This is an opinion column.
By John Archibald
I didn’t think Sen. Tommy Tuberville was a real Alabamian. I thought he was just an out-of-work football coach from Florida and an opportunistic senatorial day-trader who could never really grasp the recalcitrant history of his adopted state.
Man, was I wrong. Tubs has quite a plan, and it’s as Alabama as the chain gang.
Sure, it’s a little hard to follow, but a colleague summed it up pretty well:
“If I read his plan right,” he said, “it’s build factories, send kids to tech school to work at the factories, build prisons for those who don’t want to work at the factories, and cut taxes for the factory owners.”
Make Alabama 1901 again!
Tubs, if elected governor (as inexplicably seems likely) wants to eliminate the income tax (68% of the Education Trust Fund) and the property tax ($230 million to the state general fund and way more to local schools.) Such cuts would cripple public schools in a state that historically has failed its children. But maybe that’s the idea.
“I hate taxes. I’d love to drop the property tax in the State of Alabama. I’d like to drop the state income tax,” Tuberville said during a speech at the Association of County Commissions of Alabama last week.
“Sure,” I hear you saying. Nobody likes paying taxes.
But what would Alabama do without that money? What it always does. Raise sales taxes, turn police departments into departments of revenue, find a way to cash in on the cashless. Alabama already calls itself a low-tax state, but has one of the highest sales tax rates in America, averaging more than 9 cents on the dollar. Sales tax, of course, hurts most for those who have the least.
The Alabama way.
Tuberville talked, as he has before, about dropping 11th and 12th grades, or using them to teach trade skills. He wants to spend more to recruit industry, build trade schools to compete with our existing trade schools, and fund more prisons and more power plants to fuel the A.I. that will think for us.
“All of this A.I. will be phenomenal, and it will help,” he said.
Tuberville has a lot of ideas. But as anyone who has ever looked at the state budget can tell you, he’s not the first to think of them.
Alabama already spends crazy money on economic development. The state’s current budget claims that “investment of over $42 billion in economic development since Governor Ivey took office has served as a catalyst for the creation of 78,000 new jobs.”
Granted, there is no telling what kind of hocus pocus was used in that formula, because that’s more than $8,000 for every man, woman, and child, and $538,000 per job. But you get the drift. Our politicians would sell their souls for non-union jobs if they had them. The watchdog Good Jobs First says Alabama has given more than $5.3 billion in subsidies to lure individual businesses, most of it since 2012..
Alabama has spent hundreds of millions on workforce development, too. The Commerce Department is spending tens of millions to build training facilities across the state, and the community college system is doing the same.
Tuberville clearly knows how things are supposed to work in Alabama.
“We have to educate our kids where they use their hands and quit sending kids to four-year universities,” he said, speaking with all the knowledge of a man who was paid $5 million to get the hell off Auburn’s campus.
Since time immemorial, Alabama has relied on keeping huge portions of its population poor and poorly educated. It has underfunded schools, poured money and tax incentives into recruiting low-wage jobs. It gave away the farm – its soul and health and land – to cotton, textiles, mining, steel. They took what they could and left.
Oh well. At least we don’t have to study history anymore. We can just live it.