One of my heroes, Susan Pace Hamill, law professor at the University of Alabama, provides an interesting analogy for tax reform:

http://www.al.com/news/huntsvilletimes/local.ssf?/base/news/1241860572260150.xml

For tax reform, topple ’turtle stack’

By VICTORIA CUMBOW | Times Staff Writer [email protected] | Saturday, May 09, 2009

Prof finds 3 reasons most voters oppose altering state charter

A law professor is using a Dr. Seuss’ “Yertle the Turtle” yarn as a metaphor to argue for an overhaul of Alabama’s tax system.

Susan Pace Hamill, who teaches law at the University of Alabama, said the Seuss character wants to sit as high as possible, so he arranges a stack of turtles to sit on. The turtles near the bottom experience pain and suffering thanks to all the turtles sitting on their backs.

“The turtle stack can be compared to Alabama,” Hamill said by phone before she spoke at a Madison County Democratic Women’s dinner Thursday night.

After voters overwhelmingly rejected Gov. Bob Riley’s tax reform plan in 2003, Hamill struggled to understand why. She said the plan would’ve eased the tax burden for at least half of state voters. She set out to find out exactly why the “plan failed miserably.”

After years of listening to voters’ stories and concerns, she said, she found three reasons:

  1. Anytime someone is forced to decide on a change this drastic, there’s a fear that things will get worse.

“When you don’t trust that a change will help you,” she said, “you will never back a change.”

  1. Many Alabamians do not want to take a stand against their ancestors’ support for the 1901 constitution, Hamill said.

  2. Her third finding dealt with alienating friends and family.

“It’s very tight,” she said of the bonds of friends and family. “If you break away … and offend others in your network, you risk being cast out.”

Her solution to those problems? Newcomers to the state.

“This is why the heaviest of the heavy lifting would have to be done by newer arrivals,” she said, “by folks who have been here a while and committed to staying, but who are not disabled by these three problems.”

© 2009 The Huntsville Times. All rights reserved.

When we structure ourselves so that some get fine views at the expense of their fellow human beings, we’re doing something wrong.

He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it. This is not radicalism in the bad sense which so many attach to the word. This is conservatism in the true sense.

– Henry George, The Land Question