One of the biggest and oldest divides in the United States is between those who want government to act in favor of the poor and those who do not want it to intervene for them. It has a great deal to do with the very purpose of government and the taxes it takes to administer anti-poverty programs. On each side of the divide are shades of grey. Little here is simply black and white.
Some want the absolute minimum of government programs because they fear inducing dependency and laziness. They also fear burdensome taxes they would pay for other people. Obviously these people do not need such programs for themselves. Their personal work and effort, and a degree of good fortune, skin color and inheritance, have seen to their being affluent enough to make it on their own.
Others, whether wealthy or not, believe that government has a responsibility “to promote the general welfare” of its citizens by maintaining a floor beneath all, especially the disadvantaged, who pay little or no taxes. They want an activist government with a graduated tax system, with the better-off paying more and the not-so-well-off paying less. America has this in place, but with the constant dialectic of those with more pushing for lower taxes and those with less pushing for tax-supported programs like Medicaid or WIC (Women, Infants and Children).
While the American tax system is graduated, it taxes people proportionately less than do most other industrialized countries. This means that Canada and western Europe take for granted that government must provide college education, comprehensive health care, old-age pensions and many similar programs not only to their own citizens, but even to visitors. We Americans often think we are heavily burdened, yet we seem to prefer that every year since the ‘50s, two-thirds of discretionary federal outlays go to arms, something for which our comfortably living foreign neighbors see little need.
Somewhat familiar with the Church’s social doctrine, I can tell you that the Church does not come down exactly in the middle of this divide. It not only does the non-controversial thing of urging members to practice charity and to donate to worthy agencies like the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, it also preaches the moral duty of democracies to provide in justice a variety of services that individual citizens could not provide on their own, like a military defense or a police force, and like a welfare system’s safety net for less fortunate people. Charity is not controversial; justice is.
These latter include the three-quarters of a million blind Americans, some of whom are gainfully employed but whose earning power is severely limited by their handicap. Would the first category above want to throw them out into the street? Only the most severe would. Would the second want to award them a Lexus complete with chauffeur? Only the most spendthrift would.
A Laurel Springs correspondent reacting to my Oct. 1 “Liberalism and its notable accomplishments” takes me to task for advocating anti-poverty programs because they are “wasteful, frivolous and ineffective.” Some may have been, like school busing to achieve racial equality, well intended as that was. Let’s name and eliminate them. But let us not call them all “pork.” Such spending by legislators is fine when it brings government money into our congressional district but waste when this goes to the other several hundred districts. Unblinkingly we demand our representatives to get us pork but to starve all other Americans. Alaskan bridges to nowhere are justly exposed as pork, not programs for the blind.
How nice that well-off people worry about the poor getting lazy. Do they worry as well that the more endowed are cheating the poor by civic selfishness? Did Jesus’s parable chide Lazarus for lazing at the gates of the rich man? He ends up in the bosom of Abraham while the rich man is doomed to hell only for neglecting Lazarus. Was Jesus a Marxist for this?
“It is not the job of government,” says my correspondent, “to dictate who gives and how much via taxation or any other means.” Sorry, but our social doctrine says the opposite. Further, she charges that the downfall of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government subsidizers of home buyers, is due to Barney Frank’s extending it over-generously to the poor. This was in good times, when there was no Great Recession spawned by Wall Street’s derivatives pirates, whom she oddly fails to notice.
at the bottom and then tap “Add to Home Screen”