As a child, I followed NYS consolidated law EDN § 802. Instruction relating to the flag; holidays every morning, placing my hand over my heart and reciting the pledge to the flag, as most every American student does every single morning, despite what one might read on facebook memes
Note to meme author, we place our hand to heart for the pledge, not the song. We do it for the 4H pledge also…
And I never gave a great deal of thought to those words, 180 times a year times 13 years minus all those sick days, fishing trips, and ill timed family vacations. But it’s still a lot and I will now step back and wonder at those words. We are “united” states, “indivisible”, “one nation” and for those pledging after June 14, 1954, “one nation under god”. And so there we stand, in the wind swept canyons of the great cities, in small towns where red dirt roads lead out into the hills, across great plains of wheat, and the once inpeneratable western divide. And we all acknowledge the other as one nation, strong in that we are one together. Such a great thing, to be a strong and unified republic, I’ll take off my ball cap and pledge to that any time.
Because we are united as one, I do my share. For every buck I earn, I toss about 25 cents into the hat to pay for either federal projects to benefit all of us, like an army or our interstate highway system. Part of that money goes to people in states that are less fortunate, and depend on us as neighbors to help them out. Sometimes it’s a one shot deal like a flood, or sometimes it’s just ongoing. Additionally, I pay a little to ensure that the elderly people and disabled of today have enough to live by my contribution to the social security fund. If I’m doing work as an employee, my employer helps by splitting it with me, while when I work as a 1099 contractor, I pay the full boat. Despite the popular lockbox myth of “it’s my money” it’s actually just an intergenerational trust where today’s workers pay for today’s recipients. And I’m fine with the whole bargain. We live in a beautiful country, and seem to do somewhat OK at taking care of the most needy, sometimes, like a solid C+ for effort.
So I was surprised when I opened my NY Times and read another well written but sad story of us being anything but united. The headline read:
Mississippi Fires Lawyer Trying to Recoup Misused Welfare Funds
The lawyer had issued a subpoena that could reveal details about the involvement of a former governor and a football star in the scandal.
Mississippi has some of the most verdant land on the planet. The Mississippi river runs dark with rich sediment from millions of acres of headlands and dumps topsoil across a wide delta which produces over 100 million bushels of soybeans, 275,000 tons of cotton, and 125,000 tons of corn every year. It is a breadbasket for this great nation, blessed with a long growing season and magnificent soil. It is also, per capita, the poorest state in the nation, with less than half the wealth production of New York. Mississippi is last in the nation in child poverty and infant mortality. It ranks 48th in the number of uninsured women and 45th. In maternal mortality. Of those children who make it to school, less than 85% will graduate high school, the third lowest in the nation. And yet, the state has chosen to refuse federal help in the form of expanded medicaid for the working poor, which is odd given all the other federal money that flows into the state in a mighty torrent. In 2021, the state increased the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families payments from $160 for a family of 4 to $240, per month, the lowest in the nation. State welfare payments are, interestingly, not among the lowest, which we will explore shortly.
One of the cornerstones of tax policy is the notion that a fair tax should be “progressive” or adhere to the ability to pay principle. Those who have higher income should pay a larger proportion of their income in taxes, which is why we use bracket rates for federal income tax. Also, things that people need for their basic survival should not be subject to taxes. So for example, the first $26,000 a couple makes is covered at the federal level by the standard deduction, and is exposed to a zero percent tax rate. You need that money just to keep a roof over your head, so no worries about taxes. The next dollar you make in excess of that amount is taxed at just 10%. Sales taxes are the opposite of this sort of system and are called a “regressive” tax, in that people who make a modest income are likely to spend every cent they make, exposing all of it to sales taxes. What is the largest income source at the state level in the Magnolia state? Sales taxes. What state charges the highest tax on groceries at 7%? Yep, same. A regressive tax levied on the staples people need to survive, what kind of a mess is that?
But thankfully, we are all here to help. In a given year, nearly half of the state budget in Mississippi comes from the rest of us who pay our federal income taxes. We are doubtless more than happy to help our southern neighbors through both direct cash payments, in addition to programs such as SNAP and TANF. They clearly need the assistance, as we underscore every morning in every classroom, we are one nation, indivisible. We help out those stars on the flag that are not shining so brightly because we are one nation.
Part of this support comes in the form of block grants to help states combat poverty. The programs were first established during the Nixon years and consolidated a bunch of federal programs into larger “blocks” of funds based on the poverty level of the state. Clearly, Mississippi and many of the other southern states get loads of this money. And what did the Times determine was going on with these programs? The article leads off by noting an attorney working for the state who sought to uncover the theft of this money was summarily fired recently. He was looking into:
A state audit in 2020 found that as much as $94 million in federal funds may have been misspent in Mississippi. Instead of going to poor families, the audit found, much of the money ended up in the pockets of prominent Mississippians, including Mr. Favre, a Mississippi native, who was paid $1.1 million for speaking engagements he did not attend.
Apparently this Favre is some sports hero who has recently given a million bucks back to the state, but still owes a few hundred thousand in interest. More than $5 million of our money was stolen to build a volleyball facility at the University of Southern Mississippi.
And then, they took the money they stole from all of us and made the exterior look like a plantation house. Just to stick another finger in the eye of the American taxpayer.
This is the same institution attended by Raylawni Branch and Gwendolyn Elaine Armstrong, making them the very first black students to attend. In Nineteen freaking sixty five. Mississippi Today noted:
But officials representing one of the largest welfare beneficiaries — the University of Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation and, by extension, the University of Southern Mississippi — were aware that funding for construction of a new volleyball stadium on campus came from a Mississippi Department of Human Services block grant, according to board meeting minutes.
So, the poorest state in the nation steals block grant money from the rest of America and gives it to some football guy and a recently desegregated university for construction of a building. While refusing to expand basic health insurance programs for the poorest people in the state. While ranking consistently at the bottom of nearly every quality of life metric.
And here is the part where I want to spit those words from my mouth when I say that pledge in the morning. Are we really “one nation, indivisible” ? Are those elected leaders in Mississippi doing their part to uphold the words in that pledge? Looking past their recent succession from the United states in 1861, I would have to suggest they are doing a crap job of providing a decent state for human life. In most every basic metric of civic life, they have managed to place close to last. They don’t care for the new born children or the mothers who are at their most vulnerable moments in life, they provide little help for families, shoddy education, ramshackle school facilities for the poorest children, and substandard medical care. When we try to help by sending millions of federal dollars to directly help the ample supply of impoverished families in the state, they go and steal the money and waste it. And then they have the gall to charge sales tax on a can of Spam in the supermarket.
Perhaps this is the outcome of the deals that were made to keep the slave holding states as part of our union. We have a weakened federal government and this construction of “states rights” that seems to mean “states rights for the stuff that I want” is an impediment to holding states to account for not doing their part by the Americans who live there. In a functioning democracy, state governments that can’t manage to provide much of anything for their residents and steal from the larger society would be kicked out, ridiculed, called out as the jackasses they are. But instead we allow them to be emboldened, shaking their fists at the very government that funds nearly half of their budget.
Sometimes when I get into a funk, I wonder if we should have just let the southern states go and form their own county in 1860. It would have saved a lot of bloodshed in the civil war and the years after reconstruction seemed to only bring more violence and terror in the form of the Jim Crow south. But then we would have lived with the injustice of slavery right on our doorstep. I can’t game that one out in my head very well, which would have been the greatest loss as a nation. I guess black people made out better, maybe. Perhaps. How foolish we are to think that this whole 100 plus year block of history can be just ignored in our memory and school textbooks. Taking 10 minutes to read a newspaper article about Mississippi and read a little about the state makes it so clear that an era in history doesn’t just end like a textbook chapter.
With liberty, and justice, for all.
i always enjoyed that the same people who were dead set against a face mask as it was an infringement of their freedoms were totally OK with forcing patriotism upon others by things like the pledge and national anthem