Return of the grocery tax bill

The bill to repeal the state sales tax on groceries is scheduled for another hearing in the Alabama House — on April Fool’s Day. It’s a popular and fiscally responsible bill. For one thing it would reduce the state’s over-reliance on excise taxes, which are the first to sink whenever the economy does. For another, it would reduce the tax burden on poor citizens, replacing the revenue by closing a loophole for taxpayers in high income tax brackets.

Here’s what H.B. 116 will do:

• Eliminate the 4% state sales tax on groceries. (Local sales taxes are not affected.)
• Prevent local governments from raising revenue by taxing grocery sales only.
• Raise the income tax threshold for a family of four to $20,000 a year (so those who earn less will owe nothing to the state).
• Eliminate an income tax deduction (viz., the state income tax deduction of federal income tax payments) for taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year, or married couples earning more than $400,000 a year.
• Reduce the same income tax deduction on a sliding scale for taxpayers earning $75,000 to $200,000 a year, or married couples with $125,000 to $400,000.
• Retain the income tax deduction for taxpayers earning less then $75,000 a year, or married couples earning less than $125,000 a year.

The bill will have to be approved in a statewide referendum before taking effect.

The Legislative Fiscal Office calculates that the bill will be “revenue neutral,” neither increasing nor decreasing state revenue. Yet it will reduce taxes for more than 90 percent of state taxpayers.

Alabama and Mississippi are the only two states that tax all grocery sales.

Last time I checked, Alabama was one of only two or three states that allowed a deduction of federal income tax payments from state income tax.

When the bill first came to the floor last week, its defeat was blamed on lawmakers who carry water for the Alabama Farmers Federation (Alfa), the powerful lobby for large absentee landowners. But according to an email on the Alabama Arise mailing list, quieter but no less determined opposition is coming from limited liability companies (LLCs), a type of business that enjoys the limited liability of corporations, plus income tax advantages. For instance, LLC owners have the option of “pass-through” taxation, where income and deductions are reported on owners’ personal income tax returns, but the business itself is not taxed.

So organizing as an LLC can been an easy way to get the legal protection of corporate status while avoiding corporate income tax. Closing the personal income tax loophole might make that strategy less lucrative for wealthy Alabamians with LLCs.

If you live in Alabama, call your representative and tell ’em to support H.B. 116, the Tax Fairness Amendment. To find out who represents you, go to the Alabama House home page and click Find Your Rep in the left-hand column. You can use your ZIP code.

Post-racial America? First do this

Obama’s election set off a predictable round of inconclusive wondering about whether, or when, we’d become a “post-racial America.” Well, I have a benchmark to propose. Maybe it’s more like a precondition, but to me it’s a large and obvious one.

The United States of America will not overcome its obsession with race until Benjamin Tillman’s statue at the South Carolina State Capitol is pulled down, like a statue of Lenin in Berlin or Prague. In case you don’t know the former governor and United States senator, known fondly as “Pitchfork Ben,” here is a choice passage from his long career of violence, fraud, and windy speech-making on behalf of white supremacy:

In my State there were 135,000 negro voters, or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters. … Now, I want to ask you, with a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it? … We were sorry we had the necessity forced upon us, but we could not help it, and as white men we are not sorry for it, and we do not propose to apologize for anything we have done in connection with it. We took the government away from them in 1876. We did take it. … Then [in 1895] we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina to-day as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his “rights”—I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores. But I will not pursue the subject further.

Thus Senator Ben Tillman to his U.S. Senate colleagues, in what he apparently considered to be a moderate statement of reasonable views. His statue stands on the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol. One of these days it will come down.

I don’t mean that a narrow majority in the state legislature will manage to order the statue dismantled while crowds of white folks fume about the insult to our heritage. What I hope is that throngs of people come together to pull down that statue, and they’ll celebrate together while they’re doing it. They won’t do it out of guilt, or to make a statement. They’ll do it because they’re so glad to be out from under the thumb of the dead god of Race, and because “Pitchfork Ben,” and the bloviating fears and hatreds he embodied, have finally lost all their power.

Until that day comes, and I hope it’s soon, but until that day I’d just as soon have the lawmakers leave that statue alone. Once the statue is down, they can decide what to do with the bronze. (They might try selling it to someone in Fremont in Seattle. Folks there could probably think of some way to have fun with Pitchfork Ben.)

• Ben Tillman, “Their Own Hotheadedness”: Tillman’s remarks in the U.S. Senate, 23 March 1900.
• Bob Herbert, in “The blight that is still with us” (New York Times, 22 January 2008), deplored the statue and linked it to various social ills.

The Marine way of wisdom

Map of DeKalb County, in east metro Atlanta.

My old school system (DeKalb County, Ga.) is planning to start a public military academy headed by a Marine commandant.

This is the first such school in Georgia, but not in the country. The concept is likely to catch on, given that education secretary nominee Arne Duncan presided over the creation of six of these schools in Chicago.

The DeKalb schools superintendent denies that this will be a training ground for directing children to the military. Yet the Marine Corps will help pay for the school, including a portion of teacher salaries, and the principal will divide authority with a Marine commandant. Other details about the school’s “military-style regimen” remain sketchy.

I’m reminded of Marine author E.B. Sledge’s description of Marine training and its function. I don’t doubt that military training has changed a great deal since 1943, when Sledge arrived at Camp Pendleton. There is less tolerance for cruelty and degradation of recruits. But the function of basic training remains the same: to prepare recruits to endure and survive modern combat. And in Sledge’s assessment, the “seemingly cruel and senseless harassment” of Marine training was essential to its effectiveness at preparing men to enter “the meat grinder.”

Boot camp taught me that I was expected to excel, or try to, even under stress. My drill instructor … was a strict disciplinarian, a total realist about our future, and an absolute perfectionist dedicated to excellence. To him … I attribute my ability to have withstood the stress of [combat on] Peleliu. [E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 157]

This future, about which the drill instructor was so realistic, was one in which most of the men who entered the meat grinder would leave, as Sledge puts it, “shocked, bleeding, or stiff.”

In popular belief, military academies have a storied ability to “straighten out” young men who are difficult to manage. “Boot camp” rehabilitation for young offenders has been popular in the South, even after being shown to be bad at rehabilitating.

Sledge’s insight may help explain why this is so. Boot camp was designed to prepare young men to face an insane level of senseless violence. A boot-camp approach to general education is a way of giving up on certain young people — a half-conscious admission that we have nothing better to offer them than a life of random blows that make no sense.

It’s to be hoped that DeKalb County’s Marine school has something more to offer. All that’s been indicated so far, though, is that the academic curriculum will emphasize math and science. The school will be a “magnet school” for students from throughout the district.

Could the Marine school actually be a good idea? Maybe so, for some students. Our society is not competent at giving young people a compelling reason for living. We know that suicide is endemic among teens in the U.S., and our experts respond by prescribing pills.

So where the choice is one between training to kill and killing oneself, the Marine school may at least claim to be the lesser of two evils.

John Harvard Library

Last August I dashed off a pair of Wikipedia articles, one about the John Harvard Library book series from Harvard University Press, the other about its namesake, a lending library in Southwark.

Today I took a break from other things to spruce up the first article. The John Harvard Library is now fifty years old and is getting a facelift, according to this item at the Harvard press’s P.R. blog. Where the series started out with a heavy emphasis on colonial documents, nowadays it is casting a wider net, taking in the sectional crisis, the Civil War, and the Progressive Era.

The series has just gotten a uniform graphic design, with new author portraits drawn by Robert Carter and posted at his website, crackedhat.com. Quite a change from the old covers, done up in staid Enlightenment-era typefaces.

I like the portraits, but unfortunately can’t give you a direct link to them, as the website is done up entirely in unfriendly Flash. So here are some snapshots.

Frederick Douglass. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Stephen Crane.

Harriet Jacobs. The Federalists (John Jay, Alec Hamilton, Jemmy Madison). Jim Crow.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Harriet Beecher Stowe.

To see larger versions of these images, or more of Carter’s work, go to crackedhat.com.

Note to Google searchers: These pics are the original work of Robert Carter and must be attributed to him. Instead of copying images from this page, follow this link and select Portraits.

Haydn’s Dire Straits Mass

No, it’s not liturgical music by Mark Knopfler & Co. “Dire Straits Mass” is my translation of the title of Haydn’s Missa in angustiis, written during one of the bleakest years of Napoleon’s war on the Germans (abetted by other Germans).

I’ve been listening appreciatively to the recording by the American Bach Soloists out of New York, available from Magnatune: Haydn Masses by American Bach Soloists. (The page includes a Flash player and audio streams for browsers that don’t like Flash.)

I think you should at least hear the opening “Kyrie.” In it, Haydn gives his audience what they expected — formal beauty, fancy singing, music suited to the sumptuous surroundings in which it was performed — while also evoking the fear and anguish of people who felt that the world they knew might be coming to a violent end. It’s quite a feat.

It’s not a mood that Haydn chooses to sustain throughout the mass; the “Gloria” that follows is all sunshine and cathedral spires. I have an old LP of this mass, but this recording is much superior.

The nickname “Lord Nelson Mass” is embarrassing and ought to be retired.

Earth Hour

So I find out, less than four hours before the event, that the World Wildlife Fund is calling for “lights out” for one hour this evening, between 8:30 and 9:30 (local time).

The idea is to send a message of support for responding wisely to climate change. More info.

More about Siegelman

Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman’s conviction has been upheld on appeal, along with that of Richard Scrushy, the now-notorious CEO of HealthSouth whom Siegelman appointed to a regulatory board. Don’s partisans continue to claim he was framed, and Don himself is not yet through trying to find a judge who will see things his way.

Siegelman’s appeal concedes that he appointed Scrushy as a favor in exchange for a donation. But he argues that the exchange was not “explicit” bribery — it was just politics as usual. Let this conviction stand, and office holders will be forever subject to selective, politically motivated prosecution.

So the only reason Siegelman was prosecuted, to hear him tell it, is that he was an up-and-coming Democrat whom the Republicans wanted to discredit. This has been gospel among Siegelman supporters since the beginning, and to diehard Democrats it is self-evidently true. For others, including some Republicans, the pervasive sleaziness and cruelty of the Gonzales Justice Department made it appear highly likely that Siegelman’s prosecution was based on trumped-up evidence. But it wasn’t Gonzales who initiated the case. Nor, despite the theories floated by Don’s backers, is there any real reason to believe that Karl Rove took an interest. It’s true that Rove cut his fang-like teeth on Alabama Supreme Court races back in the ’90s, but he’s moved on to bigger things.

With the finest legal team that money can buy, the only evidence of malfeasance that Siegelman has been able to unearth are:

1. the inconsistent testimony of a self-styled Republican operative, Jill Simpson, whose alleged presence at conspiracy meetings rests solely on her own say-so.
2. an email sent from one juror to another, expressing an opinion about the case while it was still being argued. This was a technical violation of jury sequestration, but hardly a proof of conspiracy against the governor.

We are asked to place implicit faith in Jill Simpson’s veracity, without asking why no one else has come forward to corroborate her story, if her story is true. We are to believe that one single Republican in Alabama has obeyed her conscience, while every other Republican activist, from here to Washington, is loyally concealing the anti-Don conspiracy.

Yeah, that must be it.

At the same time, we are to place the most cynical (or paranoid) interpretation on the juror email. It can only be a smoking gun, proving — well, proving that a juror formed and expressed an opinion contrary to the one the Siegelman team thought the juror should have formed. And the only way that could have happened is through malign influence from Don’s enemies. Any juror who decides against Don Siegelman must not be impartial, you see.

It’s been amazing to see how the Siegelman team has been able to occupy the courts for years with this meager material. No less amazing is the way that a few opinion writers, like Scott Horton at Harper’s, manage to wring drama out of this rather boring corruption trial. (In his latest piece Horton uses vague description and innuendo to superlative effect.) Siegelman himself, after a brief fit of humility, is back to talking about his case as if Watergate were “child’s play” in comparison.

But it isn’t about him, he’s quick to add. He’s doing it for us.

The appeals court is unimpressed. “Well, what do you expect,” cry the Siegelman partisans. “All the Eleventh Circuit judges are Republicans!” So now Siegelman is pinning his hopes on the precedent set by a 1991 decision handed down by another bunch of Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court. McCormick v. United States overturned the extortion conviction of a state legislator, finding that a quid pro quo had to be demonstrated first. In other words, there’s nothing inherently illegal about handing over fistfuls of cash to a legislator who does you favors. It’s just politics.

I’ve disclosed my own bias in an earlier post. For balance, here are a couple of local Siegelman partisans:

• Legal Schnauzer: Siegelman’s second appeal focuses on ‘explicit’ nature of bribery law
• Locust Fork News: Siegelman asks 11th Circuit to rehear case

I’m curious to know what my two or three interested readers think.

Big day in Montgomery

Today the Alabama House of Representatives holds floor debate on the grocery tax bill. That’s H.B. 116, John Knight’s bill to eliminate the state portion of sales tax on groceries, making up the difference by eliminating a state income tax deduction that benefits those who pay a high federal income tax rate. In other words, it takes from the rich to give to the poor, which means that despite the bill’s popularity and good fiscal sense (reducing the state’s over-reliance on excise taxes), its passage is by no means assured.

Also today, the board of trustees responsible for the PACT program (Prepaid Affordable College Tuition, discussed earlier) are meeting to determine just how badly they miscalculated by betting on the stock market. The trustees’ decision on whether to honor their implicit commitment to PACT contract holders will be momentous, and they may be unable to do anything more than postpone it.

The PACT program has no good options. To meet its obligations to contract holders, it will have to raid other areas of the strapped state budget, assuming the Legislature cooperates. But the worst option would be for trustees to wriggle out of their obligations to PACT contract holders by lawyering the contracts to death. Besides inviting lawsuits, that stand will effectively bar a large number of young Alabamians from college. It will also send a message to the public that when the State of Alabama says it will do something, that doesn’t mean it will do it.

When Lenora Pate ran for governor, she quipped that if Missouri is the “Show-Me” State, then Alabama must be the “Make-Me” State. The government here has an amazing capacity for failing to do the things Americans expect of state governments as a matter of course. It even falls down in its constitutional duties — until a federal court steps in and forces the state, after lengthy litigation, to comply with federal law.

The state motto, Audemus jura nostra defendere, is usually translated “We dare defend our rights.” In light of Ms. Pate’s comment, I’ve wondered whether a more idiomatic translation might be “Bet you can’t make us.”

(P.S. John Archibald has proposed that the state Capitol adopt a different motto: Caveat emptor.)

• Prefiled bills, Alabama House of Representatives
• Blogger Havealittletalk, a PACT contract holder, has written a series on the PACT crisis
• Pine Belt Progressive is also covering PACT

How to read aloud

It’s remarkable how many Ph.D.s never manage the simple mathematics involved in reading a conference paper. Notorious Ph.D. has some great unsolicited advice on the topic at her blog.

One basic rule bears repeating: It takes at least 2 minutes to read a double-spaced typescript page. So if you have only 20 minutes in which to read, there’s no excuse for trying to read a paper of more than 10 pages — and that’s if you don’t care to allow any time for Q&A.

A remark by the Quaker preacher John Woolman comes to mind: “Where people are gathered from far, … it behooves all to be cautious how they detain a meeting.… In 300 minutes are 5 hours, and he that improperly detains three hundred people one minute in a meeting, besides other evils that attend it, does an injury like that of imprisoning one man 5 hours without cause.”

Selling Zheng He: A few tips

Attention Conservation Notice: This is a long, sarcastic screed pretending to offer advice about how to write a popular work of history about the specious claim that Chinese mariner Zheng He sailed clear around the world in the 1420s, discovering America decades before Columbus. You might be amused.

An artist’s impression of Zheng He. No authentic portraits survive.

Background: Zheng He (1371–1433) was a Chinese Muslim who commanded a fleet of vessels that sailed the East Indies and the Indian Ocean, calling at ports as far away as Africa. His mission was to impress foreigners on behalf of his emperor. Today the Chinese government still uses Zheng He to impress foreigners, this time as a symbol of their country’s cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism. Australian writer Gavin Menzies is responsible for the myth that Zheng He sailed around southern Africa, across the Atlantic to the Americas, and onward around the globe.

My imagined audience for this piece is a certain amateur historian (unnamed here) who has given lectures stringing together gleaned factoids about American Indians to support a theory that Zheng He was in North America. There he supposedly taught the precious little primitives how to make decent pots and to identify the Big Dipper. This fellow owns a 15th-century Chinese brass medallion that he claims was unearthed in North Carolina, but he goes temporarily deaf when asked to give corroborating details. After meeting him, I wrote this to blow off steam.

First of all, Doc, this story has been done before. Gavin Menzies has become a minor celebrity on the strength of his claim that Zheng He “discovered the world” for China. If you want a real blockbuster — I mean something in the same league as The Da Vinci Code — then you need a new angle. A good place to look for ideas is the pop history book that Dan Brown cribbed from for his novel and hit movie. I mean The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by Dan Baigent, et al. (sold in the U.S. as Holy Blood, Holy Grail).

Holy Blood wove a lot of humbug evidence into a titillating narrative suggesting that Christian doctrine was a fraud, and that a conspiracy of super-intelligent folks has guided the Western world’s destiny and picked out many of its leaders. These same people are supposedly still active today, operating in total secrecy and planning to designate a future ruler from the bloodline of Jesus Christ. Jesus, you see, had not died on the cross but had gone to southern France and settled down with Mary Magdalene, establishing a sacred bloodline that is talked about in the Holy Grail legend.