Saturday, April 03, 2010

Good News to the Poor (and Everyone Else!)

The bill to end the state sales tax on groceries is moving forward.

But there’s this amazing quote from Rep. Gipson: “The whole bill is a redistribution of wealth. Washington is doing such a good job of that I don’t know that we need to get involved with that.”

He’s already been taken to task in this editorial, but I thought this is an excellent example of the concept of privilege: the failure to recognize your own power, status, and position in society.

See, we already redistribute wealth with taxes. We just take it from the poor and give it to the rich. Alabama has some of the lowest property taxes in the nation, a fact that directly benefits those who own the most land. We make up for the lack of state revenue with sales taxes. The poor pay a greater percentage of their income in sales taxes than the rich. They are actually subsidizing farms, timber industries, and wealthy landowners every time they put food in their mouths.

Here’s another way to look at it: two to three weeks of groceries. Out of a year’s groceries, the government takes two weeks of food away from the poor and turns it into swimming pools and big lawns with automatic sprinklers for the rich. And board feet. And soybeans.

The fact that Gipson uses the kind of rhetoric worthy of FOX news to claim that this is unfair to rich people illustrates the concept of privilege: rich people are entitled to the money they earn. Poor people are not.

Last weekend I overheard a table full of elderly medicare recipients at church bewailing our country’s new “socialized medicine.” I heard from a friend that one senior citizen, after talking about her multiple extensive surgeries (all paid for with Medicare) said, “if those people can see my doctors, who knows how long I’ll have to wait?” The attitude of people in privilege is “I’ve got mine!”

Folks, if good news for the poor sounds like bad news to you, then you live in privilege. It may be the privilege of race, or class, or age, or some other system of power. But my faith says that good news to the poor is good news to everyone. The prophets proclaim a time when everyone who works for it will sit under the shade of their own fig tree (Micah 4:4), and live in houses that they built with their own hands. The idea is that in a just world, people get to enjoy the life they build for themselves and nobody will steal it from them and send them into exile, or turn them into debt slaves. City streets are safe, and there are plenty of public spaces for kids to play around retirees (Zech 8:4-5). These are not visions of streets paved with gold and towers of rubies. These visions are fairly tame: a just world where people live with some measure of security, and are able to enjoy the simple things of life. They plant their own gardens, build their own homes, and hang out with friends.