Being an elected official must be harder than it looks. Being a member of the Ruling Class – the state legislature – must be even more difficult.

Otherwise, how can one explain the difficulty of being open and honest with those whose faith in you put you in office?

By that, we mean the failings of our legislature, the only thing more powerful in our small state than compound interest.

Let’s take the gas tax for starters. When our lawmakers finally faced and revealed to us the sorry state or our crumbling roads and bridges, no one was surprised. We drive on them daily.

We knew they had been long neglected by the people who control millions of our tax dollars and dole them out to their own private projects.

Yet they promised us if we would pay more in gas taxes and fees, they could whip our roads and bridges into shape before we were maimed or killed.

That was 3 years ago and millions of gas tax dollars later.

And what do they have to show for it? Precious little.

Take the $9 billion nuclear project that was supposed to save us billions of dollars on our electric bills and help clean up the air we breathe, too.

Thousands of us who depended on Santee Cooper and SC Electric & Gas to operate in our interest watched as they picked our pockets of billions of dollars then abandoned the project without saving us a single dime on our electric bills.

Our gullible lawmakers aided and abetted these utility thieves as did state regulators whose job was to protect us from such blatant wholesale larceny.

Now consider the mess San-tee Cooper executives and their board have made of the taxpayer-owned utility. It is more than $8 billion in debt and its bond rating has just been lowered.

That will make it even more expensive for Santee Cooper to acquire money to pay off debt.

What are our lawmakers doing about this? Nothing that you can see. Any deals going on are being hidden from the rest of us.

Many good people serve in the legislature. It’s the greedy power brokers who need to go.

– Jerry Bellune