A group of religious leftists met at the White House with President Obama yesterday, seeking to add their two cents to the debate over how to deal with the federal government’s budget deficit and the deadline to raise the debt limit. Jim Wallis has this to say about it at Sojourners:
Today is another intense day of politics at the White House. The debt default deadline is fast approaching. The stakes for the nation are high as politicians can’t agree on how to resolve the ideological impasse on how to reduce the deficit before the nation defaults on its financial obligations.
If this paragraph is any indication, the group was in trouble before they got there, since Wallis, at least, doesn’t seem to understand the difference between the deficit and the debt, or how default works. August 2 is not a deadline after which the nation defaults; it is simply the date after which further borrowing instruments cannot be issued. Tax revenues provide more than enough money to avoid default. That doesn’t mean hard choices won’t have to be made.
We urged the president to protect programs for low-income people in the ongoing budget and deficit debate, and in any deal concerning the debt ceiling and default crisis. In an engaging back and forth conversation, the president and faith leaders discussed how we can get our fiscal house in order without doing so on the backs of those who are most vulnerable. We shared the concern that the deficit must be cut in a way that protects the safety net, struggling families and children, and maintains our national investments in the future of all of us.
We made our simple principle clear: The most vulnerable should be protected in any budget or deficit agreements — as a non-partisan commitment. The most vulnerable need a special exemption from all spending cuts as they usually have had in previous times of deficit reduction. We told President Obama that this is what God requires of all of us.
The notion that Wallis & Co. have received some kind of special revelation regarding God’s opinions about the federal budget is touching, but irrelevant (unless, of course, they are trying to IMPOSE A THEOCRACY!!!). Here’s the real point: I agree that the poor should be protected in the budgeting process. The problem is how that is accomplished.
With the kind of naive faith in government that comes so naturally to religious liberals, Wallis and his friends assume that “protecting the poor” is synonymous with “keeping federal programs funding at the same level.” The idea that programs might be managed more efficiently, or that less overhead might make them work better, or that eligibility standards might need some tightening to include only the genuinely poor, or that the states might do a better job of doing what the feds have been doing–none of that so much as crosses the mind of Wallis & Co. To them, reducing the amount of spending on “SNAP, WIC, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Head Start, Pell Grants, and Community Development Block Grants,” among others, is simply inconceivable.
Let’s take three of these programs to see what’s wrong with this thinking:
1) Social Security: this is not an anti-poverty program. A significant portion of its benefits go to middle class and upper class retirees.
2) Pell Grants: leaving aside the question of whether the federal government should be subsidizing college expenses (Michael Barone makes a good case today that such subsidization has dramatically distorted the market for higher education in a way that educators will soon rue), it is also the case that a good deal of the money spent on Pell Grants goes to the middle class rather than the poor.
3) Head Start: according to the most comprehensive report on Head Start effectiveness (the Head Start Impact Study for the Department of Health and Human Services), the program has little discernable impact on children’s ability to learn, with few statistically significant results found as early as first grade, and pretty much none thereafter. In other words, Head Start either doesn’t do what it was designed to do, or does it poorly enough to warrant raising questions about whether the program should continue. Yet for Wallis & Co., as for the political left, Head Start is a sacred cow, the effectiveness and funding of which must never, ever be questioned.
Points like these can be raised about many if not all federal “safety net” programs, which when entitlements are included, cost trillions of dollars every year. Yet to hear the religious left tell it, pretty much the only thing that the feds can cut without “hurting the poor” is defense. Cuts are almost certainly possible there as well, but putting out a list of untouchable programs such as Wallis & Co. have is to demonstrate that they are completely unserious about dealing with the crisis that out-of-control federal spending has brought about (a crisis which is certain to hurt poor people the most if it is not dealt with before it brings down the American economy).
We agreed that we need both fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice. Those already hurting should not be made to hurt more, and those doing well should do their part in sacrificing.
This is not very subtle code for “repeal the Bush tax cuts for the rich.” Doing that would, according to the White House, raise $700 billion over ten years. That’s less than half the current deficit for one year. Another way to look at it is that it would raise about $70 billion a year, which is less than 5% of the total deficit projected by the White House in almost any of the next ten years. So fine, go ahead and raise tax rates for the rich back to those of the Clinton era. Once that’s been done, and once defense cut have been made, what do Wallis & Co. propose doing about the other $1.4 trillion of debt that we are projected to add to the national debt this year and for years to come?
Bupkis. (That means “nothing of value” for you non-Yiddish speakers.)
The concern that Wallis and his colleagues have for the poor is commendable. Unfortunately, they know as much about economics and federal budgeting as they do about the Scheveningen Variation of the Sicilian Defense. Given the unlikelihood that they have actually been given divine guidance, their advice to the federal government should be ignored.
July 21, 2011 at 6:19 pm
“”The notion that Wallis & Co. have received some kind of special revelation regarding God’s opinions about the federal budget is touching”"
It is my contention that Wallis and the other leftist faith leaders were fed talking points at their meeting with Obama and properly regurgitated Obama’s party line when they got back to their office.
The leftists are getting so lazy that they do not even write their own press releases anymore.
July 21, 2011 at 9:51 pm
“The idea that programs might be managed more efficiently, or that less overhead might make them work better, or that eligibility standards might need some tightening to include only the genuinely poor, or that the states might do a better job of doing what the feds have been doing–none of that so much as crosses the mind of Wallis & Co.”
Or that welfare programs are so corrupting to the recipient that they actually do more harm than good, even before you take into account the cost of funding them.
July 21, 2011 at 9:58 pm
Is it better to let them starve? Sounds to me like you see no place for welfare programmes at all. Or is that not what you meant? I know people who have been “corrupted” by US welfare programmes, and I’m very sure that they would get off them if they could – but the like eating.
July 22, 2011 at 9:05 am
Did you see that one of the eight was from the NAE?
July 22, 2011 at 9:10 am
I did. I’m not sure what’s going on over there–maybe it’s the ghost of Richard Cizik.
July 22, 2011 at 9:31 am
No, of course I don’t want them to starve, but yes, you’re right that I see no place for government “welfare” programs at all.
First, it’s an error to think that the government is the only actor that can do anything to help people, or that the government can do so perfectly while the others can’t. The United States government has been engaged in a “War on Poverty” for half a century, which from the beginning its proponents promised would not ameliorate but eliminate not only poverty but dependency. (See Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed, the “War on Poverty” section of chapter 2, which goes into detail and cites its sources.) I suppose it needs no elaboration for me to point out that it has failed to do so.
Given that the government can help the poor at best imperfectly, it seems at least equally reasonable to rely on private charitable organizations (such as the church) to do that work. No matter how many complaints you have against this alternative, it would be difficult for private organizations to match the staggering incompetence of the government (see previous paragraph). (That needn’t be taken as a slight to the government, by the way—not “incompetent” in the sense that government agencies are comically inept and inefficient, though that may be the case as well, but in the sense of not being competent to do that particular kind of work—i.e., helping the poor is naturally not something the government has the ability to do well.) Note that to some extent, it’s either-or—if we as a society choose to have the government try to take care of the poor, people will give less money to private charitable organizations (perhaps because they now think that taking care of the poor is the government’s job, not theirs); so you can’t simply say that it would be best to have both the government and private organizations on the job, or say that you assume private organizations would be wholly inadequate to the task just because their role currently, having been shrunk by the encroachment of government, is small. (For empirical support, see Arthur C. Brooks’s Who Really Cares, which is full of empirical evidence, including for the proposition that government spending on helping the poor causes people to give less to charitable organizations. If you consider reading Brooks’s book, by the way, don’t judge it by the title or subtitles on the cover, which I assume were chosen by the publisher anyway; instead, read the author’s introduction, and then decide whether to read the book.)
Second, I’m serious about the corruption—I think it might not be too strong to say that the welfare state erodes people’s souls. You put “corrupted” in quotation marks, but you note that your friends “would get off them if they could”—why is that? Is there something undesirable about being dependent on the state? What do you think that is? If you think there’s anything undesirable about it, then maybe I don’t need to make any further argument here; we already agree that it’s perfectly understandable why people get hooked, but that the government is using its money to get them hooked on something unwholesome or undesirable, something they wouldn’t wish for themselves but have been in effect bribed into.
If we don’t already agree, I can offer empirical evidence, or things I have personal knowledge of. Empirically, I again refer you to Arthur C. Brooks’s Who Really Cares, in which we see, in cold, hard data, indications that welfare erodes the soul of the recipient.
If personal knowledge would be more persuasive, I know people who are on government support, too. One of them is an uncle of mine, someone I know well. He has various debilitating diseases; among other things, he is now almost completely unable to walk. Yet it occurred to me one day that he might still be able to navigate the world, and hold a job, in a wheelchair. With the Americans with Disabilities Act and current cultural attitudes (including a strong—not to say exaggerated—cultural emphasis on tolerance), I suppose that America today may possibly be the best place and time in all of human history so far for a handicapped person to be able to get around, get a job, and live as normal a life as possible. So I asked him, Have you considered going out in a wheelchair and getting a job again? He answered very frankly and without hesitation, that if he did so, he would lose a significant part of the government benefits he was receiving. So he stays home, a man of sound mind and an able upper body, bed-bound before his time, watching TV and movies (and reading books) more or less all day every day—perhaps for the rest of his life—because the government is, in effect, paying him not to work. I think that’s very bad, for him.
I think it would be great if people accepted, as we (at least in America) now accept utterly and take for granted the separation of church and state, what is for now a revolutionary idea: the separation of charity and state. What if there were some small rural community in the middle of nowhere in the western United States, that couldn’t afford to hire a Presbyterian pastor? Suppose that someone said, Then the government should hire one for them. If I objected that the government’s involvement in that sort of thing would do more harm than good, would anyone answer me, Is it better to let their souls starve?
July 22, 2011 at 3:24 pm
“First, it’s an error to think that the government is the only actor that can do anything to help people, or that the government can do so perfectly while the others can’t. The United States government has been engaged in a “War on Poverty” for half a century, which from the beginning its proponents promised would not ameliorate but eliminate not only poverty but dependency. (See Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed, the “War on Poverty” section of chapter 2, which goes into detail and cites its sources.) I suppose it needs no elaboration for me to point out that it has failed to do so.”
THIS point deserves to be repeated. I have been telling people for years that welfare is the government’s version of the benevolence of the Church. In so many ways, the liberal/progressive vision is of the state replacing the role of the Church. Note the suggested “Obama birthday parties” being pushed on us by the President’s campaign website, complete with an hour of preaching from the President. One assumes an offering will be collected as well.
July 22, 2011 at 4:01 pm
In the 3rd Reich, one of the conditions placed on the church was that it could not engage in “charity”. That was considered trespassing into the realm of government. The rationale was that welfare equalled control. It included inherently the ability to decline to support those considered undesirable. The church, for all its faults, often did help those considered undesirable.
This approach was also taken in communist dictatorships.
In both cases it was regarded as the special right of government. I’m not sure that’s a model we want to follow.