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 LEGISLATIVE - ISSUES REFORM OUR SPENDING PROCESS Every year, hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars are wasted on pork barrel spending in South Carolina – local, politically-motivated projects that have little or nothing to do with the best interests of the taxpayers of the state. Just as troubling, each year dozens of substantive, long-overdue reforms are bogged down in the Legislative process by hundreds of narrow, special-interest driven pieces of frivolous legislation. While State Legislators debate bills on bullying, billboards and body art, important economic development reforms like tax cuts, spending limitations and government restructuring too often fall by the wayside. Worse still, powerful Legislators routinely funnel special projects to their districts without concern for their broader obligation to protect the taxpayers – often disguising these spending items and preventing public debate on them by using budget “pass-throughs,” or unspecified sums of money given to an agency with a ‘wink and nod’ expectation of what the funds are to be used for once they are ultimately awarded. A fire truck here, a balloon race there, a downtown renovation project in this city or a new library for that county – special interest pork barrel spending and hidden budget pass-throughs lie at the very heart of Columbia’s addiction to new spending. S.C. Club for Growth supports reforms that let the sunlight in on the budget process, limit unnecessary pork barrel spending and minimize the time-consuming, reform-stalling backlog of frivolous legislation. We also support the use of the Executive veto when needed as an essential tool in preserving a statewide focus on our state’s fiscal affairs. Prior to the submission of detailed Executive Budgets by Gov. Mark Sanford beginning in 2003, South Carolina’s typical approach to spending the people’s money was simply to add new dollars to every existing budget line item, without considering how effectively individual departments or programs were operating or coordinating to meet the people’s needs. Of course, this already wasteful, uncoordinated and non-strategic approach only compounded problems for taxpayers with each new program or department state government created. S.C. Club for Growth enthusiastically supports the notion of budgeting for results, or Activity-Based Budgeting, in which taxpayer resources are spent on “purchasing” specific results – maximizing efficiency and eliminating wasteful political meddling and bureaucratic turf wars. By focusing on the needs of the taxpayer ahead of the needs of various government agencies, activity-based budgeting cuts through waste and duplication in government by targeting taxpayer resources specifically to the outcomes government is supposed to provide the people who pay for them. In fact, South Carolina has already saved millions of dollars as a result of savings generated from activity-based Executive Budgets, but the process has yet to be fully implemented in the Legislature. Formalizing South Carolina’s commitment to the practice of activity-based budgeting – in all branches of government – is a critical step in protecting the taxpayer and creating a competitive climate for jobs and investment, and a step S.C. Club for Growth is committed to seeing implemented. Back to Issues |
  
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