When I first arrived in South Carolina some 11 years ago, I was astonished to find that the vast majority of the citizens felt that both chambers of the South Carolina Legislature were a group of buffoons. That seemed to me to be very harsh and unfair.

As best I can tell from personally watching the South Carolina Legislature in action over those 11 years, it appears that their time has been mostly spent on five activities;

1. Petty partisan fighting between the Democrats and the Republicans for power and position.

2. Since Mark Sanford has been Governor, petty fighting with the Governor for power and position.

3. Before Mark Sanford was governor petty fighting over the Confederate Flag. This was partially solved when Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston led a “march” on Columbia and caused a groundswell of public opinion to force them to get off their butts. Even then they somehow failed to get everyone to buy into the compromise, and we are still caught up in the controversy.

4. Endless debating of the provisions of a Payday Lending Bill. They finally successfully passed a watered down version of the bill. Now this is especially important to the 96% of us who constantly take advantage of payday lending.

5. Endless debates of the provisions of a cigarette tax. This year they actually talked about imposing a 50 cents per pack tax, which would have taken us from the lowest per pack rate in the nation to about the lowest tax rate per pack in the nation.

Before I go on let me give you my favorite definition of a buffoon: “A ludicrous or bumbling person; a fool.”

Now lets get back to cigarette tax. The benefits of a high cigarette tax would cause more smokers to want to quit and less teenagers to want to start thereby saving thousands and thousands of lives annually. It would also reduce our state medical costs by billions of dollars. Oh, and by the way, in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars of state revenues there would be matching federal money of hundreds of millions of dollars. South Carolina of course does NOT NEED this money as we have recently discovered. What seems pretty much like common sense to most people apparently does not to our Legislature or Governor who posture about what if we passed something how would we cut other taxes or how would we spend that money. I must be missing something here especially in this economy.

What we need is an IMMEDIATE passage of at least a $1 per pack increase in the cigarette tax to the national average. Or how about for a change have South Carolina show some leadership and put in a $2 per pack increase and really make a difference in life and health issues.

Please, please, please Joe Riley do you think you can still walk to Columbia and inspire this group of buffoons again? Despite the fact that they are individually nice people we must ask ourselves when do we hold them COLLECTIVELY responsible for passing common sense laws that the people want and need? We need to hold them to that and or vote them out of office.

If they pass $2 per pack, I promise I will never call them buffoons again.

Tom Prioreschi