The New York Times Magazine recently published a startling article about Alabama’s tax system is designed to impoverish the poor and enrich the rich. Written by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, the article documents why Alabama remains a poor state with a high rate of poverty and underfunded public services. If you want to read a road map to how to institutionalize extreme poverty, racism, and underdevelopment, read “Alabama Takes from the Poor and Gives to the Rich.”
The author explains that the state constitution was written in 1904 by a convention controlled by rich landowners. It capped property taxes at a low rate, which meant that any public services had to be paid for by other taxes, fines, and fees. Fines and fees are assessed for almost every interaction with government.
He writes:
In states like Alabama, almost every interaction a person has with the criminal justice system comes with a financial cost. If you’re assigned to a pretrial program to reduce your sentence, each class attended incurs a fee. If you’re on probation, you’ll pay a fee to take your mandatory urine test. If you appear in drug court, you will face more fees, sometimes dozens of times a year. Often, you don’t even have to break the law; you’ll pay fees to pull a public record or apply for a permit. For poor people, this system is a trap, sucking them into a cycle of sometimes unpayable debt that constrains their lives and almost guarantees financial hardship.
While almost every state in the country, both red and blue, levies fines and fees that fall disproportionately on the bottom rung of the income ladder, the situation in Alabama is far more dramatic, thanks to the peculiarities of its Constitution. Over a century ago, wealthy landowners and businessmen rewrote the Constitution to cap taxes permanently. As a result, today, Alabama has one of the cruelest tax systems in the country.
Taxes on most property, for example, are exceptionally low. In 2019, property taxes accounted for just 7 percent of state and local revenue, the lowest among the states. (Even Mississippi, which also has low property taxes, got roughly 12 percent from property taxes. New Jersey, by contrast, got 29 percent.) Strapped for cash, all levels of government look for money anywhere they can get it. And often, that means creating revenue from fines and fees. A 2016 studyshowed that the median assessment for a felony in Alabama doubled between 1995 and 2005, to $2,000.
How did this unjust system take root?
In 1874, less than a decade into Reconstruction, the Democratic Party, representing the landowning, formerly slave-owning class, took over the state government in a rigged election and quickly passed a new Constitution that mandated taxes on property would remain permanently low.
In the next couple of decades, as cotton prices crashed, poor sharecroppers, both white and Black, banded together in a populist movement to unseat the elites who controlled the state. In response, in another set of contested elections, the elites called another constitutional convention to further consolidate their power over the state. “What is it that we want to do?” the convention president, John B. Knox, asked. “Establish white supremacy in this state.” But this time, he said, they wanted to “establish it by law — not by force or fraud.”
People like Knox weren’t just racist; they were virulently classist, too, and hoped to exclude all poor people from the political process. The result of the 1901 Constitution was the mass disenfranchisement and subjugation of poor people — white and Black. The Constitution established the basis for a literacy test, a poll tax and stringent residency requirements. By 1943, according to the Alabama Policy Institute, an estimated 520,000 Black people and 600,000 white people had been disqualified from voting by different aspects of the 1901 Constitution. “In most counties more whites were disenfranchised than registered,” the historian Wayne Flynt writes in his authoritative book “Alabama in the Twentieth Century,” “limiting the vote to a select elite.”
This system of minority rule starved public administration in the name of small government. The result was a “government of, by and for special interests,” writes Mr. Flynt. “The citizens of Alabama did not control their government. Trial lawyers, the Business Council of Alabama, ALFA, A.E.A. and their cohorts did.” And this government went about protecting the property owned by some of the wealthiest families and businesses in the state from any meaningful taxation. In 1920, property taxes accounted for 63 percent of state revenue, but by 1978, it was down to a measly 3.6 percent. In 1992, it was below 2 percent, he writes.
Alabama is an “internal colony,” controlled by out-of-state corporations and an elite, with no interest in change, progress, equality, or justice.
Sounds un-American to me.
And not just Alabama⦠vg
Globalization has run headlong into the grim realities of war, resource depletion and a planet on fire. George Ochenski (Information Clearing House)
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If the radical right continues to control the policies, we as a nation will be as destitute as Alabama. Billionaires and special corporate interests write our tax code and create generous tax loopholes that are only available to those at the top. Many conservatives want to “drown the federal government in a bathtub,” and the main strategy to implement this is to destroy the common good. Our bridges, tunnels, roads, and school buildings in urban areas are deteriorating. Biden just stuck a deal on climate, infrastructure and taxing the wealthy, but it is a modest plan compared to the need. Unless we invest more in improving our public services and helping vulnerable people, we are well on our way to being the United States of Alabama, except for the military, of course.
By the way my husband ran into a family that was from Alabama that has not been brainwashed by conservative ideology. They all voted for Biden, and their views were very progressive. While these folks are a rarity, it gives me some hope that there are some Southerners that can think for themselves.
cx: struck a deal, an Alabama family that has not been brainwashed
Trust me. There is a solid minority of people in all red states whose views are being ignored. Remember that our government depends on majority rule with minority consent. This rather delicate balance is now being ignored in many red states, where even the bones are not being thrown to the starving population that supports ideas out of power.
Case in point Florida during the caliphate of DeSantis. No compromise on teacher salaries, instead there is a concerted effort to destroy the mission of public education with divisive rhetoric.
“Fines and fees are assessed for almost every interaction with government.”
Hmmm. . . . . sounds like “la mordida” in Mexico. What is the difference between “fines and fees” and bribery or supplementing some poor low level government functionary. Mexico certainly hasn’t been and/or is not known for it’s egalitarian ways.
I was 16 on my way to the ITESM in Monterrey, NL, Mexico for a 5 week course of summer study. We, Bro. Bill and six students in a 71 Pontiac Catalina station wagon arrived at the border early, like 7 a.m. to get ahead of the crowds going into Mexico. It wasn’t Bro Bill’s first rodeo as he had lived in Peru for a number of years and also had been to the ITESM before for summer studying. He looked at me and said “Get behind the wheel” and he took off towards the front of the line. A few minutes later here he comes with a gaggle of Mexican border agents, waving to me to come to the front of the line. So I did and then at the interior check point, we were waved right through, no stopping.
We all were wondering and finally we asked “What did you do?” He explained that he just walked up and started talking, in Spanish of course, about how hot it already was at that time, and that they had their work cut out for them, suggesting that some cool refreshments were in order. He gave them a $20 bill so that they could buy some. Now in ’72 twenty dollars would have covered more than one day’s pay for the agents. But it wasn’t a “bribe”, it was “la mordida” (the bite) that if one knows how to play results in better treatment by the officials.
Sounds like the current situation in Alabama, except that only those with enough jack are able to play “la mordida” game.
Sometimes it’s actual bribery, as with Andrew Cuomo’s pal Percoco.
As a one time resident of Alabama, the honest answer is: if it ain’t Alabama or Auburn football, it don’t really matter.
Unless you sing FASOLA, in which case you can add that to football
I still have Rocky Top PTSD onset from having been in charge of a UT group at the 1986 Sugar Bowl 35-7 win over Miami. At least 5 times, not to mention pre- and post-game. I so hate that song. It pleases me that they haven’t been able to play it so much in recent years.
It’s actually very American.
From day one, this nation was about providing life liberty and happiness for the white well to do and exclusion and exploitation for everyone else.
At times in our nation’s history, we had a Supreme Court and Congress who read the words of the Constitution quite literally, but today they have rediscovered the farmers decryption key to read the true (original) meaning of the code. (Ie, original intent)
The words of the Constitution might seem to indicate otherwise, but the folks who wrote those words knew what was actually a code meant.
The Constitution Code
The Constitution Code
Was written with a pen
To only give the vote
To white, entitled men
To read the text, it seems
One must decrypt the thing
But luckily Supremes
Have found decoder ring
They found it in a box
In drawer beneath a chair
The ring reveals — unlocks
The meaning hidden there
The words mean “rich, white men”
Are meant to rule the land
And blacks and poor white kin
Are meant to lend a hand”
“Are mean to carry sand” might be better