Can we get a witness?!

The grumblings were going on for a while, but after a Legislative Audit Council report delineating everything that was going wrong at the state Employment Security Commission, the bill sponsored by Sen. Greg Ryberg passed the Senate on Wednesday and should encounter no problems on third reading. The bill fixes a number of problems in the agency, with one of the most significant being its lack of accountability. Legislators believe that reforming it into the Department of the Workforce and placing it under the oversight of the governor will be a major step forward from the present three-commissioner board that has failed to get the job done.

“At the end of the day, reform was needed for this agency, and this compromise is a good compromise,” Ryberg said to The State.

Another problem was the massive unemployment fund deficits run by the agency, due to bad regulations as to who could receive unemployment money and for how long. Not many other places give cash to people who were fired for cause or quit, and this bill will do something about that.

Sen. Jake Knotts, speaking to The State, said, “The ship is going down. It’s going to be a whole new agency.”

Even today, a report came out that the ESC has yet again missed paying its taxes.

Earlier this month it revealed that the agency did not pay $16 million in state or federal incomes taxes it withheld from benefit checks from February to May 2009.

The agency faced nearly $1 million in penalties, but the state Revenue Department dropped the interest and fine to $25,000.

If everything goes according to plan, and it looks like it will, the agency will change, people who actually deserve to get an unemployment check won’t have problems doing so, and the state won’t be in hock trying to cover hundreds of millions of dollars again.

The Employment Security Commission reform bill is on its way, passing the House 108-1 on Wednesday. The agency’s performance has been under fire over the past year, considering the massive deficits that had to be covered by the state, twice. The three commissioners were cited by the Legislative Audit Council for not providing due diligence in going to the General Assembly in time to ameliorate some of the problems facing the ESC. To head off that problem in the future, the bill, H. 3422, moves the ESC under the governor as a cabinet-level agency.

“The gross mismanagement, total lack of oversight and complete failures in accountability at the ESC will come to an end under the reform laws that the House overwhelmingly passed today,” said Speaker of the House Bobby Harrell in a statement. “It is our goal to change the ESC from a check writing agency to the job placement agency our state needs. For far too long, job placement has taken a backseat to simply throwing more money at our employment problems — today that changes.”

Other reforms go to who can receive unemployment benefits, and under what circumstances. For instance, between 2006 and 2009, the ESC cut checks in the amount of 10 percent of its entire outlay, to people who were fired for cause. We didn’t even know it was possible to collect money if you get canned. That won’t be possible anymore.

House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham, who shepherded the bill through the chamber, said in a statement, “The problems in the ESC were astounding and the only solution was a complete overhaul of the agency. Over the last eight years, we have seen dramatic changes in the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Transportation after they were moved under the control of the governor. I hope we see the same improvements in the ESC.”

The bill made a quick transition to the Senate, where it’s been hung up for the past two days. The sticking point is an amendment that requires drug tests for people receiving unemployment benefits. The proposal by Sen. David Thomas has thrown a wrench in the works so far. Other contentious issues have been who should appoint a director of the new Department of the Workforce and if the appointee should be confirmed by the legislature, and whether severance pay should be delayed while a person is taking unemployment checks.

The older we get, the more jaded we become when it comes to party-line toeing apologists for our nation’s two largest political parties. It inevitably comes down to, “We’re right, they’re wrong, blah blah blah.” Perhaps the only other thing that’s dumber is the Republican civil war in which a group of tightly-wound, ideologically-bound people view anyone who don’t adhere to the orthodoxy as “not Republican.” But, we digress. Back to the matter at hand.

Today, as has been widely reported, national unemployment numbers topped 10 percent for the first time in 26 years. All year, the nation’s sagging economy has been laid at the feet of President Barack Obama by conservatives. The disorganized liberal base points the finger at former President George W. Bush and GOP congressional leadership. But, hey, what about 1983? Will the same conservatives attacking Obama say that the sainted Reagan should be blamed for the conditions of ‘83, when he’d been president for over two years, or will they look further back to Carter? At the same time, will liberals give Carter a total pass and unload on Reagan?

It’s nuts. In reality, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Barack Obama get way too much credit, pro and con, for the economy — it’s the same with every president. OPEC’s oil embargo was a more than significant contributor to the economic problems of the ’70s and early ’80s. Historians have written that Richard Nixon probably wouldn’t have been impeached if the economy was doing better. It’s why Carter beat Gerry Ford, and a major reason of why Carter wasn’t reelected. We have our own reasons to dislike Reagan. While he was making sure the rich got richer, our parents, with college degrees, couldn’t find work for a decent amount of time during that ‘83 slump. Then there were the S&L scandals, bailouts, &c. that sent our family around the South and us to six different elementary schools in five states. Again, digressing.

The point is, with the exception of starting wars without declaring a state of war, executive orders and general directives to agency heads, the president can’t have that much impact in a short amount of time. If a Republican was in the White House right now, Democrats would be losing their heads over the unemployment rate, burning up DailyKos‘ bandwidth and the like. And so, Republicans are going to rip on Obama. But, it’s all so much bullshit.

There is such a thing as the business cycle. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Since the Depression, the government has done an OK job of managing the system to where the peaks and valleys aren’t that extreme. However, there are no short-term solutions, and any solution won’t come out fully-birthed with a donkey or an elephant emblazoned on it.

Though the General Assembly is out of session until January 2010, Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler has given notice to the House that he wants the members to begin considering his Jump Start jobs plan, posthaste, the second they return to Columbia.

“Understanding the dire circumstances many families across the state are facing, the State Senate passed my bi-partisan jobs plan with a unanimous vote nearly two months ago,” Peeler said in a statement released Friday. “South Carolina’s economy has been cut and we are bleeding more jobs everyday. My plan was the only one introduced in the General Assembly this year to help stop the bleeding.”

The impetus for the continued push was no doubt the news that South Carolina’s unemployment rate rose to 12.1 percent. In Allendale County, almost one in four people are without a job. Peeler’s plan is to give a $100 per month, per hire tax credit to every business that hires an unemployed South Carolinian, to a maximum of $2,400 over two years.

While South Carolina’s economic problems are tied both to global trade and historical neglect, the state needs to do what it can to free up businesses to get people back to work and get the state back on track.

We need help.

As was reported today, South Carolina’s unemployment rate hit 11 percent, which still puts our corner of the South second nationally, behind the captain of the Rust Belt, Michigan.

We need new ideas, infusions of capital, something, anything to get people back into work and companies growing, not closing down. And, there lies the rub. With apologies to some of our elected officials, we need the stimulus dollars coming to the Palmetto State, because, and it should be blatantly obvious at this point, South Carolina needs to be stimulated.

Our economy is like a man on a gurney who is coding. He has heart issues. He may be a tad overweight. He could be a smoker. But, when he is coding, you do not deal with dietary restrictions and pamphlets on smoking cessation. You grab the paddles and shock the system back into a regular beat.

Austerity measures are not going to help. Paying down the debt will help, but not immediately. People need jobs now. People need to pay bills now. People need to provide for their families now. They do not have the luxury of waiting for policies to have an effect two, three, four, five years down the line.

Gov. Mark Sanford has that luxury. Families like mine do not. We did not have that luxury in the early 1980s, when the economy was as bad as it is now, and my parents, who both had college degrees, could not find work.

Let’s shock the system. Let’s get people back to work. The lives of South Carolinians are more important than being wedded to an economic ideology. When times get better, as they did in the 1990s, then we can go back to a trim and a haircut when it comes to budgeting. But, we are in a crisis right now, and we need to, frankly, chill the hell out and be pragmatic about it.