Professor Puts Religion in Tax Debate

Professor Puts Religion in Tax Debate

source: Associated Press Strange News

By JAY REEVES, Associated Press Writer

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Could a Bible Belt state where so many people claim to follow Christianity really be taxing personal incomes as low as $4,600 annually for a family of four — the lowest threshold of any state — while letting wealthy timber owners pay less than $1 per acre in property taxes?

Susan Pace Hamill, a former Internal Revenue Service attorney, couldn’t believe what she was reading.

“I looked at it and said, `That’s got to be a misprint,’” said Hamill, recalling a newspaper article two years ago. “I began checking and found out within two hours it wasn’t.”

She is now on a crusade to force the state to change, arguing that its tax structure is immoral and Christians have a moral duty to do something about it. One supporter calls her an “accidental prophet.”

But change is difficult in a state that was long dominated by land barons and racial segregationists. Even some Christian groups have greeted Hamill’s campaign with little enthusiasm.

At the heart of Hamill’s argument is the idea that the government and the rich are profiting from the poor, something the Bible prohibits.

Hamill, now a University of Alabama law professor, wrote a thesis for a master’s degree in theology spelling out the moral duty of Christians to work for a fairer tax system in Alabama.

Based on six months of research by assistants, she concluded that 71 percent of Alabama’s land is forest owned by timber interests that pay only 2 percent of the state’s property taxes because of rates written to favor agriculture and paper companies.

“That is the indictment,” she said in an interview.

Old Testament laws required fairness to the poor, and Jesus taught that people should care for “the least of these.” Hamill, who attends a United Methodist Church in Tuscaloosa, argues that means believers are required to make sure the state doesn’t disproportionately burden its poorest residents.

“Alabama’s tax structure fails to come close to meeting the moral demands that God has revealed for us in the Bible,” she wrote.

The thesis was printed in condensed form in newspapers statewide last fall as an op-ed piece, and the full version was later published in the Alabama Law Review.

The Rev. Jim Evans, a moderate Baptist who has long supported tax reform on biblical principles, called Hamill an “accidental prophet.”

“We have discussed her work at our church, but mostly informally,” Evans said. “The real strength of her work is in the analysis of the tax structure itself, especially property tax.”

But such support is not universal among the state’s churches.

The head of the conservative Christian Coalition of Alabama, John Giles, said Hamill goes too far in equating opposition to tax reform with sin.

“I agree with her only on one point: Anytime you can bring tax relief to the poor it’s a noble thing,” Giles said.

But he says Alabama’s property taxes should remain low to make it easier for people to tithe to their churches, which should then help the poor.

“Never once mentioned in Scripture is it the responsibility of government to take care of the poor,” he said. “It is the duty of the church.”

Many of Alabama’s churches had at least tacitly supported tax reform years before Hamill’s campaign.

Alabama’s two Catholic bishops issued a Bible-based call for “fundamental reform” of Alabama’s tax system in 1990, and the state’s Baptist, Methodist and Episcopal churches issued statements in 1999 and 2000 calling for tax fairness.

The Birmingham News won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for a series of editorials that in part used Christian principles to call for a rewrite of Alabama’s tax code.

Two state commissions studied the subject in the early ’90s, although no meaningful changes resulted.

Still, there hasn’t been much grass roots pressure for change.

Hamill’s article and her speeches statewide, many to church groups, do not appear to have changed that, said the Rev. Dan Ireland of the Alabama Citizens Action Program, a Baptist group which helped kill a proposed state lottery for public education in 1999 on moral grounds.

“I do not hear nor do I take note that people are aware of the article,” said Ireland.

Republican Gov. Bob Riley, a Southern Baptist who took office in January and holds Bible classes at the Capitol, has voiced support for changing the lowest-in-the-nation threshold at which Alabama begins taxing the income of its poor residents.

But with the state’s budgets in danger of running hundreds of millions of dollars into the red, it may be difficult to reduce taxes now.

Still, tax reform supporters such as Sean Flynt hope Hamill’s work could be the start of real change.

“It gets people talking. It gets them thinking,” he said. “It may just be the right thing at the right time.”

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On the Net:

Hamill: http://www.law.ua.edu/directory/bio/shamill.html

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