alabama possible from the alabama poverty project

Editorial

The Birmingham News

January 1, 1999

Alabama not only survived some awful events during 1998, it prospered with a remarkable economy.

But peruse the list of Top Ten news stories as defined by The News’ reporters and editors, or by The Associated Press for some sign that we are making headway on our most resilient problems, and you won’t find any.

They have gone untended for so many years, leaving them untended is not news. We endured a number of traumas in 1998:

A tornado in Jefferson and St. Clair counties killed 34 people, injured 260 and left a path of destruction more than 30 miles long.

A bomb killed an off-duty police officer outside a Birmingham abortion clinic. Four term governor George Wallace died.

And the escape of two Mississippi prison inmates began a crime spree, which authorities allege included the killing of one police officer in Moody and the wounding of another in Tuscaloosa.

In politics, Lt. Gov. Don Siegelman routed incumbent Gov. Fob James, and Democrats held their own against a Republican Party which had been riding high through the past few statewide elections.

The economy, overall, was fantastic, as the state’s unemployment rate hovered slightly above or below 4 percent monthly, and several hundred new jobs were headed our way.

But Alabama made sparse use of that prosperity. It invested very little of it in programs that might help the state leapfrog ahead.

A kindergarten through 12th-grade system, among the poorest in the nation, got a little extra revenue. But that came only because Gov. Fob James robbed higher education to get it. In the process, we were robbing our future.

No one tried to do anything about a tax system that, according to many studies, is the most unfair in the country.

The Legislature failed in its fourth try to increase cigarette taxes to better fund foster care programs and reform its juvenile justice system. Lawmakers listened more closely to tobacco lobbyists than lobbyists for children.

Indeed the big story from the Legislature in 1998 was that lawmakers spent every last penny they could scrape together on huge pay raises for teachers and state workers.

An election year was approaching, and those on the state payroll vote. Meanwhile, the state did practically nothing about the kinds of problems outlined in an extensive study by the Alabama Poverty Project.

In the last regular census, 1 out of every 5 Alabamians was poor. Nearly 44 percent of Alabama’s poor lived in extreme poverty, surviving on incomes of less than one-half the federal poverty threshold.

Twenty-eight of Alabama’s 67 counties had poverty rates of more than 20 percent and four had rates of more than 40 percent. Only three Alabama counties that year had high school graduation rates equal to or above the national average.

Twenty-three counties had unemployment rates for poor workers that exceeded 25 percent.

If we won’t invest in trying to take on some of those lingering problems in a time of prosperity, when will we?

We may wake up one New Year’s Day to find that the problems we have left hanging year after year after year have festered into a malady that affects the whole state.

Instead of just surviving, when do we make serious plans for our future?