The U.S. is spending more for current expenses than it is receiving in tax receipts, which is adding to the national debt, so how is cutting taxes even further a solution to our deficit problems?

Republicans and their Tea Party allies keep screaming the mantra that lowering taxes will stimulate our economy and get us out of our recession. That oft repeated slogan is not supported by common sense or by experience, and the claim that the Reagan tax cuts caused a dramatic increase in tax receipts has been soundly debunked by economists but it is still offered as support for tax cuts.

Let’s look at three examples of the faulty logic of the tax cutters: [a] ExxonMobil gets a corporate tax cut of 5%. Taxes are an expense, so their expense goes down and their net income goes up. They issue an increased dividend to their stockholders. Their gas sales are not increased as a result of their tax cut, they do not hire more employees, so where do ther increased tax receipts inure to the benefit to the Federal government? [b] AIG’s taxes are cut by 5%. It gives out bonuses to its employees even though it is operating in the red, thus increasing its net loss, and because it is operating in the red it pays no corporate income tax anyway. No increase in business or sales results from their tax position. [c] My neighbor, who earns $350,000 a year, gets a 5% tax decrease, which results in about $6500 in actual tax savings. With the savings he takes his wife on a two week cruise to South America. Where does the increase come to the Federal treasury?

The reason our economy is in trouble is not excessively high taxes—it is financial market collapse, real estate market collapse, inundation by illegal immigrants driving up social costs, health costs out of control, US industry betraying the American worker by shipping our jobs overseas and closing factories, two wars that are wasting American lives and our financial resources, refusal of banks to make loans to small business, cutting Fed rates to 0% for banks so they obtain free capital from the Federal treasury rather than have to pay interest to depositors, loss of home owners’ equity and maxed out credit cards which together result in substantially reduced consumer spending, etc.

Most businesses are already paying little or no corporate income tax and the wealthy are paying less now than they have since income taxes began. Most of the small business people I know complain about state and local taxes—licenses, fees, real estate taxes, etc. So the “cut our taxes” slogan at the Federal level is silly and counterproductive as policy.

The “tax cutting” crowd has an agenda and it is no secret on conservative think tanks and blogs. While cutting taxes has a certain popularist appeal to those who don’t understand the issues, for the ideologues among the tax cutters it is not really about increasing Federal tax receipts, it is about starving the Federal government and cutting programs that the political right does not like on ideological grounds—social programs and entitlements.

Society has a duty (and has since colonial days) to help the poor, the hungry, the homeless, and that duty will not go away just because the Federal budget is starved. It just shifts the costs and the burden to state and local governments, and that affects local tax burdens which go up every time Federal tax receipts go down.

These problems are too big to be solved by cheap politics and popular slogans.

http://www.christianhumanist.net

All politics may be local but it can have national implications as this story surely does.  A local politician, former county councilwoman, current chairperson of the Republican Party’s anti-abortion committee, and prominent member of a Catholic parish is promoting a weekly protest march against a local Planned Parenthood medical clinic that provides women’s health services and reproductive counseling.  The objective is to protest its services and force it to shut down.

She says she is “pro life” – but that is an inaccurate and meaningless statement.  I don’t know many people who are not in favor of life, but as she had made clear that is not really what this protest is about.  Her statements (and those of her Catholic parish) establish that she is actually anti-abortion, anti-family planning, anti-birth control, anti-contraceptive, anti-family planning, and anti-sex education, the very programs that are necessary to increase the quality of life for our communities, reduce unwanted pregnancies and ultimately reduce the need for many prospective abortions. Planned Parenthood is the wrong target. It promotes family planning and sex education and ultimately reduces the need for abortion as a response to unwanted and unplanned pregnancy.

I find it curious that those who say they are pro life are not consistently in favor of life on other issues where positions in favor of life seem relevant.  Being pro life implies a larger agenda than just being anti-abortion.  If they were really pro life wouldn’t they oppose the death penalty [because the innocent are condemned more often than most realize], oppose war [because the innocent are often collateral damage in military conflicts], oppose manufacturers who poison our environment, contaminate our air and water, and sell defective products, etc. [because this affects the quality of life]?  However, most who say they are pro life are conservative Republicans who support war and the death penalty and oppose environmental policies that limit what businesses can do or that impose costs on them, so it is difficult to see what they mean when they say they support a pro life agenda.  I think it is safe to say that they misuse the pro life label—they are not pro life, they are anti-abortion.

Anti-abortion folks have a right to their views, and they have a right to try to convince women to keep fetuses rather than abort them. They also have the duty, having taken that position, to provide the means for taking care of the unwanted children that would otherwise be aborted [although that raises another problem, over population, which is a social and moral issue for another time].

Instead of protesting abortion and trying to eliminate abortion rights, the anti-abortion folks, who are largely associated with fundamentalist Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, would do well to create and fund orphanages in their local communities and then say to women who are pregnant—we will give you an option, we will take care of your maternity health needs, we will pay the expense of delivery and the care of the newborn with special needs, we will take the baby once it is born and raise it through childhood, we will not come after the father for child support, and we will not burden the community with the unwanted child or its expense. Then they might be taken seriously. That might eliminate the need for some but clearly not all abortions.

But these anti-abortion folks, who have a religious based viewpoint and a political agenda, should not seek to convert their religious views into legal prohibitions.  Many Christians do not believe that abortion should be outlawed and consequently they support the abortion rights of women.  Many of us are not convinced by the moral and religious arguments of anti-abortionists. 

Supporters of abortion rights should not have their rights infringed upon by religious zealots.  Anti-abortionists must respect the rights of those who disagree with them. Freedom and democracy require it.

http://www.christianhumanist.net

There are legitimate issues that can and should be discussed rationally in the abortion wars but rarely are. The anti-abortion movement seems intent on continually putting out misinformation, distorting facts, rewriting history, demonizing abortion rights supporters and mis-characterizing the work of Planned Parenthood.

Typical of the misinformation being spread by anti-abortionists is a recent propaganda film being shown in anti-abortion circles promoting the absurd proposition that abortion rights supporters are really engaged in a devious and sinister racist campaign to reduce the black urban population and attempt to make their case by what they characterize as documentary evidence. After a showing in my area an anti-abortion activist asserted in commentary written in less than correct English: “Margret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, whose big idea was the “Negro Project”. It was her and Planned Parenthood’s belief that black people were too stupid and “feeble minded” and needed to be limited in there ability to reproduce.” [sic]

That statement is categorically false (and illiterate), but it is part of an ongoing national smear campaign against Margaret Sanger by activists in the anti-abortion movement, often repeated in their publications which copy each other, but without any factual basis.

So a fact check: There was a Negro Project instigated by Margaret Sanger. It was about birth control and family planning and was not about abortion. In the paragraphs below I have excerpted some lines from the Sanger Papers. To head off the charge that I am quoting selectively I have enclosed the link to the entire history of this project below so that those interested in facts can read the history for themselves.

The Negro Project was developed by birth control reformers, who consulted with African-Americans for help. It was widely supported by such black leaders as Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. DuBois, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Sanger wrote an initial fund-raising request to help “a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped to a large measure by a ‘caste’ system that operates as an added weight upon their efforts to get a fair share of the better things in life. To give them the means of helping themselves is perhaps the richest gift of all. We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation.”

Sanger viewed the Negro Project as another effort to help African-Americans gain better access to safe contraception and maintain birth control services in their community as she had attempted to do in Harlem a decade earlier when Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau opened a clinic there.

By the late 1930s, birth control activists began to focus on high birth rates and poor quality of life in the South, alerted to alarming Southern poverty by a 1938 U.S. National Resource Committee report which asserted that Southern poverty drained resources from other parts of the country. Starting in the mid-1930s, Sanger sent field workers into the rural South to establish birth control services in poor communities and conduct research. She sought to test various contraceptive jellies and foam powders to see if they could effectively be used without a diaphragm, which would be cheaper and easier for poor women to use. These birth control initiatives were designed, in part, to demonstrate to government bureaucrats on the county, state and federal levels that contraceptive clinics were essential in impoverished Southern communities and could be successfully duplicated in other regions.

The entire article can be found at: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/newsletter/articles/bc_or_race_control.html

A fetus is not a child. Traditionally it has been understood that a human being becomes such at birth when it is independent of the mother and breathing on its own and is then considered a child or a baby. Prior to birth it is a fetus, not a child. Consider that a fertilized egg is not a chicken, and we could extend that analogy to note that tadpoles are not frogs, larvae are not grasshoppers, and pine cones are not pine trees.

Anti-abortionists have been trying to argue the point (unsuccessfully I think) that terminating a fetus is the same thing as killing a child. We beg to differ on that point for a number of common sense reasons and, for those whose beliefs are presumed to be Christian, for theological reasons as well.

What some of those arguing that point need to consider is that the reason that traditionally a human being becomes recognized as such at birth goes back to the Genesis birth stories and is an element of Christian theology. In the Genesis story a human being was born when god breathed the “spirit of life” or “breath” into the new human being. Traditionally this is the point in theology that the “soul” (which is another name for the spirit of life, or ruach in Hebrew) enters the body.

I do not understand why fundamentalist Christians, who say they believe quite literally in the Bible, seem to be unaware of this concept, which is a very traditional part of Christian theology. [This is not my belief, but is noted for those who hold that belief. I am a humanist, who happens to believe that the teachings of Jesus are worth taking seriously as an ethical guide, thus a Christian Humanist.]

This is probably the time to repeat what I have said before, that it is not correct to say that “Christians oppose abortion” any more than it is correct to say that “Christians believe in the literal truth of the Genesis creation story” or that “Christians oppose all war.” Some do, some don’t.

Http://www.christianhumanist.net

We’ve all seen the story.  Ten American “missionaries” were arrested in Haiti and are facing charges of child trafficking. The bizarre story is that a church in Idaho sent these ten unprepared volunteers to Haiti to find 100 orphans from the streets and move them to a hotel in the Dominican Republic that they would operate as an orphanage until a new orphanage there could be completed. They were caught trying to get across the border with a busload of kids, were refused entry because of missing paperwork, returned to Port-au-Prince, where they were arrested. Reports also said that not all of these children were orphans.

There are some things about this story that just don’t make much sense to me. Maybe these people are, as they claim to be, well- intentioned fools for Jesus, and just very very stupid and naïve, but it certainly makes me wonder if there is not some other motive in play here that has not yet come out. It would not be the first time that religious fundamentalists used an opportunity for some purpose beyond what it appears on the surface. Their home church in Idaho is trying to raise a lot of money to fund this venture.

They said they believed they had all the paperwork they needed…. No passports, no visas, no government clearances. For the past week the news has been flooded with stories about the difficulties of getting kids out of Haiti who were in process of being adopted and had most of their paperwork completed. It took the intervention of authorities from both Haiti and the Embassy to try to find a legal way for these kids to get to their adoptive parents in the U.S. The government of Haiti, such as it is, had announced that all movement of kids out of the country was to be stopped to prevent child trafficking at least until processes could be put into place to determine that possible orphans had no living relatives and that their identities could be determined and verified. They didn’t know any of this? They don’t read newspapers or listen to TV? The pastor didn’t know this? Don’t they have an attorney advising them on processes and procedures for doing what they say they wanted to do?

They say they had been working on this project for months and decided to accelerate their plans when the earthquake hit. They say they were going to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. Why there? These are Haitian kids. Why move them from their country? The need in Haiti is great and their orphanage could have been part of the rebuilding project and given jobs to those who needed them. There are many potential qualified employees for their proposed orphanage already in Haiti. Haitians speak Creole. Dominicans speak Spanish. Why make this any more complicated for the kids than it has to be?

One of the ten said in a CNN interview that god had called her for this mission. If god called anyone to do this wouldn’t god have called someone qualified to run an orphanage? Wouldn’t god have called someone with a skill set sufficient to know that you cannot just go into a foreign country, scoop up kids off the street and move them across international borders? If god was calling people to run an orphanage wouldn’t she have had the good sense to call someone with a background in social work and experience in running an orphanage? God’s personnel office seems to have blown this one.