Buy a home at a reasonable rate with a VA loan in Charleston, SC

All South Carolinians would do well to consider a March 10 report from WalletHub written by managing editor John Kierman. The report reveals that South Carolina ranks fifth among states most dependent on the federal government, receiving $3.42 for every dollar sent to the federal treasury.

A more than threefold return on investment would typically be seen as a remarkable deal and any investor getting that type of return would be crowing. So why will this likely not get more attention?

First, as a relatively poor state, our return is not measured in total dollars sent to the feds and received back—larger states contribute more and get more overall. Still, according to the Rockefeller Institute Data Team, South Carolina’s net balance with the federal government amounted to $34.87 billion in 2022 (excluding COVID-related funds). On a per capita basis, that translates to $5,552 for every resident.

Federal funds are often mixed with state money, making it difficult to discern their origins when services are delivered. Many local governments also receive federal money directly and I doubt many have much interest in distinguishing these funds from state and local revenues. The old adage holds true: “All money is green.”

Given the fiscal battles unfolding in Washington, we should all pay close attention. A significant portion of federal funds supports individuals, many of whom live in impoverished rural and urban areas. Don’t be skeptical? Visit Chicora-Cherokee in North Charleston specifically or just drive about anywhere in Marlboro County or Dillon County. Meanwhile, wealthier retirees in Charleston may not encounter hungry schoolchildren or have to wait at the Barrier Islands Free Medical Clinic on Johns Island. Pockets of poverty can be conveniently ignored by many of us—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there and in significant numbers.

Beyond individual aid, federal dollars flow to all of us in the form of vital public services, including roads, public health, safety and recreation. The logic behind this is straightforward: states compete for tax dollars, just as counties and cities do. Florida, for example, became a retirement haven partly due to its lack of an income tax.

Tax breaks can attract businesses, but the federal government, unlike lower levels of government, operates on a vastly larger scale and is more effective at revenue generation, even if its spending efficiency is often debated and it does in fact send a lot of dollars back to states. This partnership has historically worked well for South Carolina. The response of big business to federal cuts and changing economic policy remains to be seen, but major economic shifts take time—large ships turn slowly.

Federal support for South Carolina comes in myriad forms. As of last December, the Charleston-North Charleston metropolitan area alone employed 12,400 federal government workers. While this is a modest percentage of total employment, it has a meaningful impact — particularly when considering the many private-and nonfederal public sector jobs that rely on federal funding. It is not just job creators that create jobs. All jobs do in and of themselves creating additional economic activity, as workers spend their paychecks, sustaining countless local businesses.

To those celebrating the aggressive spending cuts taking place in Washington, consider the broader implications. State officials who mimic these federal policies should also proceed with caution. South Carolina’s reliance on federal support is not just an abstract statistic — it is a tangible reality that affects communities, jobs and economic stability. Let’s not applaud too vigorously and smack our own nose off our face.

Andy Felts is professor emeritus of political science at the College of Charleston where he taught political theory and public administration. He lives in Charleston on James Island.

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A new restaurant from the owners of a popular private events company has set an opening date in Charleston.

Merci, led by Courtney and Michael Zentner of The Drifter, will open March 22. Hours of operation are 5-10 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday.

Housed inside a circa 1820s Federal-style building in downtown’s mostly residential Harleston Village, Merci is the Zentners’ first restaurant. It draws inspiration from the couple’s travels to Europe and establishments they frequented in New York and Boston.

Merci’s food offering reflects Michael Zentner’s resume, which includes a stint at Charleston Grill. The restaurant’s culinary ethos also nods to The Drifter, the couple’s pandemic-born bread-baking business that morphed into a full-scale private events company with multiple employees.

“We kind of always envisioned The Drifter turning into something like this, but something very small,” Zentner said.

Leading large-scale dinners over the past five years has enabled the chef to hone his skills in a way that wasn’t possible in restaurants. The menu at the 20-seat Merci, featuring European-inspired creations made with local ingredients, is an extension of that cooking.

“You get such direct feedback,” Zentner said of the events. “As a (restaurant) chef, you don’t really get that very often.”

Options will include duck ballotine and house-made focaccia topped with stracciatella cheese, pistachios, fermented hot honey and Benton’s ham. Steak tartare will be amplified by fresh-baked charcoal black bread, and fresh gnudi will be brightened by peas.

Merci’s offering leans light, but meat-forward plat du jours — lamb on Fridays and beef Wellington on Saturdays, for instance — are more robust.

Courtney Zentner collaborated with local designer Helen Rice to bring vintage tableware, antique furniture, art and Spanish light fixtures inside the 200-year-old building. The setting is given a contemporary touch with artwork, custom cherry cabinetry and a six-seat bar, where wine from an all-French list will be poured.

Merci is located at 28 Pitt St. next door to Petit Merci, the Zentners’ small bakery and provisions shop. The restaurant will accept walk-in diners, and reservations can be made on resy.com.

For more information, visit mercichs.com.

A South Carolina restaurant serves “dock to table” seafood — and people can’t wait to eat there.

So much so, the dining spot now ranks on a list of the top 15 restaurants that Southern Living readers would love to try.

“One of our favorite reasons to travel within our region is in search of the best restaurants,” the magazine wrote in a March 4 report. “Our regional cuisine, from soul food to barbecue, is famous around the world. And while many try to replicate our food, nothing comes close to comparing to the excellent dishes you can try at legendary restaurants across the South.”

Southern Living said it created the rankings as it sought to find out which Southern restaurants top people’s “bucket lists.” In late February, it posed the question on Facebook, garnering about 200 comments and dozens of reactions. Editors studied the responses and restaurants’ online reviews as they determined the winners, a spokesperson told McClatchy News via email.

Charleston isn’t a stranger to being recognized as a favorite place for travelers to visit. It also has ranked as one of the top U.S. destinations for food lovers, McClatchy News reported.

“While there are dozens of bucket list-worthy restaurants in Charleston, the one that came up time and time again when we polled our readers was Chubby Fish,” the magazine wrote. “Chef/Owner James London’s creative small plates featuring local seafood and produce are absolute stunners, as are the raw bar offerings like the popular Caviar Sammich.”

Chubby Fish also serves dishes ranging from rainbow trout to chili garlic shrimp. The restaurant said its rotating menu features “fresh catches straight from the Atlantic Ocean and local rivers.” It launched in 2018, and people still flock to the city for a chance to eat at one of its 40 seats.

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“If you want to dine here, arrive early,” Southern Living wrote. “The restaurant doesn’t take reservations, so folks start lining up at 4 p.m. to be the first ones in the door when they open at 5 p.m.”

Chubby Fish topped “bucket lists” after Food & Wine magazine in April named it one of the nation’s best places to eat. More recently, the restaurant was a semifinalist for a prestigious James Beard Award.

This time around, Chubby Fish was the only place in South Carolina to earn a spot on the Southern Living list, which wasn’t organized in ranked order. The other winning dining destinations were located across the South, including in the culinary hot spots of New Orleans and Savannah, Georgia.

In the past, Southern Living has told McClatchy News it focuses on the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.

The future of a bronze effigy of John C. Calhoun continues to be debated in South Carolina courts — rather than in City Hall — years after Charleston City Council initially voted to remove the figure from its pedestal overlooking Marion Square.

Four of the council's 13 members, including Mayor William Cogswell, have turned over since that unanimous vote to take the statue down in June 2020. But the current council receives periodic updates in private on the back-and-forth legal battle.

On March 11, council went into executive session to consult their attorney — one of a few exceptions in state law under which public bodies can close their meetings — to discuss settlement terms covering a lawsuit over what to do with the 12-foot-tall statue. No public action or discussion occurred after the 20-minute meeting behind closed doors.

A pending appeal is the latest in a series of legal maneuvers by several of Calhoun's descendants and the Board of Field Officers of the Fourth Brigade — a historic militia which originally owned Marion Square over which a caped Calhoun monument loomed atop a 125-foot stone pillar for over 100 years — in hopes of returning the statue to public display locally.

A recent amicus brief the state's attorney general filed in a separate suit involving a Confederate highway marker that was removed from outside what's now the Charter School for Math and Science, appears to have given Calhoun supporters hope that S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson may also support their cause.

The Calhoun attorneys included Wilson's brief in their appeal, which is pending in the S.C. Court of Appeals.

The Calhoun appealers allege that a Charleston Circuit Court judge erred in dismissing part of a lawsuit the groups filed in 2022 to prevent the city from lending the statue to an art exhibit in Los Angeles.

The judge ruled that only Wilson has the power to enforce the state's Heritage Act, which protects Confederate statues and other monuments. Wilson has long held that private citizens can bring lawsuits under the state law, according to attorneys for his office and the Calhoun supporters.

Attorneys for the city maintain the Heritage Act applies to war memorials, which the Calhoun statue is not. Wilson said the same back 2020 when the statue was first taken down.

Calhoun, a former U.S. senator and vice president, died a decade before the first shots of the Civil War rang out over Charleston Harbor. He was known as an ardent defender of slavery, the reason for South Carolina's secession.

A day after City Council's 2020 vote, Calhoun's likeness was plucked from his perch and has since sat in an undisclosed warehouse while plans for what to do with it have been stalled in court.

A storm system currently churning over the middle of the country is lining up to deliver some potentially severe weather across the Palmetto State over the weekend.

A severe weather alert issued March 14 by the S.C. Department of Natural Resources warns that the worst weather will likely occur to the west of the state, but South Carolina could see damaging winds and tornadoes starting late March 15 and lasting through March 16.

The severity of the storm and the timing of its arrival will vary across the state, with impacts starting along the western border and moving east until the squall line moves offshore during the evening hours on March 16.

Much like the storm that moved through the state on March 12, this system will pull a cold front from the Great Lakes down into the South. Unlike the storm earlier this month, warmer and more humid air will already be in place, which could fuel more severe thunderstorms and create more favorable conditions for the formation of tornadoes.

The Storm Prediction Center puts the worst of that weather in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi on March 15.

"Our primary concern will be locally damaging winds. Like last Wednesday, it will be pretty windy even outside the thunderstorms, but the storms will cause the strongest wind gusts. The next concern is isolated tornadoes; the tornado risk is higher this time around," wrote Frank Strait, SCDNR severe weather liaison.

Damaging hail could occur in some locations, and flash flooding may occur as this storm is expected to be slower moving than the system that raced through the region last week. The greatest risk for flash flooding will be in the Upstate, Strait said.

The Upstate will bear the brunt of the storm first, starting in the early morning hours of March 16, and by midday it will likely be over the Midlands.

"If this timing is correct, the storms reach the Coastal Plain during the warmest and most unstable part of the day, so this may be where the greatest severe weather risk occurs," wrote Strait.

In the Lowcountry, a National Weather Service advisory projects the timing of storm impacts to be between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. on March 16, but that could change. The advisory warns of 60 mph wind gusts, isolated tornadoes and "marginally severe" hail up to the size of a quarter. A wind advisory for Lake Moultrie may be required, and high surf from Charleston to Edisto is also likely.

According to NWS, an earlier arrival will diminish the risks, while a later arrival could result in a higher risk for severe weather.