The governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, is a big Obama critic, but the way he's treating the poorest people in his state doesn't say much about Sanford, who believes charities--not government--should help people. After reading this story, I think he's a CREEP, not fit to be a leader, and he should shut his pie hole about the stimulus. This story illustrates the basic difference between republicans and democrats. Democrats care, republicans believe if you're not the fittest, you don't deserve to survive. We need to tune out the republicans. They're highly useless at this point, contributing ZERO to the conversation and making Obama's job more difficult.
WaPo: The scenes here are now familiar in places deeply bruised by the recession: The Salvation Army gets so many calls from people desperate for help with overdue utility bills that, one morning, its phone system crashed. The Family Service Center of South Carolina is deluged with clients seeking free counseling for delinquent mortgages. And the shelves at the Life Force food pantry run out of rice, canned stew meat and black-eyed peas in less than an hour.
Yet in few places is the nonprofit sphere being tested as profoundly as in this Southern city -- the capital of a state where, figures released yesterday show, the unemployment rate is now the second worst in the nation and conservative political leaders believe that charities, and not the government, should bear primary responsibility for people in need.
Gov. Mark Sanford (R) eschews the prevailing view in Washington that government money should be used as a salve to the economy and to people who have lost jobs. "At some level, government steps in to fill the void," Sanford said in an interview, "but we ought to be the lender of last resort, not the first."
Sanford and the Republican-led General Assembly have cut the state's budget three times since last summer by a total of $871 million, or 13 percent -- among the deepest reductions in the nation.
Of course the cuts hurt the poorest but it's also cutting into the dear private sector:
The cuts have limited state agencies' ability to help the growing numbers of people in need. The state's Medicaid program, for instance, is reducing mental health counseling, cancer screening and dental coverage.
The reductions are constricting the private sector's capacity, too. The Department of Social Services has pared its contracts to nonprofit groups by an average of 10 percent, reducing funding for emergency shelters and employment training programs.
Sanford is a denier:
For more than a year, Sanford has had a public spat with the commission. The governor contends that unemployment is not as severe as the official statistics show. He says the commission has refused to examine questions he has raised: the impact on the figures, for instance, of retirees who work part-time. "Do you guys," he said rhetorically of the commission, "have any clue of what your numbers are?"
He wants to use federal funds to pay down his state's debt. Meanwhile, his people are starving and his state's unemployment rate is more than 10%. What an arse.
