Bishop Jim Lowe: A lottery will only further set back minorities and the poor
Gambling is called the “poor man’s tax” because it takes from those who play the lottery and gives to those who control it. Many people have become enslaved to gambling, giving away their hard-earned money to take a chance on the lottery with very little chance of return. Governor Kay Ivey and state legislators know this and know it will be a problem in Alabama, too. A big one. In fact, the governor’s study group on gambling policy suggested in their report that there is potential for 66,375 “problem gamblers” if Alabama legalizes a lottery and expands gambling. 13,733 of these will be “compulsive gamblers” who will not be able to control their urge to gamble. Who exactly are these 66,375 problem gamblers and 13,733 compulsive gamblers? We know from other states that individuals in the lowest income brackets are the most regular clientele of state lotteries. We also know that black and brown people are disproportionately more likely to be in this lowest income group in Alabama. From there, we can extrapolate that black and brown people will be some of the largest funders of this operation. They’ll also be a large part of those problem gamblers. Shouldn’t these groups have the same opportunity proportionally to benefit from the government programs they’re funding to help build their communities? Shouldn’t consideration be given to help aid those putting a disproportionate amount of their income into the program as a whole? As it is right now, the lottery will take from the poor and give, in many cases, to the relatively rich. According to the bill, the lottery will fund college scholarships. Undoubtedly this is good news for many people. Education truly can make a difference in the quality of life of Alabama’s citizens. But what about the groups mentioned above and the poor? Are college scholarships the right place to start to help them? The bill does suggest that there will be an aspect of scholarship qualifications based upon income, allowing all to participate. This is a good sign. However, the entire idea of using the lottery to fund college scholarships alone is actually short-sighted. For many of the poor and disenfranchised, college is not even an option because of the lack of quality K-12 educational opportunities to prepare them for it. If a lottery is going to pass, a large portion of lottery funds should be used to offer K-12 scholarships. The building blocks of a student’s education are formed at this level, not in postsecondary classes. This small change would be a real difference-maker, empowering families to send their children to a school of their choice, leveling the playing field, and providing an opportunity typically afforded only to those with much higher means. College scholarships from a lottery sound good, but again, it falls short of actual benefit to the majority of the state’s citizens. For instance, if we follow the lead of Tennessee, which has had the HOPE Scholarship funded through its lottery since 2009, families in any income bracket will be eligible for the scholarships (though, once you turn 25, scholarships are limited to students with an annual income at or less than $36,000). To qualify for the HOPE Scholarship, students have to get a 21 or higher on the ACT in Tennessee. If you establish that requirement in Alabama, you see a vast majority of the poorest and most needy not scoring high enough to get an Alabama version of this scholarship. In Bessemer City Schools, for example, only 2.6% of students meet their college readiness benchmarks. That’s 97.4% of students not ready for college. The average ACT score? 15.1. If we follow Tennessee’s lead, which the language in the gambling bill being debated right now in the Alabama State House would allow, our scholarship system could be bent away from those who need it most. And even if we don’t follow Tennessee’s model, we are still focusing on college education when the real problem, where we are dead last and where the poor need options, is K-12 education. If the legislature is intent on passing a lottery, an inherently flawed method of raising revenue, they should at least make sure some of the funds help those who will be paying so much into the system. K-12 scholarships would do just that. As a state that supposedly is overwhelmingly Christian, I want to point out one warning from scripture for those who might be prone to ignore these concerns. “Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.” – Proverbs 21:13 Fundamentally a lottery is immoral because it exploits the poor. If it comes to fruition, it will truly be an unjust way of raising revenue. As a state, with our history, we should work to help end the cycle of poverty and provide equal opportunity with justice for all of our citizens. We should not hastily endorse legislation that sounds good but, in actuality, continues to perpetuate and inflame the class distinctions in our society. Bishop Jim Lowe is a distinguished fellow at the Alabama Policy Institute and senior pastor of the Guiding Light Church in Birmingham.
Beyond 100M: Joe Biden team aiming for bigger vaccine numbers
It sounded so ambitious at first blush: 100 million vaccination shots in 100 days. Now, one month into his presidency, Joe Biden is on a glide path to attain that goal and pitching well beyond it to the far more ambitious and daunting mission of vaccinating all eligible adults against the coronavirus by the end of the summer. Limited supply of the two approved COVID-19 vaccines has hampered the pace of vaccinations — and that was before extreme winter weather delayed the delivery of about 6 million doses this past week. But the United States is on the verge of a supply breakthrough as manufacturing ramps up and with the expectation of a third vaccine becoming available in the coming weeks. That means the act of delivering injections will soon be the dominant constraint, and it’s prompting the Biden administration to push to dramatically expand the universe of those who will deliver injections and where Americans will meet them to get their shots. “It’s one thing to have the vaccine, and it’s very different to get it in someone’s arms,” Biden said Friday as he toured Pfizer’s manufacturing plant in Portage, Michigan. The company is set to double its pace of vaccine deliveries in the coming weeks. Since their approval in December, more than 75 million doses of the two-shot-regimen Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been distributed, of which 63 million have been injected, reaching 13% of Americans. Nearly 45 million of those doses have been administered since Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20. The pace of deliveries of those vaccines is about to take off. About 145 million doses are set for delivery in the next 5 1/2 weeks, with an additional 200 million expected by the end of May and a further 200 million by the end of July. That’s before the anticipated approval by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use of a third vaccine, from Johnson & Johnson. The single-dose J&J vaccine is expected to help speed the path to immunity and requires half the vaccination resources of the two-shot regimens. But there is no massive stockpile of J&J doses ready to roll out on Day One. “We’re going to be starting with only a few million in inventory,” White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients said this past week. Still, when combined with the anticipated increases in the other vaccines, the J&J doses could prove the pivotal advance in delivering enough shots for nearly all American adults by the end of June, at least a month earlier than currently anticipated. The daily inoculation average climbed to 1.7 million shots per day last week, but as many as double that number of doses are soon expected to be available on average each day. The focus of Biden’s team is now quickly shifting to ensuring those doses can get used, though the administration has resisted the calls of some health experts to publicly set a “moonshot” target for how many daily doses it hopes to deliver. Biden first set his target of 100 million doses in 100 days on Dec. 8, days before the first vaccines received emergency use authorization. By Inauguration Day, it was clear the U.S. was on course to attain that goal. Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, said she would like to see the administration commit to a more ambitious 3 million shot-per-day target. “I want to see them put that stake in the ground and ask everyone to help them achieve that goal,” she said. The current pace of vaccination dipped markedly in recent days as winter weather shuttered administration sites in Texas and across the South, and icy conditions stranded supplies at shipping hubs in Louisville, Kentucky and Memphis, Tennessee. One-third of the delayed doses have already been delivered, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, announced Sunday. The White House anticipates that remaining delayed doses will be injected by March 1 and that the daily pace of vaccinations will continue to climb. Much of the increase, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comes from people receiving their second dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine. The pace of first-dose vaccinations, meanwhile, has been largely steady over the past several weeks, hovering around an average of 900,000 shots per day. Increasing both the rate of first-dose administrations and the rate of overall vaccinations will be key to achieving herd immunity — estimated to require vaccination of about 80% of the population — in hopes of ending the pandemic and curtailing the emergence of potentially even more dangerous “mutant” strains of the coronavirus. That means keeping demand high. The administration has expressed concerns about public surveys showing that tens of millions of Americans are reluctant to get the vaccine and it is stepping up public outreach to overcome that hesitancy as the U.S. death toll nears 500,000 — “a terribly historic milestone in the history of this country,” as Fauci put it, and “we’re still not out of it.” Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, the White House COVID-19 data director, said in an interview that the administration is “focused on going out to communities and making sure people know these vaccines are safe and how they can get them, with a goal of vaccinating nearly all Americans,.” The administration has also turned its focus toward identifying new delivery paths for the vaccines beyond those already used by states, including federally-run mass vaccination sites, smaller community health centers and retail pharmacies. The White House’s goal is to stand up the sites now so that they will be ready to handle the influx of vaccine in the coming weeks. “They can push a lot more volume through those channels, through those big box stores, through the community health centers,” Scott Gottlieb, a former Trump administration FDA commissioner, told MSNBC on Friday. He praised the Biden administration for setting up those sites in advance. The Pentagon, at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has started deploying thousands of active-duty troops to open mass vaccination centers
Casino, lottery debate expected this week in Alabama Senate
Alabama state senators are expected to debate lottery and casino legislation next week amid a push to get the issue of gambling before voters for the first time since 1999. Republican Sen. Del Marsh said he expects to get a Senate vote on his bill next week. The proposal would authorize a lottery and allow eight, or possibly more, casinos in the state. The Senate debate, which could come as soon as Tuesday, will be the first major test of support for the plan. “I do believe we will have a bill that will get out of the Senate this week. Then we’ll just work it in the House,” Marsh said. The Anniston Republican has circulated a new draft of the bill but said he has not decided on the number of casino sites after other areas made a push to be included. Marsh said he is getting polling on that issue. The bill proposes establishing a state lottery and five casinos offering table games, slot machines and betting on sports games. The casinos would be located at four existing dog tracks plus a fifth site in north Alabama that would be run by the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, Alabama’s only federally recognized Native American tribe. The proposal also would encourage the governor to negotiate with the Poarch Band for a compact involving their three other sites that currently have electronic bingo machines. Some lawmakers said they are concerned their districts were not included in five casino locations spelled out in the bill. Marsh said the latest draft still has five locations, but it might change. Marsh’s bill would shut down electronic bingo sites, although card and paper games could continue. Democratic Sen. Malika Fortier sent a letter to the Senate Tourism Committee saying an electronic bingo casino in impoverished Lowndes County would be shut down under the current proposal. Fortier, who disclosed this week that she is seeking treatment for cervical cancer, sent a letter since she could not attend the public hearing. “How can we forcibly close the doors of a business that has existed for 20 years (in one form or another) in a small rural impoverished community like Lowndes County where jobs are few and the people have passed a Constitutional amendment to locate it there, but then gladly allow it in other areas where they aren’t hurting for jobs like Lowndes County,” Fortier wrote in the letter read at the meeting. Republican Sen. Donnie Chesteen of Geneva earlier expressed concern that a Dothan-area facility was also left out. Marsh’s proposal would have to be approved by a three-fifths majority of each chamber of the Alabama Legislature and then a majority of voters in a statewide vote. Alabama is one of just five states without a state lottery. Alabamians last voted on gambling in 1999 when they defeated a lottery proposed by then-Gov. Don Siegelman. Gambling bills introduced since then have fallen short under a mix of conservative opposition to gambling as a revenue source and a turf war over which entities could offer casino games or electronic bingo machines. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
Inspector general reviews Donald Trump’s relocation of Space Command
The Department of Defense’s inspector general announced Friday that it was reviewing the Trump administration’s last-minute decision to relocate U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama. The decision on Jan. 13, one week before Trump left office, blindsided Colorado officials and raised questions of political retaliation. Donald Trump had hinted at a Colorado Springs rally in 2020 that the command would stay at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. But the man with whom Trump held that rally, Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, lost his reelection bid in November, and Colorado, unlike Alabama, voted decisively against Trump. The Air Force’s last-minute relocation of command headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama — home of the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal — blindsided Colorado officials of both parties, who have urged the Biden administration to reconsider the decision. On Friday, the inspector general’s office announced it was investigating whether the relocation complied with Air Force and Pentagon policy and was based on proper evaluations of competing locations. Colorado officials of both parties were thrilled. “It is imperative that we thoroughly review what I believe will prove to be a fundamentally flawed process that focused on bean-counting rather than American space dominance,” said Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Republican whose district includes Space Command. The state’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, also hailed the probe. “Moving Space Command will disrupt the mission while risking our national security and economic vitality,” the senators said in a joint statement. “Politics have no role to play in our national security. We fully support the investigation.” Among other duties, the Space Command enables satellite-based navigation and troop communication and provides warning of missile launches. Also based at Peterson are the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, and the U.S. Northern Command. The Space Command differs from the U.S. Space Force, launched in December 2019 as the first new military service since the Air Force was created in 1947. The Space Command is not an individual military service but a central command for military wide space operations. It operated at Peterson from 1985 until it was dissolved in 2002, and it was revived in 2019. The Air Force accepted bids from locations for the command when it was revived and was considering six finalists, including Huntsville, when Trump hinted it’d stay in Colorado Springs. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
