Quit Picking On South Carolina!!!

Unregistered Carriers on 01/19/2009 - 1091
Unregistered Carriers on 01/20/2010 - 1091

Illinois - 94.93%
Maine - 93.34%

At the UCR Board meeting last week, I showed a few people the latest list of State UCR Registration Percentages sorted from highest percentage to lowest percentage. Interestingly, most people looked for their state and then looked to see which state had the lowest percentage. Several of them exclaimed, "Look at South Carolina! 56%! What's wrong with them???" NOBODY looked up a few lines to North Carolina and said "Look at North Carolina! 63%! What's wrong with them???"

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with North Carolina ... or South Carolina, for that matter. In fact, I'm kind of wondering if anybody would have said anything about South Carolina if another state had been in the 40+% range.

By the same token, nobody looked at the highest percentage and said, "Well, I'm not at the top, so I must not be doing very well." But they did say things to the effect of "I'm at 71% (15 points higher than South Carolina). That's better than I thought we were doing! I guess we're OK."

The moral of the story is that everybody seems to want to punish SOMEBODY, but lacking a specific standard of performance, I would hazard a guess that the "punishers" will want to punish the states who are registering carriers at a pace somewhat below their own percentage (except for South Carolina, of course, who would probably wonder why we can't all just get along).

So, instead of chastising South Carolina, I think we should all be saying "Thank God for South Carolina!!!" To paraphrase an old adage, "First, they come for South Carolina, then they come for me." Or how about the old joke that ends with the punch line, "I don't have to run faster than the bear. I just have to run faster than you!"