We all know South Carolina is going through tough times. Moreover, we all know how hard the Republican Legislature and governor are struggling to deal with falling tax revenues and forced budget cuts.
Some of these Republicans have come up with some innovative ideas - but they don't go far enough. The Republicans are just too timid.
For instance, a Republican-controlled committee recently passed a measure to let schools cut five teacher work days off the school year to help make up for a $563 million shortfall. This is a small step in the right direction, of course, but we say go all the way. Let's just eliminate all funding for schools in South Carolina.
Yes, I know that this sounds like a drastic idea. But let's look at the bigger picture.
It's not as if our children can't get an education elsewhere. There are lots of first-rate programs on TV. The History Channel is good. The Weather Channel is sort of like science. There are plenty of Bible-thumping TV preachers to tell them all they need to know about family values and how the world was created. And it's all included in the price of $29-a-month basic cable package. That's a lot less than the $12,000 a year per kid we now spend.
If that is too radical for you, we could adopt a more gradual approach. Instead of eliminating all funding at once, we could just continue to cut the number of teachers. Then, when the number of students crammed into every classroom jumps to 50 or 60, the remaining teachers will be so overwhelmed they will go crazy and quit. And when they quit, we don't have to pay their unemployment benefits. Talk about a win-win.
The possibilities don't stop there. Think, for example, of all the school buses that will no longer be needed. We could just park them along the side of the road and let homeless families move in. If they took the seats out and put up some pretty little curtains, it could be cozy.
Eliminating education would also take a lot of stress off legislators. They would not have to make any more hard policy choices or ever say no to their special-interest friends. No one would care when they gave away $2.7 billion in sales tax exemptions in exchange for campaign contributions. No longer would they even have to think of eliminating the sales tax cap on yachts and luxury cars. All would be good.
Plus, with no schools, there are no school lunches, so Andre Bauer would not have to spend time worrying about feeding all the strays.
More importantly, the Legislature would be able to spend its time on the really big issues facing our state.
In the past few weeks alone, Republican legislators have demonstrated their willingness to tackle these big problems by introducing bills to ban the sale of liquor on Thanksgiving and Christmas, expand the range of golf carts on public roads and lower the legal age for getting a tattoo.
These courageous efforts pale, however, in comparison to the work being done by Republican Rep. Mike Pitts of Laurens, whose latest bill surely will solve all of our state's financial problems - forever.
Rep. Pitts' bill would require South Carolina to abandon U.S. currency as legal tender. What a great idea! We could simply hire a smart kid to fire up the Photoshop program on his computer and whip us up some nifty new money designs. There might even be some good ones still left lying around from the last time we tried this in 1860. We could call them Palmetto Bucks.
Then we could pay off all those pesky state debts, and any time we ran low, we could just tell Republican state Treasurer Converse Chellis to run down to the local Kinko's speedy quick and run off a few hundred million more.
So, to all you soft-headed cry babies who think we actually have any real problems in our state, we say think big. And special thanks to S.C. Republicans for reminding us that fortune never favors the faint-hearted, and that extremism in the defense of ignorance is no vice.
