Cost of 12 Days of Christmas Gifts? $114,651

The price of lords-a-leaping and ladies dancing has spiked this holiday season, but other items mentioned in the carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas" still cost the same as they did last year.

Buying one set of the gifts mentioned in each verse costs $27,393 in stores, or 7.7 percent more than last year, according to the so-called Christmas Price Index that PNC Wealth Management updates annually. And if you buy all 364 items repeated throughout the carol, you'll pay $114,651 - 6.9 percent more than last year.

Last-minute shoppers who turn to the Internet will pay even more for all the gifts - about $173,000.

"We were surprised to see such a large increase from a year ago, given the overall benign inflation rate in the U.S.," said Jim Dunigan, managing executive of investments for PNC.

The federal government's core Consumer Price Index rose only 1.7 percent this year.

In the three decades since the list was started in 1984, year-over-year increases have averaged 2.9 percent, which is exactly the same number as broader U.S. inflation. But it's a fickle list because the price of some items has barely budged, while others have soared.

Seven swans cost $7,000 this year, the same as in 1984, while the cost of a single partridge went from $12.57 to $15 during the same period. One pear tree to put that partridge in? Thirty years ago it cost $19.95, but will now set you back $184.

The cost of nine ladies dancing is now $7,553, or 20 percent more than last year's $6,294, while 10 lords-a-leaping jumped 10 percent, to $5,243.

Seven items on the list cost the same as they did last year, including gold rings and turtle doves, while pipers piping, drummers drumming, and the pear tree showed only modest changes up or down.

The swans are the most expensive item at $1,000 each. The eight maids-a-milking still cost a total of just $58 because the federal minimum wage hasn't risen. At $7.25 each, they're the least expensive gifts in the song.

BMW S.C. Apprenticeship Program a Rare Model in U.S.

For Joerg Klisch, hiring the first 60 workers to build heavy engines at his company’s new factory in South Carolina was easy. Finding the next 60 was not so simple.

BMW’s plant in Greer, S.C., is its only one in the United States. The company offers a program called BMW Scholars that allows young workers to study at technical colleges and work.

“It seemed like we had sucked up everybody who knew about diesel engines,” said Mr. Klisch, vice president for North American operations of Tognum America. “It wasn’t working as we had planned.”

So Mr. Klisch did what he would have done back home in Germany: He set out to train them himself. Working with five local high schools and a career center in Aiken County, S.C. — and a curriculum nearly identical to the one at the company’s headquarters in Friedrichshafen — Tognum now has nine juniors and seniors enrolled in its apprenticeship program.

Inspired by a partnership between schools and industry that is seen as a key to Germany’s advanced industrial capability and relatively low unemployment rate, projects like the one at Tognum are practically unheard-of in the United States.

But experts in government and academia, along with those inside companies like BMW, which has its only American factory in South Carolina, say apprenticeships are a desperately needed option for younger workers who want decent-paying jobs, or increasingly, any job at all. And without more programs like the one at Tognum, they maintain, the nascent recovery in American manufacturing will run out of steam for lack of qualified workers.

“South Carolina offers a fantastic model for what we can do nationally,” said Ben Olinsky, co-author of a forthcoming report by the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington research organization, recommending a vast expansion in apprenticeships.

Despite South Carolina’s progress and the public support for apprenticeships from President Obama, who cited the German model in his last State of the Union address, these positions are becoming harder to find in other states. Since 2008, the number of apprentices has fallen by nearly 40 percent, according to the Center for American Progress study.

“As a nation, over the course of the last couple of decades, we have regrettably and mistakenly devalued apprenticeships and training,” said Thomas E. Perez, the secretary of labor. “We need to change that, and you will hear the president talk a lot about it in the weeks and months ahead.”

In Germany, apprentices divide their time between classroom training in a public vocational school and practical training at a company or small firm. Some 330 types of apprenticeships are accredited by the government in Berlin, including such jobs as hairdresser, roofer and automobile electronics specialist. About 60 percent of German high school students go through some kind of apprenticeship program, which leads to a formal certificate in the chosen skill and often a permanent job at the company where the young person trained.

If there is a downside to the German system, it is that it can be inflexible, because a person trained in a specific skill may find it difficult to switch vocations if demand shifts.

In South Carolina, apprenticeships are mainly funded by employers, but the state introduced a four-year, annual tax credit of $1,000 per position in 2007 that proved to be a boon for small- to medium-size companies. The Center for American Progress report recommends a similar credit nationwide that would rise to $2,000 for apprentices under age 25.

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Liberty, Abbeville Receive HUD Block Grants

Federal grants announced for six S.C. communities include $500,000 for Liberty and $454,545 for the city of Abbeville in the Upstate. The grants are allocated annually by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Liberty is using the money for the Commerce Drive streetscape project and Abbeville has been awarded the grant for its South Main streetscape.

The other $500,000 recipients are Hampton County for the Health Department, Hardeeville for the public library and Walterboro for the South Jefferies streetscape. Cheraw received a $375,000 grant for neighborhood revitalization.

A statement from the S.C. Department of Commerce, which administers the Community Development Block Grants, said there are more than 18,000 residents in the six communities receiving a total of $2.8 million.

“The CDBG program continues to be a way to strengthen our local communities while encouraging further economic growth in those areas,” Commerce Secretary Bobby Hitt said.

In the most recent grant round last spring, more than $9.9 million was awarded for 24 public infrastructure projects, including water and sewer upgrades.

Communities compete statewide, and local governments are required to provide at least a 10% match. Most of those who benefit are in low- to moderate-income communities.

News: S.C. Colleges Spent $1.2 on Buildings in Past Decade

During an era of tuition increases that were blamed on state budget cuts, Clemson and the University of South Carolina spent more than $1.2 billion on new buildings.

Over the past decade, Clemson built or is in the process of building $513.9 million worth of facilities, while USC spent $733 million on major projects, according to documents obtained by The Greenville News through Freedom of Information Act requests.

However, the level of spending for construction at the two schools, and at institutions of higher education across South Carolina, is dwarfed by that spent by its nearest neighbors.

While the General Assembly has allocated $250 million for higher ed facilities in 10 years, North Carolina lawmakers have spent $3 billion, and Georgia, $2 billion, according to Brett Dalton, vice president for finance and operations at Clemson.

The construction boom is part of a national trend, in which colleges and universities are locked in an arms race in the competition for students to pay the freight as state taxpayer support for public colleges retreats.

At Clemson, 3 percent of student fees goes to debt service and 5 percent for facilities maintenance, Dalton said.

At USC, debt service and renovations funding takes up 7.2 percent of what students pay to go to school, or $376 a semester, said university spokesman Wes Hickman.

The General Assembly hasn’t approved a bond  bill for higher education since the year before Jim Barker took office as president at Clemson, in 1999. Before then, the state routinely approved a bond bill every two years to pay for maintenance and construction at colleges and universities, Dalton said.

State support for higher education has slipped from 70 percent of the institutions’ budget in the 1960s to about 10 percent now, and has fallen as low as 8-9 percent in recent years, Barker said.

The state has gone to using project-specific funding, primarily for facilities related to economic development.

Barker said that most of Clemson’s biggest construction projects have been off campus, such as the International Center for Automotive Research in Greenville and energy and environmental research facilities in the Charleston area.

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Haley Endorses Stronger Mayoral Powers in Columbia

Governor Nikki Haley has come out in support of Columbia mayor Steve Benjamin's initiative to change the way the City of Columbia governs, Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey told WIS late Friday.

"After talking to Mayor Benjamin, Governor Haley was happy to lend her support - the governor has long believed in restructuring government to produce accountability and efficiency for the people it serves - not just in state government, but at every level of government," Godfrey said.

Voters will decide if they want a new strong mayor form of government during a special election Dec. 3.  

If voters approve the change, the mayor would have the right to exercise administrative authority and would still be a voting member of the city council.  

Right now, Columbia, along with a majority of municipalities in the state governs with a council-mayor form in which the mayor has no power when it comes to the hiring and firing of city employees.

"While I respect Nikki Haley as our governor, I wholeheartedly disagree with her on this position," said former Columbia City Councilor Daniel Rickenmann. "The fact of the matter is she is not involved in the day-to-day operations of the City of Columbia nor has she ever served in a municipal office."

Rickenmann, who is also part of a group who opposes the strong mayor change, Communities United for a Great Columbia, said he doesn't expect the endorsement to carry much weight.

S.C. Senior Population Up 40 Percent Since 2000

The population of South Carolina residents 60 and older grew by 40 percent from 2000 to 2010, according to the U.S. Census. By 2030, that population is expected to increase by 67 percent to more than 1.5 million people, according to a population estimate from the S.C. Office of Research and Statistics.

S.C. policymakers expect the growing numbers of seniors to strain the state’s health care and transportation systems, not to mention the state budget. In response, the Silver Haired Legislature – the legislatively-sanctioned body that advises S.C. lawmakers on aging issues – is preparing for the 2014 legislative session with a host of recommendations that are getting some traction with lawmakers.

McConnell, who for years was arguably the state’s most powerful lawmaker when he was president pro-tempore of the Senate, is using his clout to push the issue to the forefront. He already has convinced lawmakers to boost the Lt. Governor’s Office on Aging budget by millions of dollars, and this year he convinced powerful state Sen. Thomas Alexander, R-Oconee, chairman of the Senate Finance Health and Human Services subcommittee – to lead the state’s Joint Aging Committee.

“I see those as being priority issues for us,” Alexander said. “I think we’ve got a moral and religious responsibility to try to take care of their needs.”

The Silver-Haired Legislature presented its report to Alexander’s committee earlier this month, and its No. 1 priority is for lawmakers to approve McConnell’s $4.7 million budget request for the Office on Aging. McConnell wants to use the money to help seniors stay out of nursing homes for as long as possible. He told Alexander’s committee a story about an elderly man in Charleston who had not had electricity since 2009 and was about to lose his house to foreclosure. McConnell said his office stepped in to keep him at home and out of a nursing home, which most likely would have been paid for with state Medicaid dollars.

State lawmakers already have given McConnell an extra $3 million in recurring money in the 2014 budget, and an extra $2 million the year before that. But McConnell told Alexander’s committee the Office on Aging lost $1.7 million in federal money because of automatic budget cuts, and he said the office still has a waiting list of 8,000 seniors trying to get help to stay out of nursing homes.

“We are making progress. We just need for the public to understand,” McConnell said.

The Silver-Haired Legislature is pushing nine priorities – “Some require funding, some require creativity,” Speaker Marjorie Johnson said – including more transportation options for seniors “at an affordable fee.” They also want to revive an incentive program for physicians, offering to pay up two doctors per year up to $50,000 toward their student loans if they agree to stay in the state for five years and treat Medicaid and Medicare patients. South Carolina previously provided $35,000 under a similar program.

“Since medical school costs so far exceed the incentives offered, we ask an increase to $50,000 (for) each student,” Johnson said.

While lawmakers mull ways to help seniors, they will need to keep an eye on the state’s budget. South Carolina residents 65 and older are exempt from property taxes on the first $50,000 of the value of their homes. Property taxes pay for local government services, and the state government reimburses local governments for this lost revenue. But as the senior population continues to grow, so will state payments. In the 2013 fiscal year, state officials estimate the exemption will cost taxpayers $194 million – $7 million more than in 2012.

Read more here: http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/2013/11/29/3871416/the-aging-of-sc-to-be-costly.html#storylink=cpy

Obama Administration Scrambles to Fix Website

As the Obama administration’s weekend deadline for a smoothly functioning online marketplace for health insurance arrives, more than a month of frantic repair work is paying off with fewer crashes and error messages and speedier loading of pages, according to government officials, groups that help people enroll and experts involved in the project.

The Times would like to hear from Americans who have begun to sign up for health care under the Affordable Care Act.

But specialists said weeks of additional work lie ahead, including a major reconfiguration of the computer hardware, if the $630 million site, Healthcare.gov, is to accommodate the expected flood of people seeking to buy health insurance. Without the additional changes, experts predict, the website may continue to crash during periods of peak use.

Beyond the prospect of potential delays for consumers, insurers warn that problems remain in the invisible “back end” that transmits enrollment information to them. That data has been plagued by inaccuracies, insurers say. Administration officials have been unwilling to disclose the error rate.

As late as Wednesday, the site still continued to slow down when 30,000 users tried to log on simultaneously, according to project specialists. A batch of hardware upgrades and software fixes scheduled for this weekend, administration officials say, will allow the site to handle 50,000 simultaneous users, as promised, by Dec. 1, which is Sunday.

The Health and Human Services Department announced that the site would be shut down for 11 hours on Friday night to put those upgrades into place, on top of the usual four-hour timeout for maintenance on Saturday night.

Although the administration has postponed a December marketing campaign, fearful that the site would collapse under a surge in traffic, five weeks of repair work have clearly made the exchange better. From last Sunday to Tuesday, nearly 20,000 users managed to enroll in insurance plans, the most for a three-day period, according to people familiar with the project. By comparison, fewer than 27,000 users picked an insurance plan on the federal site in the entire month of October.

And pages that once took an average of eight seconds to load now show up in a fraction of a second. The rate at which a user sees an error message has also dropped from about 6 percent to 0.75 percent.

But the pace of enrollment must pick up drastically if the administration is to meet its target of signing up seven million people by the end of March, the number that insurers say they need to spread risks and keep prices down. While some states that built their own sites are making better progress enrolling people, applicants in 36 states, with two-thirds of the nation’s population, depend on the federal site.

At this week’s rate of enrollment, those enrolled through the federal exchange would total fewer than 1.1 million by the March deadline. Few insurance executives expect alternative options for enrolling, including by phone, mail, or in person at counseling centers, to make up that gap.

The administration has already spent more than $9 million beefing up the system’s computing power with additional servers and other hardware. The reconfiguration of the data center — the website’s computer brain — is expected to cost millions more and require up to another month of work, specialists said.

Experts involved in the repair work say the overhaul is necessary because bursts of traffic beyond the designed capacity could bog down the site, forcing users into an electronic queue until emails notify them that they can return.

The only solution, several experts said, is to reconfigure many of the site’s computer servers so that they are dedicated solely to HealthCare.gov’s tasks. Currently, most of the servers juggle demands from other clients as well.

One expert said the site needs to be able to handle 100,000 simultaneous users to provide a safe margin of error. “Think of it as Version Two,” he said.

AU Ushers in Season with Annual First Night Event

Christmas First Night, an Anderson University tradition, will be held Dec. 3 at the Henderson Auditorium of the Rainey Fine Arts Center. The event features instrumental and vocal music, dance, and theater from the South Carolina School of the Arts, all with an emphasis on the joy of the Christmas season. First Night features lively and heart-warming selections from groups and ensembles, ending with the traditional lighting of the Yule log on the lawn outside the Rainey Fine Arts Center. 

A special collection will be taken at the event for the Connie Maxwell Children’s Home, a South Carolina Baptist home for children based in Greenwood, South Carolina. Those unable to attend but wishing to donate are asked to send donations to Anderson University Campus Ministries at 316 Boulevard, Anderson University, 29621, specifying that the donation is for Connie Maxwell Children’s Home. 

Clemson Singers Candlelight Concert Dec. 8

The Clemson University Singers continue a Christmas tradition with their Candlelight Christmas Concert at 7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 8, at Clemson First Baptist Church.

The concert will feature holiday-themed poetry and short stories read by various singers. A variety of holiday music will make up the program, with both traditional and non-traditional pieces ranging from the medieval to the contemporary.

The free concert is open to the public. For information, call the Brooks Center Box Office at 864-656-7787 from 1 to 5 p.m. Monday-Friday.

Preston, Animal Ordinance, not Part of Council Agenda

Anderson County Council will not consider any business concerning the case involving former Administrator Joey Preston nor will it put forth any formal revision to the Animal Control Ordinance as part of Tuesday's meeting at 6:30 p.m. in the historic courthouse downtown.

The meeting's agenda primarily concerns fee-in-lieu-of tax agreements for a number of businesses looking to expand or relocate to Anderson.

Council is expected to call for at least one special meeting before the end of December.

Full Agenda

Haven of Rest Serves 2,750 Meals for Thanksgiving

Anderson's Haven of Rest served a record number of more than 2,750 full Christmas meals Thursday as part of the ministry's annual holiday Thanksgiving meal tradition for the community. Meals were not only served on site, but delivered across the county to those in need.

In Anderson, the Haven, in partnership with First Presbyterian Church and and dozens of volunteers from throughout the community served turkey and all the trimmings to anyone who showed up looking for something to eat.

S.C. Threatens Washington on SRS Nuclear Waste Cleanup

The Energy Department began cleaning up an environmental nightmare at the old Savannah River Site nuclear weapons plant here in 1996 and promised a bright future: Within a quarter-century, officials said, they would turn liquid radioactive bomb waste into a solid that could not spill or dissolve.

But 17 years later, the department has slowed the work to a pace that makes completion of the cleanup by the projected date of 2023 highly unlikely. Energy officials now say the work will not be done until well into the 2040s, when the aging underground tanks that hold the bomb waste in the South Carolina lowlands will be 90 years old.

“I don’t know what the tanks’ design life was intended to be, but it’s not for infinity,” the state’s chief environmental official, Catherine B. Templeton, said in an interview.

The slowdown has set off a fierce battle between the Energy Department and South Carolina, where officials say they have been double-crossed in what they view as the state’s biggest environmental threat. In an unusual display of resistance from a state that was host to a major part of the Cold War effort to make nuclear weapons — and is now home to most of the resulting radioactive waste — South Carolina is threatening to impose $154 million in fines on the federal government for failing to meet its promised schedule.

Energy Department officials counter that the slowdown is a temporary effect of budget stringency in Washington and that Congress has tied their hands. A combination of the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration and a 2011 cap on military spending — of which the environmental cleanup is technically part — do not leave them with enough money to meet their commitments, they say.

“There’s only so much to go around,” said Terrel J. Spears, the Energy Department’s assistant manager for waste disposition here. “We can’t increase the budgets. Now we have to balance the budgets.”

Energy officials acknowledge, however, that for each additional year the waste stays in the tanks, they will have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on maintenance and security.

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Church's Project Turkey Sandwich Feeds Retail Workers

Many employees will be forced to miss Thanksgiving dinner this year, as more and more retailers elect to stay open for the holiday. Now one Denver church is determined to give them a taste of what they will be missing.

The House for all Sinners and Saints Lutheran Church is organizing volunteers for Operation Turkey Sandwich, with the mission of feeding people who are stuck working.

“This will be complete chaos tomorrow,” said Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, pointing to the empty space inside St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Denver, where Operation Turkey Sandwich will take place. “We’ll probably have about 50 turkeys that will be stripped down.”

The volunteers plan to make more than a thousand sandwiches, stuffing muffins and pumpkin cookies, in order to give people a taste of Thanksgiving. Bolz-Weber says the reward can be seen on the employees’ faces.

“The best was this one really lonely guy at the adult bookstore on Colfax,” Bolz-Weber said. “He kind of teared up last year. He goes, ‘Wait, your church brought me Thanksgiving lunch here?’ We’re like, ‘Yeah, it sucks you have to work, so sorry.’”

Firefighters and other public servants who have to work on Thanksgiving were among the first recipients of Operation Turkey Sandwich, when it kicked off five years ago, but now that so many retailers are also open on Thanksgiving, the Operation Turkey Sandwich mission has grown exponentially.

“Retail doesn’t have to be open on Thanksgiving,” Bolz-”Weber said. “That’s greed and now American workers are affected by that. They don’t get to be home with their families.”

Though some retail employees welcome the extra hours, others have expressed frustration.

“Black Friday should stay in Friday,” said Barbara Gertz, who works at Walmart. “Thanksgiving is a family holiday and Walmart workers should be allowed to spend the holiday with their families.”

“We’re definitely hitting Walmart this year,” Bolz-Weber said.

Nadia says outrage over all the stores opening has led to more volunteers than ever, but she says they still welcome volunteers and suggestions for deliveries Thanksgiving morning.

Go to https://www.facebook.com/events/600694736655577/ for more information.