Onward into the Great Morass

The single biggest issue of late in South Carolina politics has been what its supporters have termed "Property Tax Relief." It was recently pointed out to me by someone intimately involved in the debate that when politicians include the term "relief" in any sentence about taxes, the public tends to support it without question. Of course, no one likes to pay taxes and tax "relief" seems like a good deal for everybody. But let us examine exactly what this property tax "relief" is, who it benefits, and who it does not.

First, the gentleman who I have personally witnessed in the lobby of the Statehouse and in the gallery for every Senate debate on property taxes, the man who is arguably one of civil society's greatest proponents of the tax bill, lives in an old house in Charleston overlooking the Battery. For those of you unfamiliar with Charleston real estate, his house is on one of the most valuable pieces of land in the state. This is that man who is championing property tax "relief." It seems to me, a man of relatively meager assets, that any tax legislation supported so vigorously by someone holding such valuable assets is dubious in nature and deserves close scrutiny by those of us who find ourselves out of the highest tax brackets.

Also, because our local property taxes provide for the vast majority of the money spent on education, eliminating such taxes opens a Pandora's box of issues for those of us concerned with South Carolina's public schools. The Senate Democrats saw this opportunity to push for an equitable school funding program to be attached to the property tax "relief" bill. Under this bill, monies from the richer counties would be filtered through statewide programs into the school systems giving a roughly equal amount of money, per student, to each school in this state. I have personally attended public schools in both poor, rural counties and richer, more urban counties and I can vouch for the vast difference between the two. We must ask ourselves, is it fair to those kids who have the misfortune of being born in a rural area that their schools are underfunded and void of any of the newer technology and innovation that has made a few of the schools in this state great?

Paul Harrison wrote a famous book in the 1970's on the subject of worldwide poverty and, according to him, one of the root causes of poverty is geographic location. The logic goes that those peoples living in places that are naturally disadvantaged by climate and topography make up the vast majority of the systematically impoverished peoples of the world. Seems to make sense: if you live in the desert, it's probably thought to grow crops. Along the same lines, those students who were born in rural areas, where property values are low, attend underfunded schools. By allowing such a system to persist, we are dooming these kids to a life of poverty because we refuse to sacrifice a few of the creature comforts of our rich schools in order to promote equality of opportunity.

You should have seem the look on the President Pro Tempore's face when the issue of equitable school funding came up in Senate debates. I was a look of shock, horror, and disdain. The problem with our state's schools is that we allow a small percentage of them to prosper at the expense of the vast majority. But hey, we need people to shine our shoes, pump our gas, and bring us our filet mignon...right?