I am in my budget mode for the next several weeks, probably months and with it comes questions. Budgets increase...taxes increase. Yet I don’t understand why South Carolina has all this great ink about low taxes etc.
They have people. They are black and white. They have roads. Crime. Bridges. People looking to tax soda and plastic bags. They have all the things that we have but with better weather. OK. So what up? What do they have that we don’t have and don’t know how to get? They don’t have the tax liability that we have in Massachusetts or Connecticut. Connecticut for example has the sixth highest taxes in the nation. It doesn’t seem to bother anyone in the Connecticut legislature since they keep creating ways to tax people higher and higher forcing them to states like South Carolina.
South Carolina has 32 different taxes on the books. They have minor taxes that no one pays much attention to. They have a property tax. They have an excise tax. They have lots of taxes. But no one complains. In fact there are more than a few people that I know that now call SC home. And they have never said anything that comes close to bad about the tax structure, the weather or anything else...well save the stray hurricane.
South Carolina’s cost of living is almost 8 per cent lower than the rest of the nation. Schools spend more than 11 thousand dollars a year on kids. They see job growth at about 2 point 4 per cent. A quarter of the population is in sales. What they are selling is anyone’s guess.
But what do they have that we don’t up north?
Instead of all of our political people pack their bags and head to various foreign places to try to figure out how to bring big business of some entity here to this state, why don’t we try to figure out what they do that we can copy do better at and create cheaper, better and more liveable conditions up here.
Now before anyone asks, I’m not sure that the southern lifestyle is for me. The sweet tea alone would make me batty and this penchant for fried or nothing is not a palate pleaser either. But there is something there that we need to find to benefit us.
Otherwise, more people will be there than here further exploring the great unknown of affordability.
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