As the SC Senate prepares to debate the state’s 2007‐08 budget, the SC Club for Growth has released its list of the ten most egregious items of pork in the budget. A few low lights of this year’s Senate budget include the following:

• It takes nearly $1.3 billion in new revenues and creates a recurring budget deficit of $242 million by choosing to pay for recurring items with non‐recurring dollars.
• It makes a much too modest $205 payment towards our state’s $10 billion in unfunded health care liabilities for retirees. This is irresponsible in the extreme.
• It only uses 3% of the nearly $1.3 billion in new revenues for tax relief and provides no money for income tax relief.
• It grows government by another 12% on top of the last two years’ 25% increase – an amount already double the national average for government growth.
• It cuts the number of new state troopers in half and comes up short in funding our prisons ‐ while instead choosing to provide tens of million for pork projects.

“The SC Senate must think it’s the US Congress, given all of their earmarks for local projects that should be funded by local government – if at all,” says SC Club Executive Director Joshua Gross. Instead, these items are too often funded to buy votes and help Senators bring home the lard – at taxpayer’s expense. While there are no “bridges to nowhere” in these funds, there is plenty of wasteful pork to go around. Gross continued, “By just eliminating the spending for the most egregious pork projects, Senators could reduce taxes by an additional $45 million – nearly double the tax relief in their current plan.”

The SC Club for Growth urges fiscally conservative members of the Senate who still care about the taxpayers to put a stop to this foolish spending and return a greater percentage of the $1.3 billion in new tax collections to the taxpayers who sent it to Columbia in the first place. If not, they should be prepared to face some angry voters next year.

The SC Club for Growth is a voter education organization dedicated to improving the income, wealth, and education of people in South Carolina by helping elect candidates who will be leaders in the fight for economic growth, lower taxes, and smaller government. The Club honors the legacy and policies of Ronald Reagan, educating the public to put sound economic thinking back into politics.

THE SC SENATE BUDGET’S TOP 10 “LARD LIST”

1. National Bean Market Museum of South Carolina: $950,000
If the 6478 residents of Lake City really need a place other than the grocery store to go look at beans, should taxpayers around the state really pick up the $950,000 tab for it? As a matter of fact, for that amount of money we could buy every resident of Lake City 341 lbs of green beans. Ironically, this is a project that no bean counter could love…

2. Francis Marion Center for Performing Arts & the Florence Museum: $7,900,000
Apparently Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman thinks that to go with the $950,000 of taxpayer-paid beans the good folks in the Pee Dee need a healthy $7.9 million serving of pork – and that’s on top of the additional $7 million Leatherman brought home last year for the Performing Arts Center. That is certainly not the kind of performance taxpayers should be proud of.

3. Anderson County Parks: $800,000
House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper sure loves the swine too. Apparently the $250,000 in state taxes that he recently secured for an Anderson sports complex named after his father (Dolly Cooper) wasn’t enough so he’s back up to the trough for another $800,000 in state taxpayers’ funds for more ball fields back home.

4. Piedmont Technical Pottery Degree program: $150,000
Given Chairman Cooper’s apparent love of athletics, one would think that his local technical school would at least field a sports program (especially with all those taxpayer-funded fields) to add a course like pottery. What will we taxpayers have to spend next year for the football program and underwater basket weaving programs that are sure to follow in the next budget?

5-10. The so-called “Competitive” Grants Programs: $35,300,000
We always thought of government pork as just an analogy but were shocked to learn that this program, a legislatively-dominated favor factory, has given our hard-earned tax dollars to pay for ACTUAL celebrations of pork such as…

5. “The Pigs on the Ridge Festival” – Fairfield County
6. “The Piggie on the Rock Festival” – Union County
7. “Squealin’ on the Square” – Laurens
8. “Chitlin Strut” (note – chitlins are pig intestines) – Salley

We are all willing to pay taxes to fund the core functions of government but are just not sure that these items quite fit into that definition either. The grants program has also recently used our taxes to pay for many other boondoggles including…

9. “Freedom Weekend Aloft” – Anderson
10. “Hilarity Festival” – Chester

We’d keep going as there are countless other examples but frankly, we’re tired of this “hot air” and don’t find any of this “hilarious” because legislators are turning our hard-earned taxes into, in the words of The State newspaper, “the kind of legislative pork that they’d just as soon not have to debate in public.” The paper goes on to say that this program had “all the appearances of a secret legislative slush fund” that “should be abolished.” We couldn’t agree more.