The American Nightmare - Guest Column "Circleville Herald"

When was the last time you heard a religious leader say, “Money is the root of all evil”? When I was young, long ago, I heard it all the time, but I can’t remember when I last heard it said; neither can anyone else I’ve asked.
Why is that, do you think?
What I’ve been hearing for some time now is that becoming rich is “the American Dream.” Even the leader of formerly communist (now capitalist) China has joined the chorus declaring, “It is good to be rich.”
In the early days of European banking, loaning money at any rate of interest was seen by Christians as sinful; hence, the term “usury,” connoting an unfair and despicable exploitation of others. Today, the term has softened and means an “exorbitant rate or amount of interest.”
Even with that, the term is seldom heard since now almost no level of interest is considered too high. Consider the high interest many must pay on credit card debt, and if rates paid to “check cashing” and “rent-to-own” businesses aren’t exorbitant, what is? It is not good to be poor; and though it was sinful once to become rich at the expense of others, things are different now: it seems it is good to be rich, regardless.
This disconnect between the rich and working folks, between the well-off and the financially desperate, is expressed in many other ways. We hear pundits say that the rich deserve vastly larger tax cuts because they pay most of the tax, but that conveniently ignores payroll taxes. Working folks have payroll taxes taken out of every dollar they earn, up to $87,000 (an income level few workers ever achieve); a millionaire pays no payroll taxes on $913,000, but still is more “deserving” of a large tax cut than working people.
When tax cuts for the wealthy cause shortfalls in revenue, the programs that are cut to balance the budget are most often those things - like unemployment compensation, veterans services, Pell Grants, and community clinics - that serve poor and working folks. The rich get a break, the government cuts back, and those least able are asked to pay for it by doing with less – and it still doesn’t balance the budget.
It is not good to be poor.
Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has said publicly that the rich should keep their tax break, and instead, Grandpa and Grandma should have to work longer before retiring, pay more for their medical care, and have the quality of that care reduced.
The federal inheritance tax is constantly attacked (even though only the wealthy pay it) as is the graduated income tax (because with progressive taxation those who have more pay more). A sales tax is being pushed as a replacement (a tax approach which, far from being progressive, is actually regressive). The “benefit” of all this is that the tax burden will be shifted further from the long-suffering rich to the middle and working classes.
If you listen to the business news, you know that every time a company lays off thousands of workers, Wall Street rejoices and the stock market goes up. Every economic report over the past months bragging about our great and growing economy has been followed in a day or two by a quiet report on the lack of job creation. Sometimes, if you watched carefully, you also read that most of the new jobs that ARE being created pay MUCH less than the jobs that were lost to foreign sweatshops.
Profit trumps people. The government won’t raise the minimum wage; that would cut into profits. It insists on reducing workers’ overtime earnings (not their hours, just their earnings) to increase profits. It has sponsored business seminars on how to send workers’ jobs to foreign lands. It has taken steps to insure that a worker who runs into problems with credit card debt will have more problems declaring bankruptcy, and that well-off lenders will find it easier to hound the card holder until the end of his days (never mind that the lender had hounded many of these people into taking the card in the first place).
Over and over again it is clear to anyone who is paying attention that the goal of government and business is not to build a better life and a better nation for everyone, but to further enrich a relative few at the expense of the vast majority. How can that be if we live in a democracy of informed voters and if this is, as claimed by many, “a Christian nation”?
Well, too many voters aren’t well-informed and too many “Christians” aren’t Christian. The media exist not to inform the people but to make money. Long ago, news institutions at least claimed they had an obligation to inform. That is not even a consideration now. News, like “reality” shows, can do just about anything as long as it results in profitable ratings. The responsibility is not to the people but to the bottom line of the organization, and success there too often means playing ball with the powerful and their self-serving agenda, instead of going after deceit and corruption to protect the people.
As for Christianity, I find it difficult to believe that Jesus would ever claim, “It is good to be rich” or suggest that a tax cut for the wealthy should be paid for by the sacrifice of regular folks, much less the poor, the aged, and the infirm. I can’t imagine Jesus giving taxes much attention, period. Render unto Caesar and get on with more important considerations like how we treat the least of our brethren.
Didn’t Jesus say, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven”? Truly, it is not good to be poor, but it sounds like being rich isn’t so good either - in the long run – at least for a believing Christian who is well-informed, having read Matthew 19:24.
If getting rich IS the “American Dream,” then it is a broken dream because rich Americans are getting richer and everybody else is getting poorer. Worse, this wealth is achieved by driving the middle class into poverty and the poor into despair. In today’s world, money IS the root of all evil, and we need to be reminded of that more often.
Thoughtful Christians know that. The others better get to work developing a very, very small breed of camels.