Nary an Original Thought

This is embarrasing. From ChristianityToday.com:

Twenty percent of American Christians (19 percent of Protestants; 28 percent of Catholics) give nothing to the church. Among Protestants, 10 percent of evangelicals, 28 percent of mainline folk, 33 percent of fundamentalists, and 40 percent of liberal Protestants give nothing. The vast majority of American Christians give very little—the mean average is 2.9 percent. Only 12 percent of Protestants and 4 percent of Catholics tithe.

A small minority of American Christians give most of the total donated. Twenty percent of all Christians give 86.4 percent of the total. The most generous five percent give well over half (59.6 percent) of all contributions. But higher-income American Christians give less as a percentage of household income than poorer American Christians. In the course of the 20th century, as our personal disposable income quadrupled, the percentage donated by American Christians actually declined.

It’s no wonder we elected a Marxist as president. People look around and see that there are poor, hungry people living among us and something (good) inside of them feels a bit compassionate. “Somebody ought to help them,” we think. But who? Certainly not the Christians, who apparently haven’t read through the end of Matthew too frequently.

What would happen if Christians actually trusted God and gave to his Church according to his standards?

If just the “committed Christians” (defined as those who attend church at least a few times a month or profess to be “strong” or “very strong” Christians) would tithe, there would be an extra 46 billion dollars a year available for kingdom work. To make that figure more concrete, the authors suggest dozens of different things that $46 billion would fund each year: for example, 150,000 new indigenous missionaries; 50,000 additional theological students in the developing world; 5 million more micro loans to poor entrepreneurs; the food, clothing and shelter for all 6,500,000 current refugees in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; all the money for a global campaign to prevent and treat malaria; resources to sponsor 20 million needy children worldwide. Their conclusion is surely right: “Reasonably generous financial giving of ordinary American Christians would generate staggering amounts of money that could literally change the world.”

You can try the “I already help the poor because I pay my taxes” route, but I’m not buying it. We already know that the State can’t help the poor. Yes, they can give them money. Even your money. But that isn’t what most of them need. Jesus didn’t die so that the poor could have affordable housing. If we were truly committed to following Jesus, we would be loving the poor so well that they would kindly tell Obama to “keep the change” when he offered them other people’s money in exchange for the ballot box version of indentured servitude.

The irony here is astounding. If we gave as if we believed in eternal life, *this* life would be radically changed. Can you imagine what 5 million loans to entrepreneurs would do for the world’s poorest economies? What difference would 150,000 new missionaries make? I can barely imagine it.

Instead, we hoard our riches or squander them on the temporal comforts of this world. We don’t believe in eternal life. We don’t believe in eternity. Or, if we do, we certainly don’t act like it. And so, people suffer in the “here and now” while we patiently wait in the drive through at Starbucks, thinking that venti “fair trade” mocha we will soon be consuming absolves us of our greed and indifference.

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ …And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” – Matthew 25:41-43, 46

I’m pretty sure he was serious.

In a five minute conversation, Obama tells this guy that the government is entitled to a larger cut of the profits from his small business so that they can “spread the wealth” around a little. Sure, he “respects” the guy’s hard work over the last fifteen years, but he also mentions that one of the keys to his success is that he’s, “frankly, been lucky”.

Obama wants to make sure that “everyone who is behind you has a chance at success.” You’ve got to understand, “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Well, everybody except for the people who are actually earning (i.e. producing) the wealth. As this astute plumber noted, he’s “being taxed more and more for fulfilling the American dream.” Why buy another truck? Why hire another plumber? In short, why work harder or invest more into this business just so Barry can take it and give it to someone else who hasn’t earned it?

BHO’s plan sounds all nice and fuzzy. Let’s help the little guys on the bottom. I mean, all they need is “a chance at success.” But let’s define some terms here. What’s the best shot at success the poorest among us have? It’s called a job. Do some work. Provide a good or a service. Be compensated for your production. Welcome to America.

Where do jobs come from? Small business owners like our plumber friend from the video. Bobby Eberle explains: “Those at the economic bottom DO NOT create jobs. Those at the economic bottom get hired for jobs. When the economy is robust, more jobs are created, thus more people get hired. There’s not a business existing in America today that doesn’t want to ‘do more business.’ In order to grow, more workers must be hired, and more capital purchased.” It’s these small businesses that Obama thinks should be paying more in taxes. This can only mean less money for paying employees, which translates into lower production, which leads to lower profits, and on and on and on.

I won’t even mention the LARGE businesses and, *gasp*, the evil corporations that give lots of people jobs. When you hear politicians talking about BIG BUSINESS building their empires on the backs of the little guy, this is what they are talking about: giving people jobs and paying them for their work. Yes, my employer is building its empire on my back. All I get out of the deal is a paycheck twice a month. Sheesh.

Eberle also does a little quick math in his article showing just how this wealth redistribution strategy affects the economy. The long and short of it is that when the government raises taxes, it takes money out of the economy (duh!), while leaving it in the hands of the guy who actually earned it does nothing but help the economy:

The person could save it, thus giving banks more leverage to do business. The person could invest it, thus helping new or established companies grow. The person could donate some to charity, thus helping organizations at the grassroots level do things more efficiently than the federal government could ever hope to. Or, God forbid, the person could simply go out and buy stuff. Two hundred thousand dollars of stuff is a lot of stuff! Imagine all that cash injected into society. Talk about a stimulus package. More goods being purchased, whether it is cars, clothes, furniture, food, or whatever, means that more jobs will be needed to produce those goods. It’s as simple as that.

Instead, Obama would prefer to take money from the people who are doing the work, providing the products and services that propel our economy, in order to give it to people who not producing anything. Like many socialist policies (and make no mistake, that’s exactly what Obama is espousing here), this all sounds really *nice* and just and merciful. That, I think, is what has attracted so many Christians to this guy. The problem is that it simply won’t work, and will actually make things worse. Let’s give small business incentives to hire more people, not fewer. Let’s give Americans a reason to work harder, not an excuse to sit at home waiting for money taken from someone who earned it.

Last week, Joe Biden lectured the wealthy among us, telling them that “It’s time to be patriotic … time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut.”

Apparently, a system where “the top 1 percent of tax returns paid about the same amount of federal individual income taxes as the bottom 95 percent of tax returns” (source) isn’t fair enough to the “little guy”. Lest you think that these proportions are simply a product of the “super rich” making gobs of money while the little guy scrapes by, consider that, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis, this top 1% “earned approximately 21.2 percent of the nation’s income (as defined by AGI), yet paid 39.4 percent of all federal income taxes.” Yes, the top 1% pays almost 40% of the total tax bill. To be in this privileged class you would have had to bring home more than $364,000 in 2005. That’s a lot of money, but not exactly what I would call being “super-rich”.

Let’s leave the upper crust alone for a moment and look a little further down the scale. What about the top quarter? They carried 86% of the nation’s tax burden. The top 50% accounted for 96.93% of the bill, leaving the bottom half with a 3.07% share. The cutoff for the top half was a whopping $30,881. Yeah, it’s high time we stick it to those greedy so-and-sos who are making $30k a year. How do they sleep at night?

But Biden stands by his comments and, according to the Wall Street Journal, has now “upped the ante, thundering that he also has Jesus in his corner. ‘Catholic social doctrine as I was taught it is, you take care of people who need the help the most.’” And anyone who knows the scriptures will tell you that the way to take care of “people who need the help the most” is to raise taxes so we can, according to Holy Joe, “take money and put it back in the pocket of middle-class people.”

What? That’s not in the Bible? It says that the church, not the state, is supposed to care for the poor? Oh.

Aside from being entirely unbiblical, Biden’s formula has a few other problems. From the WSJ:

Regarding taxes and social justice, the issue is whether the high taxes that Mr. Biden favors promote economic growth and prosperity, not least for America’s poorest citizens. There he doesn’t have evidence on his side. Studies from around the world, including the annual Wall Street Journal-Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom, conclusively indicate that countries that keep taxes low tend to have the least amount of poverty. (emphasis mine)

But, as I’ve said before, the heart of the issue is that Holy Joe really, really, really cares about the poor among us. We know it’s true, because he says he does. So, it shouldn’t matter if his plan of increasing taxes will actually hurt the poor instead of helping them. It’s the thought that counts.

And, while we’re counting, the WSJ article mentions that “Mr. Biden and his wife recently released their tax returns, and they reported an average of $380, or 0.2% of their income, in annual charitable contributions over a 10-year period.” While that won’t land him in the top 1% of any list, at least he and his running mate are on the same page on this one.

Just remember. They’re from the party that cares about the little guy.

Yogi over at Red Planet Cartoons put into pictures what I said yesterday:

With the way The Media is, we won’t see any real accountability on this one. It’s W’s fault, stupid. No reason to ask whether the policies of Big Government, aimed at helping the poor to buy houses in this case, actually worked. They *tried* to help, and that’s the important thing. So what if Big Government now has to decide on whether a trillion dollar rescue strategy will save us all? These guys *care* about the poor, and they’re happy to take your money from you to prove it.

Keep this in mind if, God forbid, Barry wins the election and then tries to tell you he can solve the nation’s health care problems by putting Big Government in charge. If lenders were willing to make reckless decisions when they knew Big Brother had their back, what makes you think doctors and hospitals would be any different? Under that arrangement, “sub-prime” will likely mean ending up on the wrong side of the grass, if you catch my drift.

Doug Groothuis (i.e. The Constructive Curmudgeon) nicely summarizes a lot of what I’ve been thinking regarding Obama vs. McCain on the issue of poverty:

Some Christians are deceived into thinking that political liberalism is better for the poor than conservatism. So, since the Bible tells us to care about the poor and the oppressed, we should support the Democrats. Not so fast. Saying you care about them and actually providing meaningful assistance are two different things. The liberal mindset is based on centralized, tax-funded programs. This slows down the economy and encourages dependence. This was the lesson of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Poverty won. Read Winning the Race by John McWhorter (an African American) on that.

The conservative approach is to limit the power of the state, to cut taxes, and to give people more freedom to develop their skills and work on and give to the causes that concern them. It is not “Let them eat cake,” but is based on a different philosophy of economics.

Moreover it is a leftwing fable that conservatives don’t care about the poor. Studies show that conservatives give four times more to charity than do liberals. This is because liberals think the state should do this work, not individuals and private associations. (See Arthur C. Brooks, Who Really Cares? and The Acton Institute.)

McCain has articulated his concerns to help those out of work get reeducated and those without adequate health coverage to have more options. However, he does not want to socialize medicine and create a huge bureaucracy.

It is not an option for Christians to neglect the poor and marginalized. However, it is far from obvious that the Democrats have the best plan to help these people. They would certainly not help the unborn, the poorest and most marginalized of all.

As I’ve said before, if poverty is your “one issue”, you need to pick the candidate who will actually help the poor, not the one who just talks about it all the time.

It’s obvious (even to Obamaniacs who happen to be Christians) that Barrack cares very little for the littlest “least of these”, considering his impeccable pro-choice record. But, they tell us, Obama’s their guy because he really, really, really cares about the poor. I mean, really.

And that John McCain guy? Ha! If he’s president, we’ll probably end up drilling through homeless shelters so we can find more precious oil. Right?

Not when you look at the facts (another problem for many Obamaniacs, I know.). If you haven’t yet, you need to compare tax returns from the two candidates (Obama, McCain):”(By the way, that bastard Dick Cheney gave 77% of his income to charity in 2005. Tell that to some people and they’ll make sure you understand that it was probably from corrupt dealings with Halliburton).”:.

In all but the two most recent years reported, the Obamas gave around 1% or less of their income to charity. Their contributions increased in 2005 and 2006 to 4.7% and 6.1% respectively, but still are far short of those of McCain who gave 28.6% in 2006 and 27.3% in 2007.

This is, of course, consistent with the general trend of conservatives out-giving liberals. According to Arthur C. Brooks’ book Who Really Cares (cited by George Will),

• Although liberal families’ incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).
• Conservatives also donate more time and give more blood.
• Residents of the states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 gave smaller percentages of their incomes to charity than did residents of states that voted for George W. Bush.
• Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average.
• In the 10 reddest states, in which Bush got more than 60 percent majorities, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5. Residents of the bluest states, which gave Bush less than 40 percent, donated just 1.9 percent.

Or, to paraphrase in Pyromaniacs style,

If your idea of charity is raising taxes so the government can care for the poor so you don’t have to, then Barry’s your guy. It’s just that I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind in Matthew 25.

There’s quite a furor over on Gary’s recently resurrected blog about whether or not a “serious Christian” can, in good conscience, vote for Barack Obama. I’ve asked this question myself, and even if I hadn’t you could probably guess how I would answer it. That’s not ground I wish to cover again today.

What is interesting to me is the way that this debate seems to get framed among “serious Christians” who are rightly concerned with having a consistent ethic of human life, as it is often called. God certainly cares about the unborn child, but doesn’t he also care about the poor, the destitute, the oppressed? Well, folks, you can’t read through Matthew 25 without concluding that yes, God most certainly cares about the oppressed, and he will judge his people for how they care for them. Let’s all agree that a passage that includes a “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire…” statement should be central to how we understand God’s universe. I, personally, am ashamed of how little regard I have for the well being of the poor in my own city, not to mention those around the world. We, as Christians in the U.S., need to do a better job of this. No argument there.

Here’s where I start to disagree. Can anybody really argue that the issues of abortion and neglecting the poor are on the same plane? We should take Jesus seriously when he says that when he was hungry, we gave him nothing to eat because “as you did not do it to one of the least of these…”. That much is clear. But, is it much of a leap to also assume that when a doctor jams a pair of surgical scissors into the head of a child, there are some “least of these” issues involved as well? I’ve heard the argument for choosing the lesser of two evils, but it’s hard for me to think of a list on which government-sponsored infanticide is not quite as bad as X. Jesus cares about hungry folks, but he also cares quite a bit about babies.

Secondly, this argument assumes that a vote for a Democratic president is a vote for fighting poverty. I don’t think I’m quite ready to concede this point. We’ve had decades of the government-sponsored “War on Poverty,” and things don’t seem to be turning around. To use familiar terms, we’re in a quagmire with no exit strategy. We have thrown billions upon billions of dollars at social programs of all shapes and sizes, and for what? Have they worked? No. Not even close. So, is the answer that we need *more* of these types of programs? Probably not.

So, before I’m going to buy the “McCain cares about babies, but Obama cares about the poor” argument, I’m going to need some proof that Barack really is the best choice if we want a leader who cares “for the least of these” as we ought to. At this point, I’m not seeing it.

It’s one thing to say you care about helping people, another thing to actually do something to help people, and yet another thing to do something that actually does help people in the long run. We should all rebuke the man who says he cares for the poor, but never offers them a loaf of bread. He’s a hypocrite. But, don’t forget that we should also rebuke the man who says he cares for the poor and then invents programs that will guarantee that they will always be so. This man is also a hypocrite, perhaps even more so because he likes to remind us all of how cold and calloused we are for not jumping on his programs-for-the-poor bandwagon.

Borrowing heavily from Doug Wilson’s thoughts, we need to not only care about the needs of the poor, but we need to care enough to offer solutions that will actually help them. It’s one thing to have good intentions, but what if the measures we take to “help the poor” actually make things worse? In such a case, everyone would be better off if we had done nothing at all. To borrow again from Wilson, what if our shipments of “relief” to an impoverished community in Africa are diverted to the local dictator and his armies, keeping him in power and assuring that the people under his tyranny will continue to starve? Are these people better off because of the so-called aid we’ve provided? What if sending out government checks to those “less fortunate than us” encourages them to not get married, not find a job, and to have more illegitimate children? Are they better off because of it? Judging by the progress in the War on Poverty (which, I should mention, has gone on much longer, and at much greater cost, than the war in Iraq), I would say that we’re teaching people to be less responsible, and more dependent on their governmental ATM, which will most certainly run out of cash at some point.

While this shouldn’t be misconstrued as an excuse to not do anything, it should serve as a warning that we should evaluate the potential consequences (intentional and otherwise) of any governmental (or social, for that matter) intervention before we launch the latest and greatest new program to solve everyone’s problems for them. I say we employ this novel approach before the proposed legislation bailing out mortgage lenders and “distressed” home owners gets through Congress. The legislation is “meant to save hundreds of thousands of troubled homeowners from foreclosure. The legislation would create a government-backed mortgage insurance program with the power to refinance as much as $300 billion worth of failing home loans.”

Hey, that sounds great. I mean, think of the CHILDREN! Think of their PETS! Don’t we have a responsibility–nay, a duty–to protect people from the consequences of their decisions? (more…)

The Hagel Hound puts a new spin on the term “War on Poverty.”

From the article:

California’s gasoline prices are 10-15% higher than the rest of the country. Why? It costs more to produce the highly regulated gasoline in California, and there is less flexibility to obtaining supply. In Nebraska today, the ordinary person fills up their tank for $3.45 a gallon. Next time you do that consider that a poor mom trying to get across Los Angeles every day to clean a motel to put food on her table, is paying $4.25 a gallon for her gas that day. And on her way home, by the way, she will pay about 20% more for each bite of food she buys for those kids, because the truckers that haul the food to market pay that 20% premium on fuel costs as well.

Plain and simple: press the environmentalist agenda, and poor kids eat less.

…

In the end, the environmentalist movement implies a class war. Environmentalism at once resists job development and simultaneously encourages increase in the prices of basic human needs: food, heat, transportation. And the poorest among us are hit the hardest. Environmentalists claim to protect the most vulnerable species in nature. When are they going to account for their own attacks on the most vulnerable among us?

Go read the rest of the article, and then come back and tell me where he’s wrong. (And please give me something better than “it’s the evil corporations, especially Big Oil, that are keeping the poor down.”)

Larry Kudlow reports that the federal government has spent $127 billion on the recovery effort from Hurricane Katrina in the two years since the natural disaster. That nearly matches the state’s $141 billion GDP, and, to quote Kudlow, it “ain’t even fixed!”

From the article:

You might be asking, Where in the hell did all this money go? Well, the White House fact sheet says $24 billion has been used to build houses and schools, repair damaged infrastructure, and provide victims with a place to live. But isn’t everyone complaining about the lack of housing?

Perhaps all this money should’ve been directly deposited in the bank accounts of the 300,000 people living in New Orleans. All divvied up, that $127 billion would come to $425,000 per person! After thanking Uncle Sam for their sudden windfall, residents could head to Southern California and buy homes that are now on sale thanks to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and bid up the sagging house prices in the state.

Four hundred and twenty five thousand dollars per person?!? Good night, nurse. I’m liable to think that kind of money could take a guy from one of John Edwards’ two Americas right into the other one.

So, considering that blindly throwing money into New Orleans hasn’t been all that effective, what should have been done instead?

Right from the start, New Orleans should have been turned into a tax-free enterprise zone. No income taxes, no corporate taxes, no capital-gains taxes. The only tax would have been a sales tax paid on direct transactions. A tax-free New Orleans would have attracted tens of billions of dollars in business and real-estate investment. This in turn would have helped rebuild the cities, schools, and hospitals. Private-sector entrepreneurs would have succeeded where big-government bureaucrats and regulators have so abysmally failed.

Instead, we have a $127 billion example of how liberal government and “compassionate conservatism” simply don’t work. The best way to take care of people is to help them take care of themselves.

By the way, I’m still wondering where the ATM cards are for the Nebraskans who suffered through last New Year’s ice storm.