Dear Alabama: You can have our money, but how about a ‘thank you’?

Dear Alabama: You can have our money, but how about a ‘thank you’?

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

Opinion by Paul Waldman

Columnist covering politics

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Columnist

Today at 4:18 p.m. EDT

The headline seems sure to make big-city liberals mad: “Alabama governor defends plan to use covid relief funds to build new prisons.”

A displeased Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has asked the Treasury Department to step in. “Directing funding meant to protect our citizens from a pandemic to fuel mass incarceration is in direct contravention of the intended purposes” of those funds, he wrote in a letter.

The truth is that’s not entirely clear; there’s a reasonable case to be made on both sides of the question of whether Alabama would be inappropriately using these covid-19 relief funds, as I’ll explain below. But more interesting is how Alabama Republicans are talking about the controversy.

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Gov. Kay Ivey (R), for instance, insisted using these funds to address the state’s dilapidated prisons is an “Alabama solution to this Alabama problem.” And here’s another response from one of Alabama’s Republican state senators:

“I really couldn’t care less about the opinion of Washington liberals,” Alabama state Sen. Greg Reed (R) wrote on Twitter. “We aren’t going to let a New York City politician tell Alabama what we can and cannot do. These funds are intended to replace revenue lost as a result of the pandemic, and are clearly eligible for prison construction.”

So the “Alabama solution to this Alabama problem” is to take money from the federal government, then whine about the “Washington liberals” who gave Alabama that money.

The money in question comes from the American Rescue Plan, which was passed in early 2021. Alabama’s two Republican senators and six Republican House members all voted against the ARP, which got zero Republican votes in both houses.

And as for New York City politicians, are they the last ones who should be telling Alabama what it should do with federal money? Well, consider that a lot of that money came from New York. According to Rockefeller Institute data, in 2019 New York received 91 cents in federal spending for every dollar of tax revenue it sent to Washington — the lowest of any state. Alabama got $1.92 in spending for every dollar of tax revenue it sent, putting it in the top 10 “taker” states.

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On a per capita basis, New Yorkers paid almost twice as much in taxes as Alabamians. Nadler’s district, which includes the Upper West Side and the Financial District, is responsible for no small part of that revenue.

That shouldn’t give those New Yorkers any greater say than any other Americans over how federal money is spent; we don’t apportion power in Congress by tax revenue (instead, we do it by giving rural states disproportionate influence). But it’s a little rich to hear Republicans from Alabama demand funds they would never have gotten if they had their way then get angry when the way they’re going to spend the money is questioned.

All that said, there’s a genuine question as to whether the prison spending would be allowed under the ARP. On one hand, this Treasury rule indicates that states “have broad latitude to choose whether and how to use" funds "to respond to and address the negative economic impact” of the pandemic. But it also explains that the spending must have at least some relationship to what happened because of the coronavirus or how a state might be better prepared in the future.

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So perhaps Alabama would be justified in using relief funds to fix its rundown prisons so they don’t become vectors of disease, while building new prisons might be a different story, if the only purpose is so the state can lock up more people. But it doesn’t seem as though it will be hard for Alabama to make the case that new prison construction will fall under the many allowable uses.

It’s important to remember that the Democrats who passed the ARP wanted to give states plenty of flexibility. Money was given to states and localities that was supposed to be specifically targeted to address pandemic-related public health needs, but the pandemic also threatened a fiscal crisis for states, and the federal government wanted to address it.

That’s because nearly every state has a requirement in their constitutions saying they have to balance their budgets every year. When a recession hits — or a pandemic shutdown — they face a possible budgetary spiral. The shrinking state economy means less revenue, which means states have to raise taxes (a problem in bad economic times) or cut services. Part of the goal was to provide money to avoid that spiral, even if its uses had only a tangential relationship to public health.

So go ahead and use the money to fix the prison system if that’s the choice state legislators make, Alabama. But maybe while they’re at it, they should say “Thank you” to the rest of us.