The (Charleston, SC) Post and Courier generally likes Republican Governor Mark Sanford.
Mr. Sanford, during six years in Congress and six years as governor, has been an admirably frugal steward of taxpayer money. As governor he has repeatedly run afoul of fellow Republicans who run the General Assembly — and more or less the state — by refusing to go along with the free-spending status quo. In the often-testy process, Gov. Sanford has helped to advance the cause of overdue reforms that, if enacted, will make the state budget less vulnerable to inevitable economic downturns.
So why are they editorializing this way?
[A]s our governor, while he has a right to express his well-founded qualms about the stimulus, he would be wrong to deprive our state of the federal money it desperately needs.
Look out for heads aspolding in South Carolina -- oh, and in Mississippi and Alaska, too.
Of course, we don't think the decision is hard. The Post and Courier, however, thinks it's quite difficult. After all, taking the money means a "fundamental — and costly — change in the way our state distributes jobless assistance." The editorial writer, however, neatly spikes that reasoning a few sentences later.
Yet expanding those benefits to unemployed part-time workers in exchange for federal help hardly seems excessive. After all, they don't have jobs, and our state did have the nation's third-highest unemployment rate in December at 9.5 percent.
In other words, don't you think many unemployed parttime workers used to be unemployed fulltime workers? After all, the last time South Carolina had a 5.5% unemployment rate was September 2001. Initial unemployment compensation claimants nearly doubled in December 2008.
The paper gives Sanford a pass on one of his objections, reporting without comment that Sanford compared job-creation forecasts to Stalin's grain quotas in accuracy. (An aside -- what is it about Republicans and the former Soviet Union? The Cold War is over, folks!)
They also give him half a pass on his response to Majority Whip Clyburn's assertion that rejecting stimulus money would be "a slap in the face of African-Americans."
As Mr. Sanford said Sunday: "The idea that color would filter into that decision-making process is absurd."
So, though, is the idea of our state turning down much, if any, stimulus money in our current dire fiscal circumstance.
And it is absurd.
The New Orleans paper of record, The Times-Picayune, has not yet weighed in on Bobby Jindal's similar threat. I presume they'll have more to say after his speech-to-the-speech tonight. The Jackson, MS Clarion Ledger, however, mirrors the Post and Courier neatly:
Barbour and Republican governors can express their philosophical opposition to the stimulus plan. However, they should not let politics stand in the way of federal aid states need now.
Barbour should work with the Obama administration and the Legislature to aid unemployed Mississippians. Take the money and manage it responsibly. Is that too much to ask?
So does the Anchorage Daily News:
To hear Gov. Palin and a few other Republican governors talk, you'd think the stimulus was a gift horse, larded up with money that inflicts costly new requirements on the states. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the stimulus will enable states to do many valuable things and help re-start the national economy at the same time.
BOTTOM LINE: Alaska should gear up to use the stimulus money as quickly and effectively as possible.
Hmmmm... Any chance these Governors have it wrong? :-)