To Our Friends in the Legislature,

On behalf of our Board of Directors and hundreds of members from around South Carolina, I wanted to take a moment to inform you of our goals for the 2007-08 legislative session.  First, however, I would like to give you a quick recap of our involvement in the last election cycle, where the SC Club for Growth PAC endorsed candidates in 23 primary and general election races.  Thanks in part to the electorate’s desire for change, as well as the generosity of our members who contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars, our endorsed candidates won 17 elections – an impressive 73% of the races in which we were involved.

With these successes in mind and a vibrant growing network throughout the state, we wanted to share our goals for this legislative year.

1.    Restructure and streamline our government structure. The time has come to continue the work of Carroll Campbell in moving to a modern management structure.  We think all Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike want a system that allows us to hold the “Executive” Branch responsible for “executing” the laws passed by the General Assembly.  While the average state has 4 statewide constitutional officers, our 1890’s constitution requires us to elect over twice that many in South Carolina.  The public deserves the opportunity to amend this outdated governance model.

Additionally, the work of your own Audit Council has shredded all credibility for the Department of Transportation.  Since 2004, their budget has increased by 50% – from $860 million to $1.29 billion – yet continued revelations about mismanagement and alleged graft show how a board system is poorly-suited for effective fiscal oversight of an agency.  We urge you to support the move to a cabinet level Transportation Department.  Along the same lines, it is also crucial that we follow best practices in creating a Department of Administration and a consolidated Health and Human Services agency.  It is a basic element of fiscal responsibility to have an efficient, accountable structure in place before appropriating public funds – your actions on fixing ours is urgently needed.

2.    Restrain the growth of state government spending. According to the National Association of State Budget Officers, South Carolina’s budget has increased by a whopping 25% in just the past two years.  While we usually think of South Carolina as a conservative state, that is actually the 3rd highest spending increase in the country and twice the 12.5% national average!  This is completely unsustainable.  Especially given these recent increases, we urge you to limit the spending growth of our tax dollars to this year’s increases in inflation and population.  Additionally, we encourage you to support passage of the Taxpayer Empowerment Amendment, which will prevent such massive spending increases in future years.

3.    Reduce the income tax burden for South Carolinians. Avoiding the temptation to spend every tax dollar collected this year will leave hundreds of millions of new tax dollars in state coffers.  We understand it would be prudent to set aside a portion of these funds for the tens of billions in unfunded promises made to our state’s retirees.  However, we also urge you to support efforts to lower our state’s uncompetitive top marginal income tax rate of 7% on income above $12,650.  We applaud you for beginning the process of lowering the top rate for business owners to 5% and now ask you to similarly apply this rate to the rest of the working folks in South Carolina.  We think the Governor’s proposal to reduce personal income taxes through an increase in cigarette taxes is too modest.  We urge the legislature to consider a greater decrease in the income tax in order to spur our economy and create jobs in our state.

4.    Enact meaningful free market reforms in the arena of education, including tax credits for private education. We find it unacceptable that over a third of our schools are considered failing and that half of our students don’t graduate high school.  The time has come to address these failures with market choices and bold new initiatives rather than ignoring solutions that don’t fit within our current system.

We will be closely following your progress on these issues over the coming eighteen months.  We have a commitment to our members to track and report your words and votes in committee, subcommittees, and the full chambers on these issues.  The results will form the basis for our next legislative scorecard which will greatly influence the actions of our members and our PAC in next year’s cycle.

We are very hopeful that we can make great progress on these issues and look forward to working with you to improve our state in the coming year.

Thanks,

South Carolina Club for Growth