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Alabama NewsAlabama Politics
A Body Without Vision
By Gary Palmer
Posted on: February 4, 2005
With his first State of the Union Address of his second term, President George W. Bush outlined a bold course of reform directed at addressing and solving some of our nation's most pressing domestic issues.
With great determination, Bush revealed to Congress and the American people historic proposals for reforming two of the monoliths of American domestic policy - Social Security and health care. In addition, he challenged Congress to make permanent the tax cuts passed in his first term and pass sweeping legal reforms. By any estimation, President Bush is committing his political capital to a reform agenda that will rival the New Deal of the Franklin D. Roosevelt era.
Whether you agree with his ideas or not, one thing is certain … President Bush has a vision for what he believes will make a better future for the people he is sworn to serve. If only the same thing could be said about the Alabama Legislature.
While Congress will be debating great ideas and initiatives that have the potential for tremendously empowering people and meeting enormous needs, the Alabama Legislature will be tying up the legislative session with another batch of gambling bills as it has for almost every legislative session for the last 12 years.
Last year's pro-gambling propaganda theme was "Bingo for Books." Pro-gambling legislators couldn't stop talking about how the state needed video-bingo gambling revenue to buy school books to help bail our schools out of their funding crisis. A year later, the state is projecting a surplus of $554 million in education revenue and suddenly "book money"' is not an issue. If anything, the people of Alabama should see what a bunch of suckers the pro-gambling legislators take the people of Alabama for.
This year the crisis that they say justifies expanding and taxing gambling is the shortfall in Medicaid funding projected for this fiscal year. Pro-gambling interests will be pushing legislation to expand video-bingo gambling to Birmingham and Mobile and tax all the video-bingo gambling statewide in order to use the money to help make up the shortfall in Medicaid funding.
The sad irony of this is that, if the Legislature were to expand gambling, the demands on the state Medicaid program would increase as a result. In fact, various studies of the impact of gambling on a state show that the additional social and economic costs to the state actually exceed the revenues brought in by gambling. Gambling would actually make the demands on Medicaid and other social welfare programs worse.
Alabama voters should be thoroughly disgusted by the lack of vision among most of the leaders and members of the State Legislature. While our legislators do the bidding of big-money gambling interests and pretend to be doing something about Medicaid, other states are actually implementing major reforms to their programs.
Kentucky is in the process of implementing a Medicaid reform plan that is projected to save that state well over $100 million in the first year. South Carolina and Florida are also working toward major Medicaid reforms.
But Medicaid is not the only issue that the politicians in the State Legislature need to address. Alabama desperately needs bold ideas for reforming the operation of state government to make it more efficient, more effective in the use of taxpayer money, and more accountable to the people. Gov. Bob Riley has submitted a very good proposal for accomplishing those aims, but it is very doubtful that Riley's SMART budget plan will ever get a legitimate hearing. Yet around us, other states such as Virginia and South Carolina are implementing far-reaching and important reforms in the management of state government … and the same thing could be said regarding a number of other issues on which other states are pursuing thoughtful reforms.
So here we are in Alabama in need of major reforms, surrounded by states that are actually implementing major reforms, watching as President Bush and Congress begin the monumental task of reforming Social Security and health care, and sadly our Legislature will spend its time pushing gambling bills, this time under the guise of funding Medicaid.
Passing legislation to expand gambling in this state is clearly not the answer to Alabama's Medicaid program problems; in the long-run, it would only make the problem worse.
But then, making problems worse is what we have come to expect from so many of Alabama's politicians.
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