...or, The crap just keeps rolling downhill...
Only Sanford and his few political allies dispute the need for the cash. Sanford says the stimulus cash takes the pressure from legislators to reduce government spending and get rid of waste. If the right cuts are made, the need for federal stimulus cash would fall.
But legislators say plenty of cuts already have been made. The current year's budget started at $7 billion but the recession forced cuts of more than $1 billion. Without the $700 million over two years from Washington that Sanford has rejected, educators predict hundreds of teacher layoffs, colleges forecast tuition hikes and lawmakers say prisons won't be able to operate.
All of this, of course, brings a question to mind: Why didn't the state of South Carolina put back money for situations like this? Shouldn't they have known the economy wasn't going to be good forever, that sooner or later something was going to go wrong? It'd be interesting to see what kinds of cuts would come out of a third party with no vested interest in any of the items in the budget. And then, of course, it's worth asking how many nonviolent drug offenders are locked up in South Carolina prisons...
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