Fiscal Responsibility

This speech, given by Daniel Hannan, a member of the European Parliament, on March 24, 2009, has been all over the news in pieces. Here is the speech in its entirety. In three and a half minutes, Hannan makes one of the clearest cases I have heard for fiscal restraint in the face of the overwhelming urge to throw money at the current financial crisis. His rhetoric rises above its British context- these are words that every world leader, every politician and secretary, should hear and heed. We can't spend our way out of a recession, only deeper into one.

What I've Been Reading

I've been reading I Samuel in my personal devotions lately, and greatly enjoying it. The first 5 chapters (all I have read thus far) cry out with the testimony of a faithful and powerful God who blesses immeasurably those who love him while casting his wrath upon those who thumb their noses at his very being. I am moved by the gentle love God has for his servant Hannah, the working of his plan for his people through the calling of Samuel and his jealous wrath upon the unfaithful sons of Eli. The theme of redemption continues to reoccur, woven throughout the story of the unfaithfulness of God's people. Here's what I read a few days ago:

1 Samuel 5 - The Philistines and the Ark

1When the Philistines captured the ark of God, they brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. 2Then the Philistines took the ark of God and brought it into the house of Dagon and set it up beside Dagon. 3And when the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the ark of the LORD. So they took Dagon and put him back in his place.

4But when they rose early on the next morning, behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the ark of the LORD, and the head of Dagon and both his hands were lying cut off on the threshold. Only the trunk of Dagon was left to him. 5This is why the priests of Dagon and all who enter the house of Dagon do not tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod to this day.

6The hand of the LORD was heavy against the people of Ashdod, and he terrified and afflicted them with tumors, both Ashdod and its territory. 7And when the men of Ashdod saw how things were, they said, "The ark of the God of Israel must not remain with us, for his hand is hard against us and against Dagon our god." 8So they sent and gathered together all the lords of the Philistines and said, "What shall we do with the ark of the God of Israel?" They answered, "Let the ark of the God of Israel be brought around to Gath." So they brought the ark of the God of Israel there.

9But after they had brought it around, the hand of the LORD was against the city, causing a very great panic, and he afflicted the men of the city, both young and old, so that tumors broke out on them. 10So they sent the ark of God to Ekron. But as soon as the ark of God came to Ekron, the people of Ekron cried out, "They have brought around to us the ark of the God of Israel to kill us and our people." 11They sent therefore and gathered together all the lords of the Philistines and said, "Send away the ark of the God of Israel, and let it return to its own place, that it may not kill us and our people." For there was a deathly panic throughout the whole city. The hand of God was very heavy there.

12The men who did not die were struck with tumors, and the cry of the city went up to heaven.

Who's Your Daddy?

I realize that the blog is still a bit of a mess, and I also confess that I don't really consider simply reposting articles "blogging," but with a Greek Syntax midterm, a Biblical Counseling midterm, counseling observations and an Exegesis paper all due on or before Tuesday, I thought this might tide you over until I can actually start blogging again. Enjoy this piece from Dr. Russell Moore (henryinstitute.org), the Dean of the School of Theology at Southern Seminary and a preacher that I very much respect and enjoy. This short post by him fits into a lot of things I have been thinking about lately, about which I will post soon.

Your Birth Father Has Fangs
Thursday, February 26th, 2009

Imagine for a moment that you’re adopting a child. As you meet with the social worker in the last stage of the process, you’re told that this twelve-year old has been in and out of psychotherapy since he was three. He persists in burning things, and attempting repeatedly to skin kittens alive. He “acts out sexually,” the social worker says, although she doesn’t really fill you in on what that means. She continues with a little family history. This boy’s father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather all had histories of violence, ranging from spousal abuse to serial murder. Each of them ended life the same way, dead by suicide–each found hanging from a rope of blankets in his respective prison cell.

Think for a minute. Would you want this child? If you did adopt him, wouldn’t you watch nervously as he played with your other children? Would you watch him nervously as he looks at the butcher knife on the kitchen table? Would you leave the room as he watched a movie on television with your daughter, with the lights out?

Well he’s you. And he’s me.

That’s what the gospel is telling us. Our birth father has fangs. And left to ourselves, we’ll show ourselves to be as serpentine as he is.

That’s why our sin ought to disturb us. The “works of the flesh,” jealousy, envy, wrath, lust, hatred, and on and on, ought to alarm us the way a tightness in the chest would alarm a man whose father and grandfather dropped dead at the age of forty of heart disease. It ought to scare us like forgetting the next-door neighbor’s name would scare a woman whose mother was institutionalized on her thirty-fifth birthday for dementia.

It’s easy to deceive ourselves though. The chest pains? They’re just indigestion. The forgetfulness? It’s just a hectic schedule. Even this self-deceit shows us our similarity to our reptilian birthfather. He, after all, “knows his time is short” but rages away against God and his Christ anyway (Rev 12:12).

The New Testament addresses these former Satan-imagers with good news. It’s not just that we have a stay of execution, a suspension of doom. It’s not simply that those who trust in Christ have found a refuge, a safe place, or a foster home. All those in Christ, Paul argues, have received sonship. We are now the “offspring of Abraham” (Gal 3:29). Within this household–the tribal family of Abraham–all those who are in Christ have found a home through the adopting power of God.

Under Construction

I'm updating some stuff on the blog, so you'll see things vanish and reappear for a while...don't worry, it's all under control. I think.

What the Budget Means to You

President Barack Obama released his 2010 Fiscal Year budget yesterday, and the numbers don't look good. Here's a crossection of stats about this budget bill:

• A $3.55 trillion budget plan for 2010, with additional immediate changes that would push spending to $3.94 trillion in the current year. Total Expenditures: $7.49 trillion.
• A projected deficit of $1.75 trillion for 2010, projected to be reduced to $1.17 trillion next year and tapering to $533 billion in 2012. This would still be $78 billion more than last year's record-breaking deficit of $455 billion.
• The $1.75 trillion deficit would be 12.3% of America's GDP. This is the second highest percentage for a deficit ever behind the post WWII 21.5% in 1945.

Where will the deficit reduction after this drastic run-up come from? Here are a few sources (all are currently in the budget except for raising the maximum tax rate):

• Taxpayers in the current top tax bracket of 35 percent would see their tax deduction for every $1 given to charity drop from 35 cents to 28 cents.
• $636 billion will come from a hike in the capital gains tax, the elimination of itemized deductions and expired tax cuts for people making over $250,00 a year.
• The President has also stated his desire to raise the top tax rate to 39.6% from the current 35%, although this is not currently in the budget.
• Taxing carried interest (the primary source of income for the manager in private equity and hedge funds).
• A number of taxes and the repealing of deductions for various energy production costs, mostly related to petroleum and natural gas drilling.

What does this all mean to you? Perhaps the most shocking numbers are the simplest math. Taking into account only the $3.55 trillion for 2010, with a US population is 304,059,724, a little more than a third of which filed returns (138,893,908), here's the math for the 2010 $3.55 trillion:

• $11,833 spent per American
• $25,573 spent per taxpayer (Unfortunately, this assumes all return filers are taxpayers and not just return recipients, which is not the case. Some estimates have the amount of actual taxpayers only about 60% of that number.)

It's a lot of math, and reading this post most likely made you a bit drowsy. But it's important. We're about to embark on one of the most massive spending plans in American history at a time when our industry is faltering, credit is impossible to secure and homes continue to be forclosed upon at an alarming rate. But this budget doesn't just include money for more bailouts and partial government takeovers- more than $600 billion is earmarked for a fund that will be used to begin a changeover to universal healthcare, and the budget also anticipates revenues from a CO2 cap-and-trade program that is only in the concept phase.

This budget is not what we need. It imposes taxes or allows to expire tax cuts on industry that contributes to the GDP in important ways while socking away money for socialized medicine. Cap-and-trade is not the best way to work toward reducing industrial emissions, the rise in capital gains tax discourages profits for businesses and it doesn't seem to me that reducing the tax deduction for charitable contributions is ever a good idea.

I will not pretend to suggest that the Republicans haven't recently "found" their love for fiscal conservativism partially in opposition to President Obama's policies, nor did they protest as George W. Bush racked up deficits during his presidency. But this massive increase in the national deficit is too great a risk for too little reward and the Republicans are right to stand against it. In a era where we all should be spending less and saving more, the government should be leading by example, not exhibiting reckless spending.

The party's over, it's time to tighten the belt and we all need to stop before we spend ourselves into a depression exacerbated by increasing foreign-held debts and ask if throwing money at the problem is going to work. It's not- we need a new solution.

Sources: Reuters, ABCNews, Breitbart, Telegraph

Lent

Just Give It Up (from Firstthings.com)
By David Mills
Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 9:07 AM

Our eldest, then about two years old, one day announced “I want . . .” but did not finish the sentence. My wife and I waited for her to tell us what she wanted — to be picked up and rocked? a cup of milk? her stuffed bear? — but again she said only “I want” and let her voice trail off. She said it a third time, still sounding equally unsure about what she wanted. And then, with a look of enlightenment on her face, said in a loud, firm voice, “I want!”

There, I thought, was the fallen human condition expressed. We are creatures of ravenous, indiscriminate desire. We want this and we want that, but most of all, We Want.

Hence the value of Lent, which begins today, and of an old discipline that seems, even among Catholics, to be now somewhat neglected: the traditional discipline of giving things up for Lent. Bookish people being as fallen as anyone else, we might take a brief break from the pressing issues and interesting intellectual questions to reflect on the value of this discipline. Giving things up for Lent has, in my experience, two obvious benefits.

The first is that you very quickly find out how much a hold the world has on you. This is a lesson to which the Christian will give intellectual assent, but few of us really see what it means. We like to think of ourselves being happy to give up anything for the Lord just like that, with a snap of our fingers, even our lives, but most of us find it hard to give up something that really doesn’t matter. You dream of standing up to the lions in the coliseum, and find yourself snapping at the waitress because the restaurant is out of your favorite dessert.

We are not in shape, and we are also delusional. Spiritually, we’re like the pot-bellied middle-aged guy in the speedo swimsuit at the beach, who is just shocked that the twenty-year-old girls in bikinis are not hanging all over him and cooing. He would have a better idea why were he to hit the gym.

I gave up coffee one Lent. I thought I could handle it. I wanted to feel the pinch, but I didn’t expect (or want) to feel walloped with a bat instead. I gave it up, and I found that I really missed it.

For one thing, I soon realized that I didn’t like coffee only for the taste, or for the caffeine, but for the rituals, of getting up from my desk and wandering to the faculty lounge to get another cup, of chatting with the colleagues on the way, of wandering back to my office to settle in again after a pleasant break. It just didn’t feel right, not getting up for coffee.

And there was the caffeine, or the sudden lack of it. For maybe three weeks I found myself with a sudden craving for Classic Coke, something I rarely drink, and getting up from my desk to walk across the seminary quad to the soda machine in another building, even when it was pouring rain, and I did so without the slightest idea why. Then I realized I’d only found, through some subconscious sense, a substitute source of an addictive drug and was happy to risk illness to get it.

The second benefit of giving things up for Lent is that you also find, at the end of Lent, how good are the things God has given you. The things you’ve given up come to you afresh, almost as if you’d never enjoyed them before. When you can have them any time you want, and do have them any time you want, you don’t enjoy them as God meant them to be enjoyed. At least I don’t.

I sat down at breakfast on Easter morning—we’d gone to the Vigil the night before, so that I really was breaking my fast at breakfast — and drank a big cup of very strong coffee. And it was really, really, really good. I haven’t enjoyed coffee that much for years, decades even. I suddenly had some idea how heroin addicts feel.

Now, after that Lent, I drink much more tea than coffee, but every coffee I have is a treat. It’s a far greater pleasure now, coffee is, than it was when I knocked the stuff down all day.

That’s one of my experiences with the discipline of giving things up for Lent. I learned something about myself, and not just how much a hold the world had on me but my subconscious ability to satisfy my worldly cravings even when I didn’t realize I was doing so. And I learned something also about the pleasures God has given us, which really are great pleasures, until we take them for granted because we have so much of them.

Even bookish types are addicted to the world’s pleasures, and perhaps more deeply so because we believe our tastes intellectual and refined. So just give up something. Almost anything will do, because once you give it up, you’ll want it. Start small, but start.