In the coming years, Alabama’s CHOOSE Act is expected to suck more than $500 million annually from our struggling public schools, sending all that cash out of classrooms meant to educate the masses and instead into the bank accounts of private schools to subsidize the education of the mostly wealthy.
None of what I wrote above is debatable.
The Act is already costing us $180 million, and it’s only that low because of caps that will disappear in another year. The funds, data tells us, are going exactly to who we knew they’d go to—families whose kids were already attending private schools. Public schools are already starting to feel the pinch of those lost funds, and it’s only going to get worse.
Because $500 million is a whole lotta chocolate every year.
Wait. What? Chocolate?
On Sunday, as you were sitting in a church pew or spending time with your family or preparing for the Christmas holiday this week, the guy who sponsored the CHOOSE Act, state Senator Arthur Orr, was busy on Facebook. Orr posted a screenshot of a page from Amazon that showed a couple of boxes of “fancy chocolates,” as Orr deemed the $55 Godiva candies, and noted the “broken SNAP program” allows poor people to buy such items.
He then brought up the national deficit and promised to file a bill in Alabama to put a stop to this “nonsense.”
Now, I’m going to quickly move past the pathetic image of a rich dude, like a modern day mashup of Frank Shirley, Ebenezer Scrooge and Mr. Potter, sitting somewhere on the Sunday before Christmas rage posting about poor people being able to buy “fancy chocolates” with food stamp money, because I think you’ll get there without me. And there’s a much, much bigger point to be made here.
This is what divides us.
This sort of look-over-here, sleight-of-hand BS that pits poor people against slightly less poor people is why we have wage gaps and income inequality the likes of which this country hasn’t seen since the Great Depression.
Because, admit it, the idea of some deadbeat sitting around their house ordering fancy chocolates using food stamp money just made you mad. At the very least, it irritates you.
Of course it does. It was designed to. Because it was presented to you in the worst possible light, completely lacking context and bent towards anger. And it doesn’t, for even a moment, take into account all the rest of life.
In fact, mentioning the national debt of $40 trillion while speaking about a $55 box of chocolates available to food stamp recipients is a whole lot like complaining about the uneaten leftovers in the fridge inside a house that’s engulfed in flames.
And the only reason you’d do it is to divide. To vilify good people and a good program that helps millions of good people in order to sew division and justify hacking away at such programs in order to heap more money on rich people.
In the years Arthur Orr has served in the Alabama legislature—and by the way, I haven’t noticed him handing back any of his salary despite this high debt and the fact that he and his fellow lawmakers have failed the state in nearly every measurable quality-of-life category—he has rarely, if ever, opposed an economic development proposal that lavished money on corporations, businesses, business owners, land owners, farmers and investors. Including when he and his employers have benefited from those pieces of legislation.
In most cases, he has fought his way to the front of the PR photo announcing those bills and those projects.
That includes the disastrous CHOOSE Act.
Now, I’m not going to tell you that all of those economic development bills were bad, or that they didn’t serve a good purpose and result in a net benefit for the state and taxpayers who invested in them.
But what I will tell you is this: Those pieces of legislation cost the average taxpayer significantly more money each year than the SNAP program, have proven to contain more waste, fraud and abuse than the SNAP program and have never benefitted the public good more than the SNAP program. Even a SNAP program which might allow poor folks to buy “fancy chocolates.”
Food stamps cost the average taxpayer about $36 per year. Corporate subsidies and incentives programs cost taxpayers about $1,000 per year.
For some reason, though, you aren’t mad at the rich guy wasting taxpayer money on brother-in-law contracts and public works projects that mysteriously benefit a very specific group of people. You aren’t mad at the school voucher program sucking hundreds of millions out of Alabama’s public schools. Even though it’s way, way more money than some box of chocolates.
But then, that’s the goal, right? To steer your anger and outrage towards the guy who’s almost like you. To make you hate the guy who you have almost everything in common with. To divide up the poor and the middle class.
Because that makes it easier to pick your pockets. You can’t pay your power bill, can’t afford groceries and your kid’s school is canceling field trips because of a lack of funds, but you’re mad at the very idea of the guy who lives a few streets over buying fancy chocolates on an EBT card.
If only we’d learn that that division is why we all can’t afford fancy chocolates.
