This morning Joe noticed Jordan’s excellent response to the new manifesto from some evangelicals who desperately want to be (or be seen to be) relevant to the debate about government spending and debt.
Among the document’s many failings, there’s one in particular I want to call more attention to. Jordan notes that the manifesto purports not to “endorse any detailed agenda.” Here is the relevant section:
We do not endorse any detailed agenda. Experts disagree. But it is clear that a bipartisan agreement must include the following basic elements:
- We must cut federal spending. That will include corporate and agricultural subsidies, the defense budget and salary increases of federal employees. But it does not mean cutting effective programs that empower poor Americans or contribute internationally to economic development or the advancement of health. Neither does it mean neglecting appropriate investments in things like education and infrastructure.
- We must control healthcare expenses. This is a most difficult problem and it cannot be ignored. We must find a way simultaneously to respect individual choice, ensure quality health care for everyone, and stop spending an ever-higher percent of our GDP on medical costs. Everyone must be willing to sacrifice.
- We must make Social Security sustainable. We can slowly increase the retirement age, modestly reduce benefits for more wealthy seniors, and increase the amount of income taxed to pay for Social Security.
- We must reform the tax code. We should remove many special exemptions, end many special subsidies, and keep the tax code progressive.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this a little . . . heavy handed? “It is clear that bipartisan reform must include…”
These statements may seem innocuous, but many of them conceal uncritically assimilated moral, economic and political judgments. These may be right or wrong, but they ought to be made explicit and examined. And even if we were to grant that these agenda items are the absolutely right approach, or a reasonably achievable consensus approach, or even both, isn’t it a bad idea to make it morally mandatory to support any complex policy agenda?
I happen to agree, for example, that corporate and agricultural subsidies need to be cut. I even think it’s a matter of desperate urgency that they should be cut. But I don’t think it’s evil to disagree about that.
Will democratic debate be well served if people who admit that they don’t know the difficult details behind the policymaking get up on a high horse and proclaim what the reform agenda must include – with the (barely) implicit suggestion that anyone who disagrees is an enemy of the public good – or of God?
Will this law-law-law moralism undermine or reinforce the dominant view in American culture that evangelicals are arrogant scolds who use the name of God to demand obedience to our will, legalistically piling on burdens that we ourselves won’t touch with our little fingers?
Will this we-appoint-ourselves-to-speak-for-the-church approach weaken or strengthen the divisions within the evangelical family itself?
Will this we’re-Christians-therefore-our-word-is-law attitude help or hurt the ability of American democracy to function in an environment where not only religious but even moral consensus has dissolved?
Will this laying down of non-negotiable statements about what the agenda must include make it easier or harder for the economists and analysts who really do know the details to inform the public discourse?
This is not the path to civilizational relevance. This kind of thing is precisely why so few people in the systems of American cultural power care what evangelicals think.
March 4th, 2011 | 2:13 pm
Note the assumption that such programs are easily recognized. If we eliminated every program intended to do such but didn’t actually do it, we would save a pretty program.
March 4th, 2011 | 4:25 pm
I do believe that there is one evil involved in our current budget situation: saddling our children and grandchildren with huge debts to pay for our lack of discipline and will to deal with own budgets. Leaving our children’s children an inheritance is righteous; leaving them with huge debt is evil.
March 4th, 2011 | 4:31 pm
Sure, that’s true. And there are plenty of other evils in our current policy environment besides just that one.
My point is that the moral certainty we have about those problems should not be uncritically transferred to one or another particular plan for solving them. Government profligacy is evil; disagreeing about how to deal with it is not.
March 4th, 2011 | 4:36 pm
“We must find a way simultaneously to respect individual choice, ensure quality health care for everyone, and stop spending an ever-higher percent of our GDP on medical costs.”
Forget about uncritically assumed judgments — how about uncritically assumed beliefs on the nature of the world.
Why would anyone believe that we can consume more health care and pay less for it? Typically if one wants to consume more, he or she expects to pay more and if one wants to pay less, one must reconcile themselves to either less or an inferior product.
March 4th, 2011 | 5:34 pm
I agree Greg.
March 5th, 2011 | 11:26 am
Cutting or freezing Federal employee pay would have a miniscule effect on our burgeoning debt problem. Federal civilian employees salary, benefits and retirement constitute but 4% of the Federal budget in 2011. Federal civilian employees make up about 2% of the workforce, down from about 4% in 1970. DOD civilian workers were cut by 50% in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. The recent increases in government hiring are meant to hire young people to replace the giant bow-wave of retirees in recent years. Federal civilian employees pay about 30% of their health care premiums, and a good portion of their retirement. Defense spending should be at a level that is required to defend the country, it may need to be increased or decreased to do that job. Defense is an explicit requirement of the Federal government. We must cut entitlements or else we have a good chance of going bankrupt if we don’t. This needs a pragmatic solution. In the 1940s we had about 15 workers for each retiree on Social Security, now the number is less than 3-to-1. This system cannot continue, even with higher payroll taxes. We need to transition to a system that allows workers to have their own individual plan, with a small contingency plan for the truely needy. Looming bankruptcy trumps sentiment.
March 5th, 2011 | 1:52 pm
Greg, seriously, some of what you write in this post is just unwarranted blather. “… evangelicals who desperately want to be (or be seen to be) relevant”?! Here is something from a friend of mine on “relevance” that I would fully endorse: http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/2149/. Instead, the motivation behind drafting the Call, in all its modesty, and in trying to build an unexpected constituency for serious change rather than mere ideological self-congratulation, is a sense of adult responsibility. We need to have a conversation over a drink sometime, and brush away some of the sleepy preconceptions.
March 5th, 2011 | 1:54 pm
Mary: “If we eliminated every program intended to do such but didn’t actually do it.” I agree. By contrast, if we eliminated programs that intended to do such and actually *did* do it, we may be complicit in very real injustice, with very real world consequences for some of our most vulnerable neighbors.
March 5th, 2011 | 1:55 pm
Gregory: “Leaving our children’s children an inheritance is righteous; leaving them with huge debt is evil.” Amen. Which is rather the point — or one of the two points — of the Call.
March 5th, 2011 | 1:57 pm
Greg: “Government profligacy is evil; disagreeing about how to deal with it is not.” Well … yes! But also: refusing to take a serious position on how to deal with it is irresponsible … while taking the necessary time to discern what the appropriate details of a serious position might be, and being open to persuasion with regard to alternatives, is responsible.
March 5th, 2011 | 2:00 pm
Jim: “Typically if one wants to consume more, he or she expects to pay more and if one wants to pay less, one must reconcile themselves to either less or an inferior product.” Well … no. It is one of the marvels of market economies that they harness human ingenuity to overcome this conundrum by achieving fresh efficiencies through better technologies, better organization of human effort, for increased productivity.
March 5th, 2011 | 5:38 pm
All this just so disappoints me. There were some commandments summarized as: Love God, and love neighbor. Notice there was not one to love self, yet that is what so much seems to be about. All the social programs seem to be about how we protect ourselves, or have the government “love” our neighbor for us — we’re too busy.
If anything, I’d like us to have some programs to incentivize actions which show US caring for our neighbors or parents, so the government doesn’t have to (nor will we have to debate to who or how much the “government” should give — I mean after all, it has so much money, what’s the debate anyway?). Cut government social programs, and incentivize us to care for our neighbors, we seem to have forgotten how.
March 5th, 2011 | 8:02 pm
Are you claiming that every country everywhere in the world was engaged in “very real injustice” prior to this century because they didn’t have a Leviathan welfare state?
March 6th, 2011 | 7:08 am
“We do not endorse any detailed agenda. Experts disagree.” The statement should have stopped there. Just imagine how many Evangelical signatures you would get if you left it at that!
March 6th, 2011 | 5:05 pm
Nice to see you defending yourself here, Gideon -and, furthermore defending yourself graciously. That opening paragraph was a prime example of unpleasant and unwarranted snark, Greg, and it turned me off, for one, given that I know Gideon and have no doubt whatsoever that you’ve badly misconstrued his motivation. It’s tedious to have to say this, but the easy assumption that those who disagree with you must be doing so on the basis of character failings places you squarely in the company of those you oppose. And it smacks of insecurity and lack of confidence in your own arguments.
March 9th, 2011 | 8:19 am
I’d like to hear detailed ideas from Tom. It was never intended to be the government’s job to care for our parents, the fatherless and the widows. I volunteer in community ‘social work’–my mission field right here at home–and am frustrated over the misuse and abuse of taxpayer money for programs that ‘empower poor Americans’. An incentive might better empower me to financially help those I feel need it.
March 24th, 2011 | 10:21 am
[...] for evangelicals. For a century we seem to have been oscillating between isolationism and uncritical assimilation of the world’s sin-rigged agendas. We need to figure out another way to go. Natural law is [...]
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