Monday, 08/18/03

While on the subject of unknown public servants, I've become more and more taken with Alabama governor Bob Riley. Riley, quoted by the WaPo in a gripping article, told Rotarians "I'm tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad and last in things that are good." Taxes, incredibly enough, are one of the things that are good in this formulation. Riley is trying to take a hammer to Alabama's regressive tax code (which Alabamians pay after less than six months of minimum-wage work in a year, one-quarter of Mississippi's threshold) and rectifying traditional areas of neglect, such as prison overcrowding, education spending, and everything else.

Republican governors from the South who try to overhaul state tax policy usually amount to making deep cuts in whatever won't mean a statistically significant rise in toddler-stabbings. Riley's trying to increase the state's budget, by what passes in Alabama for a lot of money. In California, of course, Alabama's budget hike (twice the size of its deficit) would all fit in a small corner of what Gray Davis is still trying to recover from Enron, El Paso Energy, et al, and would fail to close the budget holes in at least sixteen other states in 2004, by my quick count.

I mention this Riley article because even though it appears there's a good chance he will lose, there are two things about the story that I find hopeful. First, Riley has the granite balls to position the tax initiative as a Christian imperative, which is brilliant, with the added benefit of being true. The WaPo article quotes the editor of The Alabama Baptist that "The Bible is clear that 'to whom much is given, much is required,'" a sentiment present in Sam Raimi's Spider-man movie, but not so much in public discourse. It would be refreshing to see more counter-examples to the far-right Christians giving Christians a bad name.

Second, the national Republican party sees Riley as a threat, and they'd like to skin him alive. The state party chair says, "If this can pass in Alabama, it could be a precedent to attempt it elsewhere, and muddy the anti-tax message." Of course, passage in Alabama will have required worst-in-the-nation educational scores, but that's how Tom DeLay/Grover Norquist Republicans feel about taxes -- even when you're scraping around in last place, "raising taxes is never the answer." There's your anti-tax message. To have breathed such a comment to a national newspaper smacks of overreaching. 08:41PM «

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