According to Alabama governor Bob Riley, it’s the best thing
since Mother
Teresa beer. What started as a plan to close a budget gap
foisted on him by a previous profligate administration turned into
a crusade to bring fairness to the state tax code and public
services. Fairness in this case means at least $1.2 billion in new
taxes, higher salaries for inner city school teachers, and more
generous college scholarships for the state’s youth.
What’s more, Riley stops just short of telling voters that it’s
their Christian duty to vote for the referendum on September 9. He
says that Jesus would vote for “the least of these” and places his
plan firmly in this category. He points out that the state income
tax kicks in at an absurd income level — less than $5,000 — and
that statewide educational performance is arguably the worst in the
nation.
But rather than calling for income sheltering (where government
agrees not to go after the first x number of dollars of a
family’s income) and gradual education reform, his plan would lower
the income taxes of the poor, raise property and luxury taxes, hike
income taxes on the better off, and trade more education funding
for flexibility in the hiring and firing of new teachers (the state
teachers’ union has acquiesced in this but expect them to move to
gut the reform in the event that anything is passed). Some doubters
have dubbed this plan the Jesus tax.
Riley is of course winning all kinds of Strange New Respect
awards from groups and commentators that usually worry about the
mingling of religion and politics. Governing magazine
named him “legislator of the year.” New Republic
editor Peter Beinart called him “that rarest of creatures: A
genuinely inspiring politician,” and berated the civil rights
establishment for not marching in lock step with the a man who is
invariably described as the “conservative Republican” Alabama
governor. The American Prospect ran a
glowing profile of Susan Pace Hamill, a law professor whose
work on “social justice issues” provided the intellectual
ammunition for Riley’s plan.
Given the huge number of poor people in Alabama, you’d think
that “the least of these” would be rubbing their hands together in
anticipation of an opportunity to sock it to the country club set,
but polls show the plan is likely to lose and lose badly. Granted,
Alabama residents are viscerally anti-tax, but that is, at best, a
partial explanation for its unpopularity. Thomas Pearson, an
Alabama native who attends the law school at George Mason
University, explains, “Alabamians are sick and tired of being told
that they are somehow second class when compared with the rest of
the country. The kind of elitism that this proposal smacks of is
sickening.”
Though he’s not adverse to giving the poor a break, Pearson also
takes umbrage at the governor’s controversial sales pitch:
“That Gov. Riley and Ms. Hamill cloak their plan in the rhetoric
of Christian Duty is the most disgusting tactic of all. Christ was
not a politician and did not lobby the Roman Senate for more
handouts. Rather, he did what many Christians since have done. He
went out into the streets and ministered to the poor and the weak.
Christian charity, like all charity is based on voluntary giving,”
he says.
The statewide campaign has shown, far better than any number of
college seminars on religion in politics could ever hope to
explain, the tortured relationship that the divine has with the
mundane. Who would have thought, in Alabama of all places, one of
the more enthusiastic rungs of the Bible belt, home of Judge
Moore’s 5,000 pound tribute to the two tablets of the Mosaic law,
that voters would be gearing up to enthusiastically endorse the
separation of church and state?
