Terrifying Headline in Horry Newspaper

Taxpayers in Horry County should be quaking in their boots after reading the headline, "School board members mull future tax hike." In our observation, the move from "mulling" to "enacting" is generally one that school boards make quickly. Get ready, Horry, your taxes are about to go up.
 
According to the terrifyingly-titled article, some members of Horry County's School Board want to even out it's $7 million deficit for the coming budget year by increasing the burden on taxpayers. If you're wondering how - despite $13,831 in per-pupil funding - Horry School District is still running a deficit, consider the following quote from the aformentioned article -

 
"Despite its financial troubles, the district has added staff and built new schools."

 
Yes, you read that correctly. Some members of the Horry School Board support raising taxes - one-time funds - to deal with recurring debts that they created through bad stewardship of taxpayer resources.
 
This baffling level of fiscal mismanagement isn't suprising for anyone familiar with Horry School District's "tax and spend and tax again" approach to education funding (click here to read more), but that doesn't make it less reprehensible of an idea. What's truly puzzling is the school board's ability could burn through more than half a billion in funding for the district, and still think they need more. To put everything in perspective, the projected budget deficit of $7 is only about 1.4% of the district budget from 2011-12. That's enough for some board members to justify raising taxes. 
 
In fact, one school board member even referenced the district as working "extremely efficiently," a statement that could only be made by someone who is astoundingly out of touch.
 
Our guess is that Horry School District annually pays more in salaries to bureaucrats who make more than $100,000 than they have as a projected deficit. A few years ago, almost 60 employees of the district were making more than 100,000. Extremely efficient? Hardly.  
 
Someone may have a good thing going with the operations of Horry County School District, but it isn't the students and taxpayers.