“It does not take a majority to prevail…but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” Samuel Adams

The Governor make an excellant point in his veto message yesterday of the Cigarette tax.

First, the current tax structure still largely resembles the same rate we had 60 years ago. At that time, former Sen. Strom Thurmond was still a freshman in the U.S. Senate and computers took up floors, not desktops. Yet, the annual median income meant that working families were near the bottom of the tax brackets. Today, we have what economist Dr. Russ Sobel calls, “the highest flat rate income tax in the U.S.” 

Tax Rate	Beginning Income (1959)	Beginning Income (2008)	1959 Brackets Adjusted for Inflation
2.5%	$0	NA	$0
3%	$2,000	$2,670	$14,797
4%	$4,000	$5,340	$29,595
5%	$6,000	$8,010	$44,392
6%	$8,000	$10,680	$59,189
7%	$10,000	$13,350	$73,986

and closes the message:

If the General Assembly sends me legislation that increases the cigarette tax, but offsets it with cuts in other places, I would sign it immediately. I encourage you and your colleagues to reject the notion that we can ask more from our taxpayers without delivering lower cost government and encouraging economic activity. We remain committed to working with you and the General Assembly to accomplish these goals in the weeks and months ahead. 

For these reasons, I am vetoing and returning without my signature H. 3584, R. 193. 

Many have said that it is an embarassment that SC has the lowest cigarette tax in the nation. My questions is it is more of an embarrassment that we have the highest income tax burden in the nation. What about the embarrassment of the 2nd highest unemployment rate in the nation?

I will support the veto, as I’ve given these reasons before:

I have supported raising the tax on cigarettes under certain circumstances. As a health care provider, I witness daily the health problems caused by smoking. Cigarette smoking costs the taxpayers millions of dollars a year, and I know that this extra cost is unfair the non-smoking taxpayer. I also witness a tremendous amount of waste in health care, and will continue to use my experience as a pharmacist, to reform our system.

I favor raising the tax on cigarettes and coupling that tax increase with an equally valuable tax decrease on personal and or corporate income. Such action would not only depress the incidence of cigarette smoking and its related health care costs but would also ignite our anemic economy.

During the debate of H. 3584, I offered an amendment to offset the cigarette tax with a cut in the top rate of income taxes. This would cut taxes for everyone in South Carolina making over $13,000. Not only would this tax cut benefit individual returns, but most most small businesses. Among the businesses affected would be LLC’s, LLP’s, sole proprietors, S-Corps and others. Most will agree that small businesses are the economic engine of our economy. Small business tax cuts have always resulted in job creation as proven by history time and again. Unfortunately, this amendment failed. I also supported amendments cutting taxes for agriculture property, property taxes for manufacturing, residential and commercial property taxes, and finally, I supported an amendment to eliminate the capital gains tax. Unfortunately, all of these jobs creating tax cuts failed.

Senior Joe Kelly and junior Gabby Gibson sport their prom outfits made out of duct tape! Pretty cool don’t  you think? source: www.independentmail.com

I exercised an unusual move in Medical Affairs last week. Sen. Shane Martin and myself placed a “minority report” on H. 4538, a bill to create a government run portal connecting all healthcare providers in this state. This portal would give access to the health care records of all South Carolinians. Hospitals, pharmacies, doctor’s offices, clinics, rehabilitation clinics, dentists, etc. would all have the connectivity to treat you more efficiently so say the bills proponents. Sounds good right?

I objected to this bill because I’m not so sure I want a government agency in charge of a mega-database with very sensitive records of all of our citizens. This database would have the potential to be accessed by the 100+ thousand healthcare workers in this state. Don’t you think there may be 1 dishonest person in our medical workforce that would love a couple of thousand bucks to give a hacker the login information to this system? Or at least one incompetent person could mistakenly reveal this sensitive data? At this time, H. 4538 sounds like a recipe for disaster. So SC will have to wait ’til next year to take on this Obamacare initiative.

IF, we’re going to do this, we’re not going to do it in the last 3 weeks of session. The last month of session is the most dangerous time for the taxpayers of South Carolina. Bills will be ping ponging from the Senate to the House back and forth to meet the deadline before the end of 118th session.

After some research, our office found most American’s agree from across the political spectrum

From right winger Bob Barr’s blog: “A recent survey conducted by the respected and nonpartisan Ponemon Institute questioned some 850 Americans from diverse backgrounds and views and from 45 different states.  The just-released study found that a whopping 75 percent of Americans do not support a database of private health information in the hands of the federal government.  The vast majority of Americans – 85% according to the Ponemon survey – are not even aware that such a move is in the works; that such a proposal was in fact suck into the health care legislation passed recently by both the House and the Senate.

From the leftist ACLU: The ACLU of Oregon led the effort to oppose this law. We argued that our private and personal medical information should not be the subject of surveillance by the state government and accessed by thousands of pharmacists and health care providers across the state.  This law treats all Oregonians as potential drug abusers, in an attempt to ferret out a small percent of those who are inappropriately seeking drugs.

In April, the Virginia prescription database was breached, exposing over 8 million Virginians to medical identity theft. Even after this incident, proponents continued to assert the breach was only alleged. However, Virginia sent out notices to over half a million Virginians alerting them to the data theft, and the database was off line for more than two months. (As we’ve argued, these databases are particularly attractive for criminals because they put in one place sensitive and valuable information about millions of individuals.)

South Carolina has the same database for narcotic drugs. I voted against the bill, however, I regret not taking  a stronger position a few years back when this bill was being debated.