A number of influential evangelical leaders have issued a statement on the budget fights in the federal government. The group includes a few men that I greatly respect—including Gideon Strauss, Ron Sider, and Richard Mouw—and I appreciate their willingness to address this concern from a Biblical perspective.
But the proposal suffers from some fatal flaws, as my friend Jordan Ballor notes:
There is very little principle in this statement, which purports not to “endorse any detailed agenda.” The basic principle communicated is: “We ought to care for the poor because God does.” This is of course laudable and true, as is the commitment to “intergenerational justice,” as long as that is defined as not living today on the backs of the unborn and not code for something else.
But the rest really just consists of leaps in logic largely based on unstated assumptions about the role that government should have in administering that care. To wit: “To reduce our federal debt at the expense of our poorest fellow citizens would be a violation of the biblical teaching that God has a special concern for the poor.”
Given the current state of affairs, which the statement acknowledges is a “crisis,” I don’t think it is helpful to energize the grassroots to petition to save particular programs from scrutiny and reform. Things are so bad that everything should be on the table. The situation is not an either/or between social spending and military spending, as Claiborne and Wallis would have it. It’s a both/and, and that includes entitlements.
March 4th, 2011 | 9:18 am
Really, the budget sections for many of the hated entitlements are pennies, and are “busted,” in the terms of the author, due to overt efforts to “break them.”
I don’t understand the consternation among conservatives. The right wing has its fiscal end game in play right now. This is the Grover Norquist dream-a government so broke it can be drowned in the bath tub.
We are where the right wing has wanted since David Stockman was budget director in the 1980′s. The poor will be the victims, having lost access to their pennies, and the military contractors well, they never lose money.
This is the David Stockman dream too. This plan has been in play for a generation and it is coming to fruition, without so much as a criticism of Mr. Norquist or his well-placed disciples over the years.
The poor, and God-forbid, not a military contractor, are the victims of this fiscal dream.
March 4th, 2011 | 9:56 am
The big problem with our entitlement mess is that it represents a promise made by one generation to itself to be paid for by later generations. If this generation believes it has an obligation to the poor and needy of its time, it should pay for it itself.
I simply examination of the annual federal budgets from the end of WWII to today demonstrates the problem. We kept adding new entitlements, but never raised new revenues to pay for them nor cut other spending sufficiently to pay for them without increasing revenues.
The biggest of these is Medicare, which was enacted in 1965. In 1964, the year before Medicare was enacted, the federal government’s revenues represented 17.6% of GDP. In 2008, the last year for which final figures are available, the federal government’s revenues represent 17.7% of GDP, almost exactly the same as the year before Medicare was enacted. Yet, while no federal monies went to this entitlement in 1964 and only 5.5% of GDP was spent in aggregate for Human Resources (of which Medicare is a part in the budget), in 2008, 13.3% of GDP went to Human Resources in aggregate, with Medicare being the biggest component. Put simply, while we enacted a payroll tax to pay for Medicare, we cut other revenues so that the net federal revenue for all federal government is roughly the same percentage of GDP as it was before Medicare was enacted while the expense for it and other entitlements have raised Human Resource expenditure by more than 2.4 times the percentage of GDP as it was in 1964.
In sum, the generation that decided to be generous to the poor and elderly did so with the money of the children and grandchildren. That’s not charity; that’s theft. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of Proverbs 13:22a, which teaches us: “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.”
March 4th, 2011 | 9:57 am
Oh, by the way, the source for my numbers is the federal budget submitted by the Obama Administration for last fiscal year. See http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy10/pdf/hist.pdf
March 4th, 2011 | 9:58 am
“I simply examination . . .” should have read “A simple examination . . .”
March 4th, 2011 | 10:44 am
Gregory, you make an excellent argument – thanks for the clarity of thought!
March 4th, 2011 | 12:26 pm
[...] morning Joe noticed Jordan’s excellent response to the new manifesto from some evangelicals who [...]
March 4th, 2011 | 12:40 pm
I do like the idea of that the pension benefits arrangements are in fact “promises.”
Can one ditch such promises so easily?
March 4th, 2011 | 2:20 pm
The problem with this is that it allows the envious of the day to insist that the price be paid by the “rich”. Many of them seem to think that the rich have bottomless pockets because they have more than the envious.
They should read the Good Book.
March 4th, 2011 | 2:22 pm
Dan, I just promised myself that you would pay me a million dollars. By next week.
Will you ditch this promise?
March 4th, 2011 | 2:28 pm
Dan,
If I promise my buddy my neighbor’s money without my neighbor’s consent or knowledge, that is a promise that can and ought to be “ditched”. Likewise with public pensions.
March 4th, 2011 | 4:10 pm
I agree that pensions are promises.
On the other hand, we have been knowingly reckless about promising what isn’t ours to give and/or what we can’t really deliver or afford.
This is a huge problem because private corporations have been declaring bankruptcy for the express purpose of getting out of expensive retiree benefits. So what we have in both the public and the private sector are large numbers of people who thought they could count on much-needed retirement benefits, but who aren’t going to get those benefits.
Call it a promise or not, but if the money’s not there, they’re not going to get those benefits.
What we need to do is IMO twofold. On the one hand, we need to get our finances under control, because if we crash nobody’s going to have a nice retirement, period.
But we also need to do something to ensure that none of these people who thought they’d have a retirement benefits package coming to them are thrown into poverty.
They may have to accept that they aren’t going to have all the money they thought they’d have. But they should have enough to live on, and they should have health coverage.
We can’t survive as a society if we let people do that to each other. Trust is a precondition of the cohesiveness necessary to functioning.
March 4th, 2011 | 4:21 pm
@Dan,
“I do like the idea of that the pension benefits arrangements are in fact ‘promises.’
Can one ditch such promises so easily?”
A few points.
1. The promise made to those now dependent or soon to be dependent must be met. Justice demands that. The promise needs to be changed to younger adults and soon so that they too don’t become dependent on an unsustainable entitlement.
2. It’s even worse than TimC suggests as it is not your neighbor’s money being promised without his consent but it is your and your neighbor’s children and grandchildren’s money. We are and have been for a long time robbing from future generations at the same time we have been squandering our inheritance from our frugal ancestors. Making promises with other people’s money is a bad as breaking promises. If we want to do charity, we need to do it with our own money.
3. That leads me to point 3. I believe it is legitimate to debate how much we want government to provide retirement and health care benefits, but we need to have a mechanism in place to make sure that the generation that makes the promise is the generation that pays for it. A balanced budget amendment (nuanced to permit debt for capital investments (e.g., roads, buildings, etc., with long useful lives), war and severe economic downturns, etc.) would do the trick. If you want a Medicare program and don’t want to cut other spending enough to pay for from existing revenues, you have to raise new revenue NOW to pay for the program.
4. I actually favor further defense cuts. However, our spending for defense as measure in GDP has been cut by more than half in the last 50 years. We certainly can save more, but, frankly, you could eliminate all defense spending (not a prudent thing to do) and we would still have huge deficits. The solution is to either slash entitlements, drastically raise taxes or a combination of the two. I favor the latter, combined with a balanced budget amendment which is implemented slowly over a decade.
March 5th, 2011 | 12:28 am
So… I live in NJ and the governor cut taxes and increased expense borrowing against pensions. This was Kean in the 1980′s. Florio, a Democrat, says we need to pay our dues, raises taxes, and a conservative push results in a one term governor. Then, Christie Whitman plays the Grover Norquist playbook and increases spending and decreases taxes, followed by Democrats.
The voters have brought us to this moment. I was a voter during these decisions and the states’ voters were clear…we’ll pay later for these pensions.
Is this just to merely say “sorry, can’t do that?” These are decades old decisions to defund the pension plans without being upfront to the worker. Is this fair?
March 5th, 2011 | 12:43 pm
To what degree is this bankruptcy a desired outcome for conservatives? Hasn’t this been a specific goal?
And, if so, was it deceitful to have promised these folks their pensions at those rates, hoping to bankrupt the government and then reneging on those promises?
March 5th, 2011 | 7:53 pm
Deceitful? Given that “Social Security is unsustainable” has been reported regularly in the news for decades, I suspect only studied ignorance is possible.
March 6th, 2011 | 12:46 am
Blame whom you want, Dan. Personally, I believe all of us are to blame as we demand more from government every year while simultaneously insisting that our taxes be cut every year. You can’t have it both ways. Either cut spending or raise taxes or do a combination of both (which is what I favor).
What’s the proper role and size of government is a legitimate debate over which reasonable people can disagree, but refusing to pay for the spending demanded and leaving the next generation the debt for our spending is outrageous. They will justly damn our generation for our lack of discipline and for the inheritance of debt which we will leave them.
March 6th, 2011 | 12:13 pm
I am thinking conservatices should be self-congratulatory. This is exactly what was planned and desired by Reagan administration budget director David Stockman and no less a conservatice luminary as Grover Norquist.
As such, I am sure conservatives have in place the great follow-through to help with the poor and needy once the federal government ceases this activith, since a nation can’t both feed the poor and buy Wii’s at the same time.
March 7th, 2011 | 10:32 am
Sorry, Dan, but while I’ll admit that conservatives have some blame here, so do liberals. The former cut revenues without cutting expenses, but liberals raised expenses without raising revenues. Both parties are to blame. And really, the ultimate blame belongs to us all, we all demanded more from government while insisting that our taxes be cut and we got our way by voting against any candidate who dared to tell us the truth. The moderates have been pushed out of both parties, leaving us with the extremes.
“People talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable. Actually, all human problems, excepting morals, come into the gray areas. Things are not all black and white. There have to be compromises. The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower.
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