Now it’s up to South Carolina’s legislators to decide how to spend federal stimulus money.
Gov. Mark Sanford decided he won’t take it Friday after failing to persuade President Obama to let him use $700 million of the state’s share to pay down debt.
Key legislators were quick to respond with assurances that they plan to spend it. Congress told states to either use the money or lose it, but either way, taxpayers here are on the hook to pay it back.
South Carolina has been a recipient state for decades. For instance in 2005, the most recent year that figures are available from the Tax Foundation, South Carolina enjoyed $1.35 in federal money for every dollar that it sent to Washington.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html
Those numbers are skewed by the unusually high number of military installations in SC, John, not federal money just handed over to the state for this or that.
The numbers appear to skew towards poor states. Unless perhaps wealthy states don’t have military installations. It seems that states with poor populations tend to be recipient states.
This is interesting:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/24471.html
“The Tax Foundation’s annual federal tax burden and expenditure study clarifies the geographical patterns of income redistribution that federal tax and spending policies cause each year. The results of the study have been controversial for years because they show that the nation is not only redistributing income from the prosperous to the poor, but from the middle-income residents of high-cost states to the middle-income residents of low-cost states.
“Thanks to a steeply progressive federal income tax, states with higher incomes pay vastly higher federal taxes, payments that are unlikely ever to be matched by federal spending directed to those states. Ironically, most of these high-paying states are the so-called blue states that have generally elected politicians who support a more steeply progressive tax system even though their own constituents bear a greater share of the burden as the code gets more progressive.”
So what’s the problem, John316? Gov. Sanford is not taking $700 million – so in this instance the federal government is not providing that amount to a poorer state.
Just so, #4. But isn’t that the whole point of the consolidation of power in the federal government? If a state just gets back what it pays in federal taxes, why send it to them to begin with? You’re making the point we right-wing maniacs have been making for decades: The federal government’s scope and power should be restrained by the Constitutional limitations put on it. Then there will be little controversy over who’s getting what.
The bottom line is that none of this money should be spent by any state. This stimulus bill should never have happened in the first place. It is terrible for the country economically and is a destroyer of individual liberty for the citizens.
You’re not gonna get an argument from me, TGS.
#7 TGS; No argument from me either!!! Nuff said!!!
Woo hoo!!! That’s my governor. You go, sir!!!! Your fellow Republican non-conservatives won’t support you — but we’ll keep the list of who has no integrity. Thank you, Sanford!!!