[lbo-talk] facts? what facts?

JBrown72073 at cs.com JBrown72073 at cs.com
Thu Oct 16 15:03:34 PDT 2003



>>Consider Alabama, which in September voted down a tax referendum championed
>by the state's Republican governor. Alabama's threshold for paying state
>taxes is the lowest in the country at just $4,600 for a family of four;
>taxes are highly regressive. The referendum would have raised the threshold
>to $17,000, increased the tax rate for higher earners, ended the state's
>full deductibility of federal income taxes, and expanded the sales tax.
>The revenue would have more than offset the state's record budget deficit,
>with the surplus earmarked for a reading program for elementary-school
>children, higher teacher salaries in at-risk schools, and college
scholarships.
>
>I'm not sure that transaction costs capture this conundrum
altogether--ideology
>seems pretty irreducible. In Alabama, where I used to live, one reason
>people support the tax structure is that theeir "facts" come from the Baptist
>church. They basically argue that you can be for tax cuts and against
inequality
>because the taxes that go to reducing inequality should be paid to the
>church, who are the rightful servants of the poor anyway. To people thus
>inclined, the time I might spend reading the NYT or BEA pages is better
>spent researching the issue with their preacher. Which doesn't really
>change Woj's conclusions much--in a way, it makes the situation seem even
>bleaker. Ooops.
>
>Christian

I was in southern Alabama visiting my aunt a few days before this referendum went down--the big timber companies and whatever other anti-tax forces had distributed a huge number of anti-referendum signs ("vote no--we're taxed enough!")--the no:yes sign ratio was 20:1 as far as I could tell, at least in my aunt's area (very rural). So it's not like people were left to figure it out on their own, there was a huge well-funded opposition lying about it everywhere you looked. The Repub. governor supported it, essentially for religious reasons, but that doesn't mean Republicans generally did.

You're right, the church has gotta be a big factor--but in this case, the pro-tax group framed their position religiously, and my aunt, who is a very conservative evangelical (quotes from Deuteronomy in the bathroom, Pat Robertson on the TV) nonetheless supported the tax.

The anti-tax ideology is a fragile, illogical one which has to be shored up constantly--Sunday's when they do that in Alabama. My mother went to church with my aunt a few months ago (a rare occurance for my mom)--it was one of these rock n roll evangelical churches. She said the preacher talked the whole time about this conference he went to in Hawaii and how much money this person and that person had, and the kind of car they drove and on and so on--she was waiting for the punch line, or even a bible quote, but there wasn't one--the entire sermon was this slightly awed accounting of possessions. She figured the underlying ideology was that money is evidence of god's love so it's enough to talk about the money, it apparently goes without saying that this person is very loved by god since they're very rich. So you can see where that puts the rest of us, including my aunt, who is quickly dropping out the bottom of the lower middle class due to the expense of care for her stroke-disabled husband.

The problem I have with Wojtek's prognosis is that progress has, in fact, been made--yes, even in southern Alabama--but this would be unaccountable on his theory, unless it was imposed by a vanguard party against the will of the population, which I suppose in that area would have to be the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and later SNCC. Problem is, both of those gained their most militant participants from among the 'unsophisticated' local folks.

Jenny Brown



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