Matt Yglesias

SC Governor Fiddling While State Burns

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has emerged as the current economic crisis’s greatest sadist, not just refusing to help victims of economic distress in his state, but going the extra mile to ensure that the federal government can’t help people either. Some say this is just a cynical play for Republican presidential primary votes, but it seems to me to reflect a very authentic strain of Dixie conservatism that simply takes a vindictive attitude toward the poor. You saw a lot of this in the Depression, when the locus of resistance to New Deal programs that transferred wealth from the prosperous northeast to the poor south was actually in the South.

Here’s John O’Connor’s account in The State of anti-Sanford protests and Sanford’s reaction:

“Tent city is obviously people trying to make a political point,” Sanford said. “I get it. But it doesn’t make it true.”

Sanford should know, said Sheheen, adding Sanford has a history of publicity stunts.

“Things like this pale in comparison to bringing pigs to the State House,” as Sanford once did to decry pork-barrel spending, Sheheen said.

According to the latest Center for American Progress analysis of state-by-state unemployment numbers by Heather Boushey and Nayla Kazzi, South Carolina has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation (behind Michigan) at 11 percent. Take a look at the state’s rapidly deteriorating labor market conditions:

Back in 2007, before this spike in the unemployment rate, 15.1 percent of South Carolinians—and 21 percent of South Carolina’s children—were living below the poverty line. That was above a national average of around 13 percent. But, again, the unemployment rate has almost doubled since then so that’s sure to be a serious undercount of how many people in Sanford’s state are facing a dire situation.

Mark Sanford’s War on South Carolina Teachers

Ali Frick runs some numbers and does a little reporting and concludes that Mark Sanford’s anti-stimulus posturing could imperial the job status of as many as 7,500 South Carolina teachers:

John Cooley, deputy superintendent for finance and operations at the South Carolina Department of Education, explained that the stimulus funds would help fill a 15 percent budget cut already inflicted on the school system. Without those funds, Cooley estimated that up 7,500 teachers (15 percent of the state’s 50,000 teachers) could be negatively impacted. But he cautioned, “I’m not going to sit here and tell you that we’ve reduced 7,500 teachers” or that all 7,500 will lose their jobs.

These kind of education cutbacks directly deepen the recession, by further contracting individual spending power. The teachers who see job losses or salary cuts suffer, but so do all the businesses they patronize and all those business’ suppliers. Meanwhile, in the long run the state gets a less-educated workforce, which means more inequality and lower average wages.

Maintaining Effort

An excellent point from Ed Kilgore about how to do the necessary aid to state and local governments in the context of a stimulus package:

I’d go further than Matt on this subject and observe that states have significant control over some of the “automatic stabilizers” that he’s attributing to the federal government (e.g., Medicaid, SCHIP and transportation programs); without some new assistance, states may not only counter-act the “automatic stabilizers” but could actually subvert them. That’s clearly what some Republican governors like Mark Sanford have in mind when they call for abolition of federal “mandates” rather than federal assistance: let us completely decimate Medicaid beyond what we are already allowed to do, and we’ll be fine!

So an effective stimulus package must not only provide heavy assistance to state and local governments; it must also be sufficiently conditional to ensure that the Mark Sanfords of the world don’t use the money to cut taxes as well as services.

Indeed. Of course a governor really fanatically committed to the idea that pro-cyclical spending cuts and making sure poor people can’t get medical treatment is the key to economic success is going to find a way to do it. But congress will have a lot of power to shape state policy through an aid package, and it’s important to use it wisely.