From TCS Daily: What Would Jesus Tax? Excellent article!
"When Jesus tells us he will regard the way we treat the hungry, the homeless, the stranger, the sick, and the prisoner as if we were treating him that way, it likely means he wouldn't think capital gains tax cuts for the wealthy and food stamp cuts for the poor represent the best domestic policy."
— Jim Wallis, Sojourners Magazine
When I read Jim Wallis's attempt to use the gospels to set the capital gains tax rate, I flashed back to a speech that I heard Ted Kennedy give in the 1980s. Attempting to stifle the rising tide of conservative evangelical political engagement, Senator Kennedy said "I suggest that the almighty has not taken a position on the IRA deduction." Great line, I thought.
How times have changed. Keeping the Bible out of public policy was the left's line in the 1980s. Now they've switched to trying to get a 25% marginal tax rate on long-term capital gains out of St. Luke.
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It's not that the Lordship of Christ doesn't extend over economics, or that God is indifferent to financial matters. If I believed that, I couldn't work in those fields. It's that no detailed legal and tax code could ever be sufficient for all times and all places.
A couple of decades ago, a group of Calvinistic thinkers launched a movement called 'theonomy'. It attempted to impose the details of the Deuteronomic law code on modern America. Theonomists did it from the hard right; it seems as though some on the left are trying to do it from the other side. They agree on the premises that we can skip the hard thinking about economics and finance and simply base our policies on Biblical revelation at one moment in time. They disagree only on the era. Theonomists wanted the to impose the law code that was given to a Neolithic tribe in the second millennium BC: Evangelicals on the left look to the communal practices of a small group of dissidents who waited in First Century Palestine for the imminent fall of the dictator, as our economic guide.
The problem with both approaches is that in the end, they provide elaborate theological justifications for their followers to stop reasoning about economics. …
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Critics on the left charge that lowering the tax rate on capital helps the rich, not the poor. This reveals the fundamental presupposition error of their thinking—that the rich and poor have an inherent economic conflict of interest. They do not. The tendency in modern dynamic economies is for the rich and poor both to get richer, but at different rates. Growth-oriented policies are beneficial to both. They have an inherent harmony of interests. This is demonstrated by current economic data. ….
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The simple economic fact in the end seems to be a moral fact as well. There is an 'envy-tether' which, when tightened in an attempt to punish the wealthy, ends up hurting the poor. I live in the Mon Valley area of Pennsylvania, very near ground zero of American deindustrialization, just outside of the former Mill town known as McKeesport. We're so close that we actually have a McKeesport mailing address. In fact, a couple of years ago, our accountant got a little confused and prepared a McKeesport tax return for our business earnings, thinking that we actually lived in the same taxing district. The bill was incredibly high, so high in fact that we would have moved our business to avoid it. They actually have something called a 'business privilege tax' which you have to pay even if you don't make any profit at all.
In the summer time when we walk around the neighborhoods or are driving home from Church, and the windows are open, we can actually smell the stench of urine and liquor on the main drag. A thriving business district now sports liquor stores, second hand shops and places to sell blood plasma. How, I wondered, can things have gotten and stayed so bad? Then I remembered that tax bill, and it all made sense. The envy tether.
Jim Wallis came here to McKeesport last year as part of something with a name like March for Justice. He mentioned the poverty. He did not, to my memory, mention the business privilege tax.
The best sentence in the article is, "This reveals the fundamental presupposition error of their thinking—that the rich and poor have an inherent economic conflict of interest." If some of our religious social justice types could ever escape their Amos and Jeremiah aspirations, maybe we could develop sound public policy that matches good intentions and reduce poverty.
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