Raise the cigarette tax

The South Carolina Senate's approval of a 50-cent cigarette tax increase envisions more funding to tobacco cessation programs and more support for low-income health care. The tax also is expected to diminish cigarette consumption among thousands of young people by raising the cost of smoking. That in itself is a good argument for increasing the tax. ...

The cigarette tax is a logical way to support health care for low-income residents. Smoking contributes greatly to health problems in South Carolina, many of which are treated at public expense. Health advocates for the increased tax estimate that 35,000 fewer South Carolinians will be smokers if the tax is increased. Many will be young people. ...

State spending

The General Assembly is budgeting like a homeowner who figures he'll skip a mortgage payment in order to upgrade his cable television service.

The House and Senate budgets include less money to run the state's prisons and fuel its school buses than lawmakers know will be needed. Yet they plan to allow these programs to run deficits so they can fund other priorities.

Gov. Mark Sanford questioned whether these budgets meet the constitutional requirement of a balanced budget.

The state constitution requires the General Assembly to pass a balanced budget. Lawmakers often boast of the fact that, unlike Washington, they cannot engage in deficit spending.

But they are. ...

Funding prisons and school buses are core responsibilities of state government. If the state budget doesn't cover these costs, it isn't balanced. ...

The state budget

At its worst (as far as anyone knows), the Legislature's practice of tacking separate laws onto the tail of the state budget produced the clandestine legalization of video poker and a bribery-tainted, retroactive tax break for a select few.

Those abuses led the Republican leadership of the House and Senate, once they controlled both bodies, to agree to put an end to bobtailing or logrolling or whatever you want to call this blackmail maneuver.

That agreement had a slow start, but it seemed to be working until last year, when House leaders used a different procedure to achieve the same goal, refusing even to negotiate the state budget until the Senate acquiesced on a separate bill that masqueraded as "reform" of the Transportation Department.

Last week, they laid aside the pretense and declared bobtailing season open, adding four separate new laws to the budget bill. They didn't even try to hide their arm-twisting intentions ...

Dealing with these bobtails should be the easiest thing the Senate has ever done: It should reject them out of hand, and put the burden on the House to explain why it is petulantly holding up the budget and using video-poker-style political ploys to blackmail the Senate, and the state, into doing its bidding.

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