The Saluda County Democratic Party hosted a Gubernatorial Meet the Candidate Forum for Democratic Candidates Thursday evening and WLTX News 19 reported:

Governor Sanford finally acknowledges the importance of education funding:

Gov. Mark Sanford flew to Washington on Thursday to tell the Obama administration that South Carolina wants $300 million in federal stimulus money.

Sanford, who spent much of last year fighting parts of the Obama administration's stimulus plan, now wants S.C. to have a piece of $4 billion in "Race to the Top" education money.

Dwight Drake represented South Carolina students Casey Edwards and Justin Williams in their legal fight to force Governor Sanford to accept federal funds for economic recovery and to put that funding to work for South Carolina's public schools.

The State reports:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dwight Drake would give companies that hire unemployed workers a tax credit, according to a job plan he released Thursday.

Two Drake supporters, Reps. Boyd Brown, D-Fairfield, and Bakari Sellers, D-Bamberg, said they will introduce the proposal in the House.

Drake said the proposal would also take some of the strain off the state's bankrupt jobless benefits fund. South Carolina's 12.6 percent unemployment rate is fourth-highest in the country.

"How many will do it? We don't know," Drake said. "If it hires only one, that's one person who has a job who didn't have a job."

Read the whole article here.  To learn more about the Drake Back to Work Tax Rebate, visit the Greenville News for additional coverage.

The Palmetto Scoop covers "Sounds Like", our video release showing that Rep. Gresham Barret is stealing his lines from Dwight Drake:

You would think that Congressman Gresham Barrett, who was the most absent member of Congress last year because he was too busy running for governor, would have plenty of time on his hands to come up with some creative and original ideas for moving South Carolina forward.

But apparently that is too mighty a task for Barrett to accomplish, as he has now resorted to stealing lines from Democrats. ...

Drake, who is also running for governor, released a 60 second ad on Friday contrasting a line he made more than five months ago with a recent, nearly identical, Barrett statement.

The ad shows a clip from this month’s BIPEC forum in which Barrett says, “I think the next governor needs to wake up every day and go to bed every night thinking about how he’s bringing jobs to South Carolina.”

Asks a narrator, “Where’d you get that idea, Gresham?” The answer, of course, is from Drake.

“The first thing a governor should do when he wakes up in the morning is think, ‘What can I do today to bring good jobs to South Carolina?’ The last thing he should do at night is ask himself, ‘Did I do enough today on jobs?’”

From the Greenville News:

Dwight Drake, an attorney who served as a top aide to two Democratic governors, said Friday that state Sen. Vincent Sheheen failed to act when a committee on which he sat heard in April 2008 that the trust fund would go bankrupt within 14 to 16 months.

Drake said the likely result of the state’s unemployment nightmare will be a “triple-whammy” for workers who he said Sheheen cares little about — reduced employment benefits for jobless workers and increased employer tax rates that could end up spawning more layoffs.

...
Drake said, “When somebody tells you something is going bankrupt you don’t need a committee, you need some leadership, you need some action, you need to get busy about fixing the problem. And it’s gotten worse than it was even related to be then.”

...

The Greenville News reported this week that Employment Security Commissioner "Billy" McLeod dropped a bombshell on a group of lawmakers, including Sheheen, in 2008 when he forecast bankruptcy and said the agency was paying out at least $90 million a year more than it was taking in.

The unemployment trust fund ended up going insolvent much sooner, by the end of 2008, but Drake said the problem would have been easier to fix two years ago than it is today.

“It’s just like any other debt,” he said. “The longer you ignore it, the worse it gets and the more painful it is to come out of it. And he (Sheheen) ignored it for two years except for recommending a committee to study it.”

Drake said the same could be said for all legislators but that Sheheen was one of four who heard the remark first-hand and the only one who now wants to be governor.

“The biggest sin in government by government officials is the doing of nothing when you know there’s a problem,” Drake said. “That’s what he did, and that’s what he continues to do.”

...

Since running out of money in its trust fund, the state has had to borrow more than $700 million so far from the federal government to pay unemployment claims.This week’s agency audit found that the ESC has spent $171 million in unemployment benefits over the past three years on workers fired for cause and knew as far back as 2001 that money going into the trust fund was inadequate.

Read the whole story.

The Greenville News reports:

Sen. Vincent Sheheen, a Camden Democrat running for governor who also sat on the screening committee, said he believes the trust fund’s problems then were well known by lawmakers.

“Clearly there is responsibility shared throughout state government,” he said. “It’s not just the Employment Security Commission’s fault.  This was a trend that started in the early 2000s and continued rapidly with the economic downturn.”

Dwight Drake, a Democratic candidate for governor, accused Sheheen of doing nothing about the information.  “I think he demonstrated a complete absence of leadership,” Drake said.  “He and the others were given a warning and did nothing.  Minor adjustments could have saved this huge deficit.”

Sheheen denied that, saying it would have taken more than minor adjustments and the insolvency was caused largely by failed job growth in the past decade.

Read the whole article here. [PDF]

The Greenville News reports:

With December unemployment in South Carolina reaching 12.6 percent, gubernatorial candidates have outlined plans for filling existing job vacancies and creating new jobs to put people back to work.

[...]

To prepare for recruiting major industrial projects, Dwight Drake, an attorney and a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, would analyze and update the state’s incentives program and identify “mega-sites” for major prospects. He also would promote a new focus on retaining existing small businesses with “smart, targeted tax reform.”

Read Dwight's complete jobs plan here.

The State reports:

South Carolina’s jobless rate reached another all-time record high in December, hitting 12.6 percent.

The rate broke the old mark of 12.3 percent set in November, according to data released Friday by the S.C. Employment Security Commission. The U.S. rate was 10 percent in December.

Last month, the number of people looking for work statewide rose by 6,400, while the number of jobs shrank by 9,900. The trend was the same in November.

There also were signs that more workers have given up the job hunt.

Read the whole article here.

From Real Clear Politics:

Read the whole article.

TheState.com reports:

The number of unemployed passed an all-time high, rising by 5,896 last month to 266,330, according to preliminary calculations.

The state’s job count fell by 1,500 in November with continued losses in construction and the off-season fall off in lei-sure and hospitality. Government, retail, temporary work and manufacturing gained jobs last month.

Read the whole article.