The Heroism of Susan Pace Hamill
posted by Frank Pasquale
It is now sadly all too common to see public intellectuals pointedly ignoring–or even cheering on–growing inequality. Bloodless statistical accounts tend to miss the consequences that flow for poor families when taxes on the wealthiest are cut and social programs are gutted accordingly.
Professor Susan Pace Hamill has done an extraordinary job in turning public attention to this problem. According to the NYT’s David Cay Johnston, “her latest effort is a book, As Certain as Death (Carolina Academic Press, 2007), that seeks to document how the 50 states, in contravention of her view of biblical injunctions, do more to burden the poor and relieve the rich than vice versa.” Some statistics are really striking:
The poorest fifth of Alabama families, with incomes under $13,000, pay state and local taxes that take almost 11 cents out of each dollar. The richest 1 percent, who make $229,000 or more, pay less than 4 cents out of each dollar they earn, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, an advocacy group whose numbers are generally considered trustworthy even by many of its opponents.
As a cursory Google search shows, Professor Pace Hamill has honed her message with extraordinary clarity and skill in a variety of forums–law review articles, books, interviews, and even sermons. Prof. Pace Hamill’s engaged scholarship and contributions as a public intellectual provide a great model for those who seek to develop religiously inspired legal theory.
Hat Tip: TaxProfBlog; Mirror of Justice.
December 26, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality, Tax
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Responses (2)
TJ - December 26, 2007 at 2:50 pm
I always find it problematic when advocates of reducing the income tax point to statistics showing how little the poor pay in income taxes, while ignoring the effect of consumption and other taxes (that make the overall tax burden only slightly progressive). Isn’t this statistic, taken out of context, pulling the same trick, only from the opposite direction?
Miriam Cherry - December 26, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Prof. Hamill has been promulgating this message for years now, to little avail. When I lived in Alabama three years ago, I voted to raise taxes on myself to help out education (even though I have no children), but the bulk of the poor, who would have been helped by the bill, voted against it (“any new taxes are bad”). As much as the Alabama religious right may pay lip service to helping the poor, I’m not actually seeing anyone walk the walk (or open their wallet).
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