If you’re about to spend a lot of money on a good vacation, you plan for it. If you’re going to make an investment or build a house, you hire a financial advisor or architect to help you do what? Plan.
People, in fact, spend a lot of time planning everything from Christmas pageants or buying a new car to retirement and tonight’s supper. But lawmakers in the General Assembly? All 170 seem to just show up in Columbia every year with a pocketful of things they want to do. There are 170 agendas, not an overarching statewide strategy or long-term vision to do things like fix failing roads or educate children. About all that they do for weeks at the Statehouse is mix the competing political agendas into a short-term vision, otherwise known as a budget.
There’s got to be a smarter way of doing things.
Six years ago, we suggested that state lawmakers needed to craft bipartisan policy goals to create a better South Carolina. What we wrote still holds: “If you don’t have a policy map for where you want to be headed, you will flounder in proposal after proposal.”
Our Palmetto Priorities in 2009 suggested 11 sweeping policy objectives, each designed with a measurable time outcome to create significant outcomes for citizen. Over the six years, the legislature has only partially accomplished one of those big goals by raising the cigarette tax to lower smoking rates and maximize health spending.
Over the years, we updated our suggested goals. But it’s not surprising that lawmakers didn’t move forward very much. Why? Because of the structural limitations of the General Assembly, a place where it is infrequent for lots of “big picture” coordinated discussions on ways to have long-term impacts.
Perhaps the biggest way lawmakers could get South Carolina moving forward with new vigor is to sit down together before any bills are up for consideration to learn about issues from experts and figure out how to craft a bipartisan path to a new future.
To provide a kickstart, we again offer our Palmetto Priorities, now revamped with new timelines, as 10 policy initiatives that could make a real difference.
POVERTY. Develop a broad-based anti-poverty agenda by 2020 that includes the jobs, education and health care components below to help lift the almost one in five South Carolinians in poverty into better conditions.
JOBS. Develop a Cabinet-level post by 2020 to add and retain 10,000 small business jobs per year. Politicians talk about helping small businesses. This would force them to.
EDUCATION. Cut the state’s dropout rate in half by 2020.
HEALTH CARE. Ensure affordable and accessible health care that optimizes preventive care for every South Carolinian by 2020. Take the federal funding now through the Affordable Care Act to allow 200,000 of the state’s neediest to get health insurance.
ENVIRONMENT. Adopt a state energy policy that requires energy producers to generate 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020.
TAXES. Overhaul and stabilize the tax structure by 2018 through reforms that broaden the tax base and lower rates. This should include reimplementation of reasonable property taxes and removal of hundreds of millions of dollars of special-interest sales tax exemptions.
ELECTIONS. Increase voter registration to 75 percent by 2020 by reducing voting barriers and making it easier for all to vote.
CORRECTIONS. Cut the prison population by 25 percent by 2020 through creative alternative sentencing programs for non-violent offenders.
ROADS. Develop and implement a plan in 2015 that creatively taps several sources to generate an extra $1 billion every year for investment in the state’s crumbling system of roads and bridges.
POLITICS. Have a vigorous two- or multi-party political system of governance.
You may have a different list of priorities — cutting the state’s high violent crime rate, revamping ethics laws or reshaping environmental laws. That’s fine. Regardless of what makes it on a list, now is the time we need to pull together as a state to develop a real list of goals and start acting on the big, shared objectives on which we can agree. Then we need to implement solutions.
Let’s not keep spinning our wheels.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!