South Carolina’s Transportation Secretary Robert St. Onge Jr. said this week that the state needs $29.3 billion dollars over 20 years to bring roads into good condition. The Greenville News reports that St. Onge is finding it difficult to fix the roads because of the “no-new-taxes environment.” Instead St. Onge finds himself, “carefully managing the decline of the state highway system.” That means “no collapsed bridges, take the worst congestion and fix it, maintain the freight network.” The lack of new or increased tax revenue means “you’re going to have to take from something else and put it on your road system, and that’s tough,” St. Onge told a group in Mauldin earlier this week.

The consequences of this “no-new-tax” environment was demonstrated recently when the SC state senate voted overwhelmingly to not conform a portion of South Carolina’s tax code to adhere to changes in the federal tax code. Conforming with the changes would have resulted in a $200 tax increase on average for the state’s wealthiest residents. If South Carolina updated its code to conform with federal changes, the tax rates for single people with taxable incomes over $250,000 a year and married couples earning at least $300,000 a year would have been affected. The Greenville News reports the change would have affected about 15,000 people, accounting for less than 1% of the state’s 2.1 million tax returns. More significantly the change would have added about $3.1 million dollars to the general fund.

In essence the legislature is saying to their constituents, “Sorry folks we can’t fix the roads because we don’t have any more money and we can’t get any more money because we signed some stupid onerous pledge to never increase taxes no matter what.” The SC senate is saying they would rather protect the richest 1% of residents from an incidental tax increase in compliance with federal law. It’s like the bullies in the school yard are in charge of our state. We must break free of the strangle hold this no-new-tax ever policy has on our state. The people of South Carolina, all 99% of us have to stand up and say we need more revenue to support public education, higher education, infrastructure, cyber-security, promote tourism, protect our natural resources and make our state livable and viable into the next century. This takes money and we’ve cut tax revenue to the bone to the detriment of our future. Enough is enough.