Frank Knapp Posts

If 2015 was the hottest year globally on record, what did that mean for your city? The New York Times, using weather data from AccuWeather, has given us an easy to use tool to find out (well as long as you live in one of 3,116 cities data is available). So how did we do in Columbia, SC? In 2015 we were 4.0 degrees above average. Charleston, SC, was 3.4 degrees above normal as was Greenville, SC.

There are strong rumors that President Obama will soon announce his decision, possibly within days or by the end of August, on the Keystone XL pipeline. He will either throw his support to the private Canadian oil company that wants to build the pipeline into our country to send the dirtiest, high-carbon oil from the tar sands region of western Canada all the way to our Gulf for processing. Or the President will stand for what is in the best interest of America’s future.

This evening the Beaufort/Port Royal Sea Level Rise Task Force will make a presentation to Beaufort City Council’s work session. The task force, which the South Carolina Small Business Chamber helped to convene and was not formerly established by either government, has been meeting since late last year preparing to assess the threat of rising seas to these municipalities and to make recommendations as to how the communities can be more resilient. Tonight’s presentation will be an update for the Council. The presentation to the Port Royal Council will be tomorrow evening.

As we know now, the scientific evidence on the relationship between tobacco and lung cancer is incontrovertible. In the years since 1966, many restrictions on tobacco use have been promulgated, through legislation, regulation and litigation. Now we have another issue where the scientific consensus is nearly universal but the political consensus (supported by a few modern Dr. Rappaports) is clearly not. - See more at: http://thecontributor.com/what-can-tobacco-teach-us-about-climate-change...

Oceana released a new report today that finds offshore wind would produce over three times more jobs and nearly nine times as much energy as offshore drilling off South Carolina’s Atlantic coast.

Drillers around the world have already begun to trim exploration budgets and delay new projects as a result of low prices, but production from existing fields will continue and keep supplies high.

Congratulations to five of our 7 U.S. House members for opposing the government-funding bill that barely passed the House late yesterday.  They were Jeff Duncan, Trey Gowdy, Mick Mulvaney, Tom Rice and Mark Sanford.
Buried in the 1600+ page bill is a provision to once again put the American taxpayer on the hook for bailing out big banks that gamble with their depositors’ money.
It is exactly this kind of big-bank bad behavior that led to the Great Recession and then the 2010 passage of the Dodd-Frank Act that made the greedy big banks move their risky betting out of

The Center for Effective Government has published a new report, "Gaming the Rules: How Big Business Hijacks the Small Business Review Process to Weaken Public Protections." The report documents how big business has weakened public protection standards by manipulating the SBA’s Office of Advocacy that was intended to provide small businesses with input into EPA, OSHA and CFPB regulations. The report finds that this office has encouraged large industry trade associations and their big business members to participate in various roles in this process thus causing the real opinions of small businesses not to be heard.

With near unanimity, voters believe there should be tougher enforcement of existing laws and rules, and they should be enforced fairly, without regard to the wealth or power of violators, a new poll released today by the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards shows.

According to a new Rutgers University report, notoriously anti-regulation Midwest businessowners can't name specific regulations or how they're affected by them. While half of Democrats fall under this category, a majority of Republicans do.

According to data released this past Friday by the U.S. Department of Energy, in the first six months of 2014 almost 12 percent of the domestic energy production came from renewable sources. Energy from solar, wind and hydropower was up seven percent from two years ago. Not bad...but not good enough.

South Carolina's Small Business Chamber of Commerce has now publicly advocated for a federal minimum wage increase, to $10.10. South Carolina has no state mandate on the minimum wage, meaning that only a federal increase would benefit the state's workers in the near term.

South Carolina is reaping the benefits of the Affordable Care Act, and not just health-wise. Because of the mandate that 80% of premiums be used for actual care, customers are actually seeing rebates. That's money from health insurance coming back. Who's heard of such a thing?

With the temperatures increasing, and summers getting warmer, energy bills have no where to go but up. And that's going to hit small businesses especially hard.

Remember the big campaign to get young people to opt-out of Obamacare? Burn your Obamacare card they said, even though there is no such thing as an Obamacare card. Apparently it's not working. According to the Washington Post, only about 77,000 families and individual have asked for an exemption based on one of the many officials reasons someone can avoid the individual mandate to have health insurance. That is less than one percent of the 8 million who signed up for Obamacare during the open enrollment period.

The fourth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act's signing is important to recognize. It has been a long four years of continuous fighting against the negativity and outright lies of its opponents. On this day, it's also important to listen when a small business details the health law's benefits for both employers and employees.

Secretary of State John Kerry needs to talk with U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. Better yet, he should come see the South Carolina coast firsthand. Even a two- to three-foot rise in sea level will inundate many commercial areas and residential communities and destroy vital infrastructure. And this means we won’t be waiting until the end of the century to see our small-business coastal tourism economy start disappearing. It might be, as some scientists predict, only 30 to 40 years.

A comprehensive, five-year study of 288 profitable Fortune 500 companies finds that 26 paid no federal corporate income tax over the five-year period; 111 paid no federal corporate income tax in at least one of the last five years, and one-third paid a U.S. tax rate less than 10 percent over the same period, Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy said today. Further, most multinational corporations in the study paid lower U.S. taxes on their domestic profits than they paid to foreign governments on their foreign profits.

While everyone agrees that there is no one solution to lessening the number of deaths from firearms, one common sense proposal is almost universally supported — background checks for all gun purchases.