Editorial: There’s an easy solution to SC budget impasse, but legislators won’t like it

South Carolina’s Legislature has one job it must complete every year: Pass the state budget. This year — or, since we’re past the July 1 start of the state’s new fiscal year, last year — lawmakers failed. Their failure continues.

We are nearly two weeks into the 2026-27 budget year, and there is still no 2026-27 budget. It remains in a conference committee, which has met a total of two times since House leaders presented the full House with their massive take-it-or-leave-it rewrite to the Senate budget on May 6.

Now, to be fair, lawmakers’ failure to do their one essential annual job is not even in the same league as Congress’ routine failure to do the same. Unlike the Congress, the Legislature passed what’s called a continuing resolution, which continues to fund state government at its 2025-26 level for the entire year, or until lawmakers pass a real 2026-27 budget.

But doing that absent extraordinary circumstances — like during the first year of COVID, when no one had any idea how long the tax collection freefall would continue — is a first step in the direction of D.C. dysfunction.

There are, as The Post and Courier’s Nick Reynolds reports, several important policy differences in the House and Senate versions of the budget, such as a save-the-bars provision that once again throws DUI victims under the bus, minor reforms for data centers and efforts to either demand a tiny bit of accountability from the Commerce Department for its overspending on the Scout Motors project or else sweep the whole mess under the rug.

But when our House and Senate negotiators held their second meeting on June 30, they said their main sticking points involved the Senate’s irresponsible idea of slashing property taxes for seniors and the House’s irresponsible idea of squandering money on unvetted give-always to nonprofits.

The hang-up, to be clear, isn’t that the House opposes irresponsible cuts that involve taxes the state doesn’t collect, and whose reduction likely will lead to more caps on how much local elected officials can raises taxes even when their constituents support them. Nor is it that senators oppose unvetted earmarks, although Senate Finance Chairman Harvey Peeler does and even his colleagues might oppose sending them to unvetted nonprofits — as opposed to simply unvetted local government programs.

The sticking point is that there’s not enough money to pay for both, and technical budgetary rules make it difficult to compromise. Not impossible, since lawmakers are in a special session called by the governor and so can work around those rules, but difficult.

Fortunately, there’s a really easy solution to this problem, and there’s no reason negotiators can’t adopt it when they meet Tuesday for what they hope will be their third and final session. It’s the solution Senate negotiators repeatedly used at the June 30 meeting to kill Senate provisions in the bill they didn’t actually like and House negotiators repeatedly used to kill House provisions they didn’t like: Strip them from the budget.

Kill the Senate’s $248 million plan to wipe out property taxes on the first $150,000 instead of just the first $50 000 of senior citizens’ residential property taxes; the homestead exemption cuts taxes for seniors of all incomes and wealth, including those who can easily pay them, while requiring struggling young homeowners to pay their full share, even if that forces them out of their homes.

And kill at the least the House earmarks that go to entities — sometimes quite questionable — that have managed to attain nonprofit certification. Better still, kill all $315 million in House earmarks, along with all $130 million in Senate earmarks. That way, we’ve got a budget agreement, and as a bonus we’ve gotten rid of two particularly irresponsible parts of it.