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Who Would Jesus Tax?
The Saga of Susan Pace Hamill's Alabama Tax Reform Crusade
[Published in the September-October 2003 issue of GroundSwell, a publication of Common Ground-USA, www.progress.org/cg/]
A University of Alabama School of Law Professor has asked God's forgiveness for the years she lived in the sin of ignorance about tax injustice. Susan Pace Hamill, a tax expert, business consultant, and dedicated United Methodist church goer, thought there was a misprint when she first read that personal incomes as low as $4,600 for a family of four were being taxed by the state, while timber owners holding 71% of the land of Alabama were paying less than $1 per acre in property taxes. Two hours later she found out there had been no mistake and that Alabama has the most regressive tax code in the country. Her righteous rage spawned a tax crusade that has reverberated onto the national scene.
"As somebody who knows a lot about taxes, I could not have imagined a design of a tax structure this bad," she said in a Tuscaloosa News story last February. "The state's tax code is really horribly unjust and has no moral, ethical leg t