As I’ve said on numerous occasions, there is no desire to reign in the fiscal insanity in Columbia. This year your government has heaped $720 million ($120m incentives, $500m roads) on your children, even though we proved we had the money on hand during the budget debate.

S. 3360 is a bill that commits millions every year to our state’s crumbling roads and dilapidated bridges. That’s good, however, the bill also enables the borrowing of another $500 million.

Another unoticed problem with s.3360 is this language:

it’s in section 3

The department may transfer from the state highway secondary system any road under its jurisdiction, determined by the department to be of low traffic importance, to one of the parties indicated in this section if mutual consent is reached between the department and the party that the road is being transferred to:

(a) a county or municipality; (b) a school; (c) a governmental agency; (d) a nongovernmental entity; or (e) a person.

A person? Really? So, this department could condemn a piece of property, paying nickels on the dollar, then give it to a person. Hello, remember Kelo v. New London, Connecticut?

Recent events warrant the paranoia of abuses of individual liberty by government.

Also, s.3360 is an appropriations bill, these lines could’ve received a line item veto, salvaging the good portions of this legislation.

Drew McKissick’s website, The Conservative Outpost, has a great article on Big Brother:

You’ve read about it in books and you’ve seen it on TV and in the movies. Well, here we are. Welcome to the surveillance state.

Today it is the collection of phone records, emails, Facebook posts, text messages, chat room sessions, Google searches, credit card transactions and online documents that we know about. Tomorrow, who knows?

If you can imagine it, odds are that it can probably be collected eventually. In fact, at this point you have to assume that anything that is transmitted digitally is either currently being seized, copied and stored for future reference or will be just as soon as someone on the government payroll can figure out how.

It will be a historical database of your entire digital life.

It is safe to say that this is well beyond the scope of anything our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Fourth Amendment. But now our right to “be secure in (our) persons, houses, papers, and effects” is almost non-existent just because most of our “papers” are now digital.

It is the foundation for a total surveillance society. Why employ an army of snitches and spies to keep tabs on your population when you can outsource the job to the population itself? Just fix it so that everything you potentially want to know goes through one “pipe” and make copies of everything that goes through. Easy peasy.Read more

For the first time in my 9 years of service in the South Carolina Senate I voted for a conference report on an appropriations bill. Here’s why. For the first time in our state’s history, some South Carolina students will have school choice. I sponsored and amendment allowing for South Carolina taxpayers to receive a tax credit matching a contribution to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO’s). These SGO’s will offer scholarships to special needs children for up to $10,000 per year. The credit is capped at 60% of their tax liability. The tax credits are capped at $8 million.

All would agree that special needs children’s education must be individualized and this is very expensive. I would like to extend tax credits for school choice to all children in South Carolina. I am confident that when we hear the success stories from children and their parents, we will get the momentum to expand school choice in South Carolina.

Also, the budget commits $141 million to our dilapidated roads and crumbling bridges. I supported several amendments that would send hundreds of millions of dollars on hand, however, as you saw yesterday, the rinocrat majority would rather in-debt future generations and fund warm and fuzzy programs that show zero results.

There’s a ton of junk in this budget, as a matter of fact, its been said that “there’s not much punch in the bowl”. For example there’s $24 million going to a program that has shown zero results like First Steps.