The mediocre teacher tells.
The good teacher explains.
The superior teacher demonstrates.
The great teacher inspires.
William Arthur Ward
Unsigned Editorial:
"On issue after issue, president out of step with Catholic teaching":
Partial Thumbs DOWN!
As a Catholic libertarian-conservative, I face the same types of problems a fellow Catholic commentator/journalist, Bill O'Reilly, goes through trying to tactfully balance the goals of well-intentioned Church's ideals of social justice against its means. Quite often Catholic progressives in particular buy into political hype versus substance. In my case, I started my academic career at a Catholic college with the intent of eventually becoming a priest, probably with a teaching order like the Jesuits. I tend to be frugal; I've never bought an expensive car and wouldn't even spend my limits in client-allowed expenses. I still remember the CEO's assistant telling me I was approved (without asking) for a $199/night hotel in Santa Clara, but I commuted from an Extended Stay in Morgan Hill at $43/night (and the commutes were over 30 minutes each direction on 101). The point is, I understand the social teachings and initially started out as a pro-life liberal Democrat, and I came to the conclusion that the social ideals were best met by a vibrant economy incompatible with unsustainable progressive Democratic programs and policies.
I think the core point is aptly made ironically by Charles Dickens in 'A Christmas Carol'. Scrooge responds to appeals for donations by saying, in effect, I've done my part; I've paid my taxes; the government serves the needy. In a certain sense, the Church aids and abets the unappreciative secular government by providing schools, hospitals, and other social services, often at far lower costs but much higher quality outcomes than the government itself. If the government decides to spend money on behalf of citizens using these Church-subsidized and operated programs and facilities, it wants to dictate terms in such a way that contradicts the Church's own teachings.
The editorial at one point raises the issue that maybe the secular government, by attempting to extort Church institutions, would rather do without the existence of educational and health care provider diversity and competition; why should Catholic NJ Governor Chris Christie support his parish, pay for his children's Catholic K-12 education, and pay tens of thousands in property taxes supporting public schools? If you thought public schools and hospitals are hurting now, just imagine if the Church decided it wouldn't effectively subsidize these policies.
Perhaps my Google search on this purported editorial column or my site search at the Tennessee Register, a regularly published Catholic Nashville diocesan paper was inadequate. The latest (September 2) edition is available via a link at the diocesan home page. I saw no archive links to past TR issues, editorial references or comments to the article in the current issue, any relevant link via a diocesan website search, or direct/cached Google references to the alleged original column. The Catholic News Service (above link) did republish the column within a week of publication, and I have also seen the column republished (unsurprisingly) at a San Francisco area Catholic website. (Go figure; Nancy Pelosi is a San Francisco Roman Catholic.) I become aware of the column because a priest friend of my uncle (a retired priest) sent copies to my relatives and others.
Looks may be deceiving: if anyone thinks I'm disagreeing with the column title itself, he or she is mistaken. Most of the editorial deals with the unsatisfactory treatment of conscience protections regarding Catholic hospitals, schools and social service agencies; the idea that taxpayers or church institutions would be forced, directly or indirectly, to provide or fund elective abortion services is morally reprehensible; I also concur with the well-founded criticisms of the Obama Administration on its failure to support the traditional definition of marriage, its support of embryonic stem cell research, and immigration policy. (I have a more sophisticated point of view of immigration than the typical progressive and conservative talking points, based on a fundamental principle of economic liberty; I also know that union interests (which, of course, progressive Catholics also support) were responsible for shutting down a more orderly temporary worker program.)
So what set me off about this editorial?
"The president is so out of step with Catholic teaching. On ...protecting the poor and vulnerable from carrying the burden of the recently enacted budget cuts,..., the president has done little to nothing...In the recent budget and debt-ceiling debates, the bishops urged the president and Congress not to pass budget cuts that would hit hardest the poorest and most vulnerable. But, eager to make a deal, the president and the majority of Congress ignored the bishops' pleas and passed a plan that will lead to cuts in programs that help those who need it most."Whoever wrote this derivative propaganda doesn't have the slightest regard for the truth. So much for that eighth (or ninth, depending on one's faith) commandment:
It's important to note that each Commandment is simply a summary of a whole category of actions. Don't be legalistic, searching for a way around them because their wording doesn't fit you perfectly! For example, "bearing false witness against your neighbor" covers any kind of falsehood: perjury, lying, slander, detraction, rash judgment, etc.One of the main issues I have with Catholic prelates in particular is that they aren't much more knowledgeable about business and economics matters than President Obama himself (i.e., they don't know much about it other than somehow they obtain church or campaign offerings/donations from nefarious individuals). Of course, there is notorious Catholic guilt, and then you have secular Warren Buffett-style guilt, i.e., he feels so guilty about not writing an optional check to the US Treasury (a veritable validation of the worthiness of Congressional spending versus his own philanthropic efforts) each year that he's willing to volunteer the obligatory confiscation of other rich people's assets. There's a different commandment that covers that (it's called the Tenth Commandment; of course, progressives also have a blind spot when it comes to the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution...)
Let us "educate" the readers: the government fiscal year (FY2011) ends in September (i.e., the end of this month). When we were talking about substantial increases to the national debt, we weren't simply talking about the last 2 months of the current fiscal year, but the next fiscal year as well (FY2012). There are also two types of spending: discretionary and mandatory. Roughly a third of the budget is discretionary, meaning that the Congress specifically appropriates funds (increase or decrease); mandatory spending involves what I call rule-based (and mostly entitlement) spending, based on eligibility criteria, e.g., social security, Medicare/Medicaid, and food stamps. The Congress mostly controls mandatory spending by tweaking program eligibility.
Democrat policymaking over the last 5 years in particular have been focused on expanding program eligibility well into the middle class, e.g., SCHIP, Medicaid (ObamaCare), etc. It's obvious why they are doing this: once one engages in morally hazardous policies of the government bailing citizens out of their own financial responsibilities, citizens are vested in the ongoing sustainability of said programs. That's why FDR structured social security in a politically savvy way: by vesting higher-income Americans into contributing 6% up to $100K or so of their earnings (matched by employers), they believe that they are entitled to depend on their fair share as part of their retirement income. This was supposed to be in a lockbox which the Congress, of course, immediately uses, net of disbursements, as a captive loan to finance the budget deficit. Of course, we are already running in the red, because of the economic malaise, we are currently running social security at a deficit and having to draw down on the government IOU's. Progressives are continuing to insist this is not a Ponzi scheme. The undeniable fact is that current and past recipients have received more back than they contributed to the program, and this is not sustainable:, particularly with the largest retirement generation in US history starting to retire: ask Bernie Madoff. I strongly suggest that Catholic bishops look at the ethics of the current generation's spending on the backs of future generations. Will social security recipients get no checks in 2036? No. As long as the government deducts 12% of employee compensation towards social security, a check is guaranteed--but the checks will be a lot smaller without any government IOU's in the trust fund to make up the difference. And then that generation not only will be still paying off a $15T-plus national debt and hundreds of billions of dollars in interest each year (not being used to feed or house the poor) but paying more taxes to pay off senior citizens whom didn't contribute enough because, of course, Democratic politicians today insist there isn't a real problem. Democratic politicians are very good at punting bills to the next generation when they'll no longer be in Congress having to pass hugely unpopular tax hikes and cut program eligibility.
Yeah, Catholic bishops: you are really exercising "moral leadership" here: we have a government where the bottom half of workers not only don't pay a cent for the costs of the federal government and aren't even paying the true costs of their retirement benefits, but of course President Obama thinks it's only right that the group of higher-income workers that are already paying historically high percentages and aggregate amounts of individual tax revenues should be forced to pay even more towards covering the 24% increase in discretionary spending added over the last Democratic-controlled Congress. Yup, that sounds like Catholic bishops are promoting virtuous autonomy and moral maturity instead of undue dependence on the government. Why bother learning to fish when the government will subsidize your purchase of filleted fish caught and processed by private-sector companies and sold at the supermarket? Maybe you would take a job at the fish processing plant yourself if you didn't clear more from unemployment compensation.
But let's go even more here into the editorial's allegation about "cuts" in social spending affecting the truly needy. Where were the Catholic bishops when Bush argued that a large number of poor eligible for SCHIP but not participating should be serviced first while Democrats were pushing for household eligibility with incomes over $50K? Even if you have a cutback in the program--which isn't even on the drawing board--who is saying you are going to target recipients under the poverty guidelines? Maybe you cut the budget by laying off $100K-plus a year bureaucrats, cut certain gold-plated benefits or increase co-pays, outsource the operation to the more efficient private sector, or tighten eligibility criteria, say, to $30K. But, of course, money is fungible. The budget cut doesn't have to come out of that program; maybe the federal government can cut those all-important shrimp-on-a-treadmill university research grants or stop paying consumers thousands of dollars to buy a Chevy Volt versus a compact car.
The fact is that the debt ceiling increase legislation only calls for a $6B cut in discretionary spending for FY2012 versus FY2011: this is from a budget in excess of $1T. People, we are talking about a rounding error--and the cut spans across two broad categories: security-related and other domestic spending categories. Let me quote other experts, starting with Peter Ferrera:
The Boehner-Reid plan, at best, will result in a further increase in the national debt of $7 trillion. It cuts only $6 billion for next year out of a budget that will spend literally over 600 times that, so it’s no wonder it has been widely criticized by fiscal conservatives.These budget debates make no sense because of ‘baseline budgeting,’ which builds in trillions in automatic increases in the budget, and then calls any reduction in that runaway increase a draconian cut in spending."Let me restate the baseline budgeting point for the fiscally impaired: you can have a circumstance where the agency budget goes up automatically, say, $8B, the GOP whacks out $2B in operational inefficiencies in the agency, which leaves the agency with a real $6B increase, the Democrats claim that the savings are coming due to the nefarious GOP taking food out of the mouths of starving orphans, and Catholic weeklies will screech, without doing even minimal due diligence, in righteous indignation and a knee-jerk fashion over the sins against social justice.
But now let's look at these nefarious cuts. According to the editorial board, we can just imagine Speaker John Boehner, a Catholic, negotiating with Obama over what poverty programs to cut that $6B from. In fact, they were talking at a very global, not detailed level over those few hours they had discussions, and they discussed the targets of defense/security versus domestic expenditure spendings and various trigger mechanisms in essence spreading across-the-board cuts if cost savings couldn't be negotiated:
For FY 2012, the bill would cap discretionary spending at $1.043 trillion, $6 billion less than FY 2011 but $24 billion more than the cap in the House-passed budget earlier this year that formed the basis for House earlier action on agricultural and other appropriations bills. The $1.043 trillion is divided into a $684 billion cap on security spending and a $359 billion cap on non-security spending.Steve Stanek (from the earlier-cited Heartland quote) specifically makes the relevant point about global-level versus specific funding cuts:
We’re supposed to believe in some $2 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years when no spending cuts are specifically identified, and when any future Congress could thumb its nose at this agreement and spend whatever it likes?And really, the Register's editorial board would have you believe that a GOP President and GOP-controlled Congress that couldn't pass a partial self-directed social security account, one of 3 recommendations for social security reform from a bipartisan panel, demagogued by Democrats and special interest groups like AARP as "gambling" versus investing (as if keeping retirement savings in the hands of the Congress which has racked up $10T in publicly-held national debt instruments with tens of trillions in unfunded entitlement liabilities isn't gambling with your retirement!), are going to run for reelection based on balancing the budget on the backs of blind schoolchildren and handicapped grandmothers! We can't even get the Democrats to agree to an across-the-board 8% cut or cuts similar in nature to local and state governments are going through to balance their budgets!
Political Humor
"President Obama’s uncle was arrested for a DUI. His alcohol level was actually higher than Obama’s approval rating." - David Letterman
[It's another thing Obama and his uncle have in common: seeing pink elephants...]
"The White House agreed to move President Obama’s speech from Wednesday to Thursday because the Republicans have a debate scheduled for Wednesday. So the debate that no one is going to watch holds more weight than the speech no one is going to believe." - Jay Leno
[President Obama didn't really mind. It's still the summer rerun season; Obama's new megalomaniac policy ideas, a horror genre series, will debut on Fox News Channel along with the rest of the new fall TV lineup. The President's speech, tentatively entitled "The Worst of Former Clinton Administration Economic Advisor Bloopers", will be a recycled hash of ideas that didn't work the first time: payroll tax cuts (which add to Ponzi scheme unfunded entitlement liabilities), infrastructure spending (e.g., on trains guaranteed to lose money from day one), unemployment compensation spending (where people make more money NOT working), more picking winners (e.g., small businesses: forget all about those new mandates we've passed the last 3 years and planned tax hikes for successful entrepreneurs) and losers, and other Keynesian brainstorming ideas from former Enron advisor Paul Krugman. I do think Obama's rumored warbling of an ode to Fed Reserve chief Ben Bernanke, "I'm Dreaming of QE 3", is a little over the top.]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Air Supply, "The One That I Love"
