Catholic Social Teaching tells us that we should always have our mind on those who are poor. If they have a hard time fulfilling their needs we as a nation should be able to help them since we are “the richest nation” in the world. We cannot let our fellow neighbor starve; we as a nation are better than that.

But this concern for the most vulnerable in our nation is not a priority of the Republican budget proposal for FY 2012.

One important program for mothers, infants and children is WIC. This Special Supplemental Nutrition Programs helped 9.2 million people in 2010. But proposed cuts would reduce those numbers by eliminating from 325,000 to 475,000 spots. This would result from cutting $833 million in next year’s budget. Is this providing for the most vulnerable? The Republican plan also includes cuts in other vital programs that help our senior citizens and other low-income people in our nation.

One program facing cuts is the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, or CSFP. The CSFP provides food for more than 600,000 low-income families every month, and 96% of these low-income families are seniors. They want to cut $38 million from this program and $63 million from The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP. This program helps stock food for emergency food banks that provides a nutritional food source for low-income families. These types of budgets cuts should not be allowed.

Meanwhile, Republicans are helping those in our nation who do not need help; they are the ones who are benefitting from the extended Bush tax cuts. In particular, 321,000 households (income >$1million) received a tax break in 2011 worth approximately $139,199 or $2,900 per week. If we take Bush tax cuts for one week, the $866 million would be more than enough to cover the proposed cuts in WIC. Or if we take those same Bush tax cuts for one day, there would be $120 million. That would be more than enough to cover the proposed cuts of $110 million to CSFP and TEFAP.

Is this the type of government we want? Do we want a government that neglects people who are poor and continually rewards those who do not need it? Many Republican proposals hint they want a government like that. Catholic Social Teaching once again calls our nation and its citizens to be mindful of those who are not able to meet their basic needs. What is needed is a fair and equitable approach to balancing our budget. This means providing programs to help low-income families and eliminate all Bush tax cuts that only help a small group of people who don’t need help. In the end, we all have to come together to help with budget concerns and those who are in need.

Work Cited:

Melissa Boteach (Center for American Progress), from Budget Choices Up Close, 14 June 2011

As pointed out by today’s  (Sept. 12) front page article, “For the very richest Americans, low tax rates on capital gains are better than any Christmas gift.” Our nation cannot afford daily Christmas gifts for the super-wealthy!

Here is the article, which should spur us all to demand change.

Yesterday afternoon, I attended a lunch meeting in the Russell Senate Office Building entitled “Are Investment Incentives Necessary in Corporate Tax Reform?” with Donald Marron, the director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, Rob Atkinson, from the Technology and Innovation Foundation, and Michelle Hanlon, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Each of the members on the panel spoke on the topic of tax incentives, or temporary tax breaks for businesses if they make efforts in innovation or if they participate in a specified activity such as investment in a certain capital good.

Having studied history in college, and not economics, the speeches were a little over my head. No wonder the average American citizen is confused and often frustrated with the federal tax system! There is so much jargon. I suspect, and maybe it is just the young cynic in me, that the tax system is meant to be confusing and that the baffling mess and that the endless stacks of system manuals are a perfect way for ultra-wealthy corporations to slip in complicated income tax loopholes. Corporations could claim that the American tax rate is the second highest in the world. What is important to know about here is the “effective tax rate.” The effective tax rate is what corporations are actually paying in taxes after various loopholes and tax avoidance schemes. The effective American tax rate is not the second highest in the world, and is actually ranked near the middle of other countries’ effective tax rates. Is it not about time that the wealthiest pay their fair share?

“But don’t tax hikes on the wealthy prevent business leaders from having the ability to create jobs?” This is a question that often comes up when taxes are addressed in a critical light. The majority of the panel claimed that tax breaks ultimately harm the common worker for a company or organization. In reality, tax breaks do not create more jobs.

According to a May 2010 Forbes.com article, huge corporations like General Electric do not use the saved money to increase the number of jobs, but instead to create incredibly low-wage jobs in different countries. Why are American corporations allowed to make more and more money while refusing to create more jobs on our own soil? It is time for this unfair system to be shaken up and flipped upside down. If this article interests you, I highly recommend the Facebook website for the organization Citizens for Tax Justice. It has the great, but challenging mission of creating a just tax system in our country.

Today, I listened to a presentation at the Center for American Progress by Dr. Alan Krueger, Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. As he spoke about the rise and consequences of inequality, I again recognized the timeliness of NETWORK’s campaign on the wealth gap (Mind the Gap!) – and the critical importance today of our work for economic justice.

Alan Krueger’s talk focused on how rising inequality and the diminishment of the middle class are very much at the heart of our nation’s economic woes. Overall trends in recent decades have been headed in the wrong direction. The percentage of middle class people has shrunk from a little over 50% in 1970 to 44% in 2000, to just 42% in 2010. We also now have more people at the lowest and highest extremes.

Growing inequality has come at a time when economic mobility has decreased. More and more, we find in our country that parents’ incomes are excellent predictors of their children’s future incomes – i.e., poor children are highly likely to become poor adults. This “land of opportunity” is providing less opportunity than we like to imagine.

Much of today’s rising income inequality can be traced to the dispersion in hourly wages. Dr. Krueger mentioned several causes – starting with technological changes that require more educated workers, the proliferation of very high salaries in the finance/real estate sector, less skilled U.S. workers competing with workers around the world, declining union membership, and tax policies that favor the rich.

Consequences of inequality include lower morale and productivity among those who feel they are underpaid. As their productivity decreases, economic problems grow.

NETWORK focuses on public policy, and Dr. Krueger mentioned several policy areas that could directly impact rising inequality. They include:

• Support of the Affordable Care Act (2010 healthcare reform legislation, which NETWORK helped pass). It is already helping many middle class families, including young people not able to go to college but who are now able to remain on their parents’ health insurance.
• Help for the middle class through a longer extension of unemployment benefits and the payroll tax holiday, two major focus areas for NETWORK in the coming weeks. These are helpful tools that support economic recovery.
• Better regulation to prevent excessive risk-taking and corruption in financial markets.
• Fair tax policies, another NETWORK priority, including more progressive taxes and a return of the estate tax to 2009 levels.
• Just access for all children to quality education, good nutrition, healthcare, etc. (i.e., safety net issues that have served as NETWORK priorities for decades).

I came away from Dr. Krueger’s talk with a renewed sense of purpose, along with a deeper appreciation for the thousands of NETWORK justice-seekers committed to strengthening our nation through fair government policies that foster equality and economic justice. Our work has never been more needed!

Yes, we know that President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner met on Sunday

“A lot of people know that the president and I met on Sunday. It was a nice meeting, it was cordial,” the speaker said. “But we’re still waiting for the White House to identify what spending cuts the president is willing to make as part of the balanced approach that he promised the American people. You know, where are the president’s spending cuts?”

My question is: Congressman Boehner, where is the list of tax loopholes you are going to cut or eliminate? You say you can get $800 million from reining in loopholes, but you have not specified which ones, now how much you would get from each – even though you have stated a total amount.

The Buffet Rule is intended to place an additional tax on those with income over $1 million/year. Many members of Congress continue to insist that we cannot do this because that would stop them from creating much-needed jobs. I seriously wonder about this for two reasons:

• I’ve not seen evidence of their creating great numbers of jobs in the 12 years during which they have enjoyed significant tax benefits. The unemployment rate rose to nearly 10%, and has only slowly returned to 7.8 as of January 30, 2013.
• Millionaires are well within the top 1% of earners in this nation – whose income accrued to 20% of the total national income. With the exception of two brief peaks (2000 and 2007) this is the highest percent of total national income that the group has held since before the Depression (1939).

As our legislators work to improve the economy of the nation and to protect those who are most vulnerable, The Buffet Rule seems one important action to include. It seems reasonable to hope that there would be scaled amounts or percentages for the Buffet Rule, as those with the greatest income are surely able to give the greatest support to the other 99.99% of the population (in 2011, 15,837 families, the top 0.01%, received annual incomes above $7.9 million each).

Sources: Saez, Emmanuel, 1.23.2013. Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States(Updated with 2011 estimates) http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2011.pdf

Piketty and Saez (2003), series updated to 2011 in January 2013 using IRS preliminary tax statistics. Table A1 and Table A3, col. P90-95, P95-99, P99.99-100.

Income is defined as market income including (or excluding) capital gains.

This is California, and we don’t usually get quite so cold as it was here in December.  It was nothing like what was happening in the northern climes of this world, but we do not have the clothes, nor all of the other stuff we need to keep warm.  As a result, I shivered for at least four days.

So it was with a great deal of relief one night that, even though I was having trouble getting to sleep, I was warm, so I snuggled in and let my mind wander.  Eventually it wandered to the news of the day, which included some dim-wit Congressman stating he wasn’t going to vote for the extension of federal unemployment insurance because of some obscure Bible verse that suggested that if one doesn’t work, one doesn’t get to eat.  That swirled around for a while in my brain until I thought about the parable of The Good Samaritan.

Luke 10:29-37

But he, wiling to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbor?  And Jesus answering said, “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.  And by chance there came down a certain priest that way; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.  And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.  But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.  And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, take care of him; and whatsoever though spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.  Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves?”  And he said, he that shewed mercy on him.  Then said Jesus unto him, “Go and do thou likewise.”

Usually when this parable is preached or spoken about, it is that someone from a different culture, or tribe, acted with more compassion than the members of the beaten man’s own tribe, and that we must be compassionate toward everyone.  Which in and of itself is certainly true.  But the thought that came to me was that after the initial compassionate acts of binding up the beaten man’s wounds and taking him to an inn and caring for him for one night, the Samaritan, having obligations he needed to attend to in the next days, paid the inn keeper to care for the man, with the promise that he would come back and see to it that the inn keeper was reimbursed for any further costs.  What the Samaritan didn’t do was berate the beaten man for having been so negligent as to not having learned the ancient equivalent of taekwondo in order to defend himself and not  be beaten in the first place, and then behave toward him with contempt for being a “loser”, and for deserving everything that happened to him.

With that being said, we don’t have inns or inn keepers like that anymore.  But we do have government agencies that are substitutes for them.  We have the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, we have unemployment insurance, we have emergency rooms in hospitals, and we have Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.  We pay the “inn keepers” of our time with our taxes.  There is no way I can be everywhere, nor can anyone else, but we can see to it, as the Samaritan did, that people who have been beaten down by life are cared for by the appropriate government agency, if there is no other means possible.

Shame on those who do not want to fund these programs through closing tax loopholes, readjusting an outrageous tax system back to a progressive tax rather than the regressive one we have now.  How have we as a country, sunk so low that we would deprive people of any age food, but particularly children and seniors!  Now, in my book, this is viciousness personified!