Click the link to see how your South Carolina Legislators plan to hide their voting records. http://bit.ly/bFtIP7. This is outrageous. Please join our campaign to stop the nonsense! Let's do something useful for SC.
Removing Disincentives for Local Farming:
If a consensus emerges through passage of a State Referendum regarding health or other activities that can disproportionately burden infrastructure or public services, but are not criminal behavior, (examples are smoking, drug consumption, littering, polluting, and so forth.) an estimate of the upper 15% of the annual cost to repair or manage the consequence of the behavior will be charged to the citizen or entity engaging in the behavior, with an additional cumulative charge of 5% appended for each time the citizen or entity continues to engage in the behavior. The purpose of an approach like this is to reduce taxation of all citizens and to focus fines and penalties upon citizens who encumber, burden, or endanger their fellow citizens. If we can impose fines for speeding, we can impose fines for polluting.
If a consensus emerges through passage of a State Referendum regarding health or other activities that can disproportionately burden infrastructure or public services, but are not criminal behavior, (examples are smoking, drug consumption, littering, polluting, and so forth.) an estimate of the upper 15% of the annual cost to repair or manage the consequence of the behavior will be charged to the citizen or entity engaging in the behavior, with an additional cumulative charge of 5% appended for each time the citizen or entity continues to engage in the behavior. The purpose of an approach like this is to reduce taxation of all citizens and to focus fines and penalties upon citizens who encumber, burden, or endanger their fellow citizens. If we can impose fines for speeding, we can impose fines for polluting.
Farm subsidies and FDA regulations encourage large agribusiness and disadvantage small producers. National security and public health risks justify tracing sources and distributors of food for centralized producers who source nationally and distribute nationally; but for small producers of agricultural products where the vendors and producers are known to their customers, traceability is not an issue and ordinary contract law can serve readily to keep procusers honest.
Removing Disincentives for Local Meat Packing:
FDA regulations encourage large meat packing plants and disadvantage small producers. National security and public health concerns justify tracing the sources and distribution of meat from centralized meat packers who source resources nationally and internationally and distribute nationally; but for meat packers that process meat from local producers who distribute locally, the regulations increase operations costs beyond economic viability and reduce healthy choices available locally.
Incentives for Businesses:
Currently, this is a way for businesses to collude with political appointees without input from representatives. If it is in the interest of South Carolina to encourage business development, any incentive package should be offered to all businesses currently located within the state for a period of one year prior to the incentive being offered to an entity not already paying taxes and employing people within South Carolina.
Act 388 - My position on this topic is evolving. Apparently the original design and intent of this Act and the actual implementation of it are quite different. Below is my thinking so far, but that may well change if I can figure out where the slip was "twixt cup and lip:"
Act 388 bypasses responsible, consistent, and accountable taxation by shifting it from property owners within a jurisdiction to businesses that may have no representation within the jurisdiction. It is taxation without representation. It must be repealed. Act 388 imposes a sales tax increase to substitute for increases of taxes on owner-occupied property in order to support school operations costs. Other than its obvious unconstitutionality, the tactic has backfired because the economic downturn has led to a drop in sales tax revenue, creating a cycle of an increasing tax burden on businesses in an effort to generate adequate operating revenue for schools. While many homeowners saw a significant reduction in their property taxes, many living in homes of lesser value did not. In fact, they were saddled with the increased sales tax, in addition to the tax on their homes.
The change saved money only for those who owned homes worth more than $100,000, because homes under that value already had an exemption from property taxes for school operations. But the bill increased taxes for everyone.
- Not only did it raise the sales tax, it established a system that induces local governments and school districts to raise their millage rate (the amount of tax paid per thousand dollars of home value) by the maximum allowed every year. The law limited these bodies to raising their tax rates by no more than the combination of population increase and inflation rate. Lawmakers had hoped the act would enable them to hold local tax rates down. The effect of the law is the opposite.
- Town, city and county councils and school boards have been raising taxes as much as they can under these limits each year. They have to. The law reduced their flexibility. Some school districts, such as Fort Mill have imposed additional fees on parents in order to make up for budget shortfalls. This usage of fees for participation in athletic programs or other extracurricular activities is a positive trend and should be encouraged to continue when the bill is repealed.
- A council may be able to raise taxes 3 percent. even if it doesn't need the extra money. It will raise the taxes, because, if it doesn't, and it needs to raise taxes 5 percent next year, its limit is likely to be 3 percent again, and it will have no way to make up the difference.
- When the state ended up in budget trouble, it cut funding to schools and local governments. The tax restrictions left those bodies with no practical way to make up the difference in their budgets, other than add-on fees.
- Act 388 made the property tax fundamentally unfair by limiting reassessments. Periodic reassessments ensure the fairness of the tax by making sure that everyone pays taxes based on the assessed value of their homes.
- The law limited increases in assessed value to 15 percent every five years. That means the owners of quickly appreciating property such as waterfront homes and homes in trendy subdivisions will pay a lower share of taxes than other homeowners.
- Act 388 was a hastily passed law that was aimed at appeasing taxpayers angered by rising property taxes. It was not well thought-out. It has eroded the local control of city, county and school budgets. It has benefited wealthy homeowners by allowing them to pay taxes on less than the full value of their homes. It replaced stable property tax income for local bodies with unstable state funding. It has been a disaster.
Burdening or Encumbering Fellow Citizens – Reciprocal and Mutual Responsibility for Participating in Community:
If a consensus emerges through passage of a State Referendum regarding health or other activities that can disproportionately burden infrastructure or public services, but are not criminal behavior, (examples are smoking, drug consumption, littering, polluting, and so forth.) an estimate of the upper 15% of the annual cost to repair or manage the consequence of the behavior will be charged to the citizen or entity engaging in the behavior, with an additional cumulative charge of 5% appended for each time the citizen or entity continues to engage in the behavior. The purpose of an approach like this is to reduce taxation of all citizens and to focus fines and penalties upon citizens who encumber, burden, or endanger their fellow citizens. If we can impose fines for speeding, we can impose fines for polluting.
Pay as You Go and ensuring "Pennies for Progress" does not turn into "Progress to Pennilessness"
S.C. authorized counties to add a penny sales tax which, after being voted on by the citizens, turned into "Pennies for Progress". This is a good idea whose implementation has gone horribly wrong at the local level.
It was originally intended for projects which would benefit a county and which would go above and beyond regular road maintenance and construction. It was a pay-as-you-go program, meaning that if the funds dried up or were too low for increased costs, expenditures would discontinue until sufficient funds were raised over time to continue. Unfortunately, Counties have begun to look at the projects as necessary, and may have to issue bonds to finance the underfunded projects.
Another problem is the overly ambitious plans set by Counties. There is considerable project creep as well as difficulty doing solid cost estimates resulting inmost projects being beyond their budgets by at least a third.
This can still be a viable program if the number of new projects is limited to a realistic hard quoted set and a provision is made in new referendums to allow "new" money to be used for unfinished projects from past referendums.
The State's role in this process should be to set limits on supplemental funding for these projects as they are endorsed and before the referendums are voted upon to prevent Counties from anticipating support that the SCDOT can't provide or creating a lobbying frenzy that pits county against county for SCDOT funds. An important side issue is to separate SCDOT planning from projects funded at a county level. SCDOT should plan for road maintenance and construction that accurately reflects anticipated growth and current poulation in a transparent county by county comparison.