Times Change — By Tommy Purser

Earlier today I was looking back at some old copies of the Ledger when I ran across a column I had reprinted in the Ledger more than 40 years ago — in May of 1985 to be exact.
A lot of changes have come to Georgia in the past four decades but I, for one, don’t think they’ve changed enough for the better. In May, 1985, Tom Teepen, who died in 2017 at the age of 82 and who was, in 1985, editorial page editor of the Atlanta Constitution, penned a column that spoke to the problems Georgians who lived outside the metro-Atlanta area were having bringing themselves up to speed with the modern ideas and ways of the state and nation in the mid-1980s. Yeah, we’ve come a long way from those times but we still have far, far to go.
Sometimes it does us good to look back at the way things were decades ago to jog our memories and make sure we don’t repeat the mistakes of our past — or continue making the same mistakes repeatedly.
Here’s what Tom Teepen said 41 years ago:
BY TOM TEEPEN
Editorial Page Editor
The Atlanta Constitution
(Reprinted from the May 11, 1985, edition of The Atlanta Constitution)
The Trap of Political Poverty
Georgia is:
1 – America’s boom state, the wave of the future, so go-go it is darn near gone-gone, the peach in the Sun Belt basket.
2 – A sink of ignorance, backwardness, bad health and poverty.
The correct answer, of course, is some from No. 1, and more from No. 2 than most of us would care to admit.
Perhaps you noticed the story over the weekend which pointed out that only 14 of Georgia’s IS9 counties can boast personal income averages at 90 percent or better of the national average. Folks in 145 of our counties make less than 90 percent of the national average – and in about half of those counties, they make less than 70 percent.
True, something close to half the state’s population lives in the well-off counties – metro Atlanta and the Macon, Augusta and Savannah areas – but that is kind of the point, isn’t it?
We will remain untrue to ourselves and unfair to our own citizenry if we do not look for ways to make it possible for Georgians to prosper where they live, if they wish to, rather than having to move to one of the cities. Nor is Atlanta helped in the long run by a prosperity that drains the rest of the state instead of nurturing it.
There is no single key that can unlock the magic kingdom of modern development for counties where the 195Os still seem overdue. With enactment of a new, statewide education program by the General Assembly this year, Georgia probably has done the one thing that, in the long term, can make the biggest difference for the better – if, that is, we see it through, funding it fully and sticking to its principles of accountability.
And there are other direct public investments that would help, too – investment in the state’s university system, investment in local infrastructure (good water and sewerage systems), investment in developmental highways to breach the isolation of the northern, mountain counties and the southern, rural ones.
But the poorest counties often are poorest of all in political leadership, and that works against them every bit as much as any physical disabilities.
There are important exceptions, of course, but let’s face it: In much of Georgia, there still appear to be more rewards for the politics of ignorance than for pragmatic politics.
The federal courts and a civility of sorts forbid overtly racist politicking these days, but there is more than a tad of wink-and-nudge racism in some local politics. The appeal to racism effectively prevents the kind of consensus-building from which communities can work steadily together for their common best interests.
The anti-tax hustle remains a winner, too, but it prevents precisely the development that it usually is put forward as seeking. You know the scam: We’ve got to keep taxes low so we can attract industry. But industries that can be attracted just by low taxes typically are junk industries, which actually want poorly educated workers and which can be bought away by any area willing to cut its taxes lower still.
Any industry that is worth having cares about the quality of schools and other amenities before it cares whether taxes are 4 percent or, say, 4.2 percent of its total operating costs. Yet much of underdeveloped Georgia remains in the thrall of pols who preach a low-tax gospel even though investment in public responsibilities, rather than themneglect of them, would pay far the greater dividends.
Statewide good times will take years to build, but we could hurry the process along for ourselves by developing, statewide, a hoopla-alarm that would ring off the wall every time some up-is-down politician tells us that the status quo is the way of the future, cheapness is the way to prosperity and backwardness is the way to go forward.
That’s not leadership. It’s just plain lying.