Hard-hitting Publications
February 3, 2008

There’s a new, very valuable publication, just out, called Bridging the Gap. It’s an examination of the way many working families in our state have been left out of recent economic advances. You’ll want to download, read, and keep on file this outstanding study of financial realities in Alabama!

The piece comes from the good folks at Alabama Arise. This link will take you to Arise’s home page. Scroll down a little bit under “What’s New” to the link for Bridging the Gap. Click on it to download a PDF version. Arise, of course, has it in hard copy form as well. Contact them about how you can get that.

One of the things that gets missed by many, I fear, is that the poverty thresholds are simply inadequate measures of adequate family income levels. Bridging the Gap helps to point this out too. Once again, Arise is proving to be an invaluable resource to our state.

Here are three editorials published in response to the report:

From the Birmingham News.
From the Montgomery Advertiser.
And from the Anniston Star.

Alabama’s Taxes and a National Perspective

You may well know about APP board member Susan Hamill’s outstanding work breaking down Alabama’s woefully inadequate and regressive tax system. The University of Alabama law professor has recently had published a book that takes a look at the tax policies of every state in the union.

It’s called As Certain as Death and is published by Carolina Academic Press. Susan and her research team worked for a two-year period putting together information that assesses the way states acquire revenue, who pays and who doesn’t. This will prove to be a helpful work for many tax reform advocates around the country. Alabama’s not the only state that struggles with an unfair tax system. But it will help our state in particular by providing a larger context in which to evaluate.

You can go to Susan’s University of Alabama webpage for several resources about the book, including the book’s “Forward and Methodology” and a book review from State Tax Notes.

While you’re there, I highly recommend you also take a look at other links to Susan’s publications, including her review of Wayne Flynt’s Alabama in the Twentieth Century and the article that sort of started it all for her – “An Argument for Tax Reform Based on Judeo-Christian Ethics.”

As Certain as Death has gotten some national exposure too. Here’s an article from the New York Times. Here’s another from the Denver Post. And you can catch an interview with Susan here.

One Telling Perspective from Education             

This article in the Birmingham News concerns the wide gap between the haves and have-nots in Birmingham metro school systems. There are “two separate worlds” that exist next door to one another in the metro area. New reports indicate poverty rates among school-age children in Bessemer, Birmingham, and Tarrant approach the low levels found in the state’s Black Belt area.

It is somewhat disturbing to make the short drive from downtown Birmingham, taking the Red Mountain Expressway, into the “Over the Mountain” communities of Homewood, Vestavia, and Mountain Brook. In a matter of moments one can go from an area of serious income inadequacy to perhaps the wealthiest single part of Alabama.

While striking in how close neighbors can live so far apart, it is only a single illustration of the challenge we have before us. Whether one mile or ten miles or 100 miles, we live as a single community.

An Important Interfaith Event

The Alabama Faith Council has announced its unveiling, coming February 18 at Southside Baptist Church in Birmingham (where APP’s offices are located.) The meeting will begin at 9:30 a.m. and will feature a great lineup of speakers as well as some informative breakout sessions.

Click here to go to go to the AFC website and to download a PDF version of the event brochure.

I believe the Alabama Faith Council will prove to be a very important voice in the state, speaking to many matters of justice and mercy. I’m pleased to sit on the steering committee of the group and to serve on AFC’s poverty work group.

Here’s a news article that gives some more background information about AFC. I hope you will be able to attend this groundbreaking event.

Poverty and Political Will

Spring Hill College is the most recent member of APP’s Higher Education Partnership. They recently had Congressman Artur Davis on campus to talk about poverty in Alabama. He’s quoted in this article as asking whether or not we are passionate enough about problems related to poverty to address them effectively.

It really is, I think, a matter of will. Will we do what we can do to make it possible for every citizen to benefit from our economic advances, or will we simply let the opportunity for advancement pass us by?

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