The Nerve

At the beach, home rule is in the bag By ROBERT MEYEROWITZ One thing we can safely say about the election last November is that it was divisive, or at least that it has done little to heal the country’s divisions. The smoke had barely cleared (some would say it still hasn’t) when Richard Florida, […]

Judicial selection committee has a new member: a former senator By HANNAH HILL The state’s Judicial Merit Selection Committee screens and nominates judicial candidates. Its members are picked by the House Speaker and the Senate President Pro Tem. State law requires that four of the ten be “selected from the general public” (the other six […]

South Carolina’s murky world of tomorrow By ROBERT MEYEROWITZ South Carolina, like every other state, is in the business of building roads. It’s a big business: Four of the top 10 vendors for the state in 2016 were roads contractors, accounting for $175 million in spending alone. And that doesn’t reckon the opportunity cost — […]

Higher ed regrets governor’s veto By ROBERT MEYEROWITZ On Monday, Governor Henry McMaster vetoed a welter of items in the budget that was passed by the legislature last week, including a proviso that touched upon the authority of the Commission on Higher Education. Last week, a Nerve opinion piece, “How to hamstring a watchdog,” laid […]

That goes quintuple for higher ed By ROBERT MEYEROWITZ How big should the public sector be, relative to the private, and how well should it compensate its workers? These are questions that ignite wars among economists and ideologues, but there is some consensus: The average value of pay and benefits in the private sector has […]

Governments scrap over the taxpayer bone By HANNAH HILL The State published a story two days ago with the headline “SC pension deal will hit cities, counties, schools hard.” It’s referring to the astronomical increase in employer contributions to the state pension fund. The bill, now signed into law, increases the employer contribution by 70 […]

It could be hurting our cities By ROBERT MEYEROWITZ Talk of cutting federal funding to cities has hung in the American air like burnt gunpowder since the last election — but how much of a threat is it, really? Could it even be a blessing in disguise? That’s some of the gist of a recent piece […]

If legislators followed the law, this wouldn’t happen By HANNAH HILL The legislative session and the special extended session have ended, and we still don’t have a budget. Currently the budget sits in conference committee where lawmakers seem to be agonizing over the differences between the House’s $27.41 billion spending plan and the Senate’s $27.42 billion spending […]

Seven weeks later, the state Senate still hasn’t approved one By ROBERT MEYEROWITZ Reforms to the state Ethics Commission were due to be enacted as of April 1 of this year, but if you visited its website lately, and looked at the space where the eight members of the commission should be listed, you’d have […]

  You could always Google it By ELISABETH ALLEN When it comes to keeping lucrative companies in South Carolina, state government will do just about anything — including, we fear, throwing common sense to the wayside by ignoring the environment, the interests of surrounding communities, and fairness in the marketplace. We see it in the […]