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Get ready to pay more in taxes in exchange for rich people getting a tax break on private school tuition.
That’s where we are in Alabama, a state where the voting population has been convinced that voting for the popular team is better than voting for themselves.
There’s a whole swath of people in this state who will, after June 30, be taxed more and making less money every week. That money they’re losing will instead go towards paying the private school tuition for the children of mostly wealthy families.
And here’s the truly strange thing: Both sets of those people – the people losing the money and the rich people getting the tax break – somehow think they’re winning.
How that can be is one of the great mysteries of today’s politics, where it has become commonplace for certain groups of people to vote against their interests in a weird, misguided statement of loyalty to a particular political party. But rarely is that contrast more evident than with two specific issues in Alabama.
The overtime tax repeal and the CHOOSE Act.
To hear Alabama Republican legislators tell it, both of these things cannot exist at the same time. If they do, the state’s education trust fund will have a gigantic hole. Schools won’t be funded. Teachers will be fired. Children will have to go to work in the mines.
And so, those lawmakers have determined it’s necessary to kill the overtime tax repeal.
That repeal, which passed unanimously last session, removes the five-percent state tax on overtime pay, putting more money in the pockets of working Alabamians. It was heralded as a much needed win for the working class last year. The brainchild of House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels, it became popular in state houses across the country, and on both sides of the aisle – to the point that then-candidate Donald Trump made it one of his centerpiece talking points.
The repeal was supposed to cost the education trust fund about $30 million – a figure representing the typical average of tax revenues generated from overtime pay taxes. Instead, thanks to employers using the tax repeal to lure workers to jobs and offer more OT to loyal workers, it ended up generating more than $200 million in savings for workers.
It’s worth noting that that doesn’t equate to a $200 million loss for the education budget. Without the tax repeal, and the resulting changes it inspired in workers and employers, the state would still be generating about $30 million in revenue from OT taxes. So, we’re only losing $30 million.
Ah, but there’s another bill coming due soon, and the Republicans know it.
That bill is the result of their CHOOSE Act – a gift to wealthy Alabama families who are already sending their kids to private schools, or who are home schooling their kids. Currently, with steep restrictions on who can participate in the CHOOSE Act, it is costing the education budget $100 million.
But in two years, when the caps come off and the restrictions are removed, the estimates on costs range from a minimum of $500 million to three-quarters of a billion dollars. And almost all of it will go to the wealthy.
And no, that is not conjecture.
Of the 25,000 or so students who have signed up to take part in the program, according to data provided by the Alabama Department of Revenue, almost 70 percent are either already attending private schools or are home schooled.
What happened to all of those promises of helping desperate students “trapped in failing public schools?” What happened to the promises of hope and opportunity for needy Alabama families?
It was all a steaming pile of feces shoveled by greedy goobers who’ve been trying for decades to get their sweaty, stinking hands on all of that public school, taxpayer money. And they finally found a group of politicians shady enough to give it to them.
We knew from other states that the per-pupil money offered wasn’t enough for even middle class kids to be able to attend private schools. We knew the poor kids wouldn’t be able to do it even if the full tuition was covered, because lunch and transportation wasn’t covered. We knew that more than 70 percent of recipients of these vouchers would go to wealthy families, because that’s who got all of them in other states.
And most importantly, we knew that absolute scam was going to blow a half-billion-dollar hole in our education budget while making our schools worse and encouraging fraud on a level we rarely see outside of our state legislature.
What we didn’t know was that our ALGOP lawmakers would decide to keep that tax break program instead of the one that actually puts money in the pockets of hard working Alabamians who could use a break. But that’s exactly what they plan to do.
And a whole bunch of those hard working Republican voters are going to let them get away with it.
