Mark your calendars. Next Sunday, September 3, on NBC's MEET THE PRESS:
MR. RUSSERT: That’s all for today. We’ll be back next week as we kick
off the return of our MEET THE PRESS Senate Debate series. One of the
most closely watched Senate races of the year, Pennsylvania; incumbent
Republican Senator Rick Santorum vs. State Treasurer Bob Casey.
Santorum vs. Casey. The debate, right here, next Sunday. If it’s
Sunday, it’s MEET THE PRESS.
_______________
mp
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Bob Casey v. Rick Santorum
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Then, Slavery and Scripture; Now, Homosexuality and Scripture
I thought of the similarity between *their* debate and *our* debate when I read this short piece on Mark Noll's new book. (Not that we're about to have another civil war.)
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
August 26, 2006
Slavery, Scripture: An explosive mix
John Blake - Staff
Before the Civil War was fought on the battlefield, it was fought in America's pulpits.
Southern ministers claimed Scripture sanctioned slavery. Abolitionists said it condemned the practice. The colossal political issue of mid-19th century America might have been the preservation of the Union, but it turned on a deeper question: What does the Bible say about slavery?
Those positions form the basis for author Mark Noll's "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis" (University of North Carolina Press, $29.95).
The "book that made the nation was destroying the nation," because the Bible could not provide a moral consensus on slavery, said Noll, a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois.
"The political standoff that led to war was matched by an interpretive standoff," Noll writes. "No common meaning could be discovered in the Bible, which almost everyone in the United States professed to honor and which was, without a rival, the most widely read text of any kind in the whole country."
Noll, speaking by phone from his Wheaton office, said he was drawn to the subject because few writers had explored the theological conflict that preceded the Civil War. Deeply felt Christian beliefs drove participants and leaders on both sides.
"This was far and away the most religiously engaged conflict in American history," Noll said. "There's a strong religious dimension in the American Revolution ... but nothing like that of the armies and populace in the Civil War."
It may be difficult for people today to understand how Christians could use the Bible to support an institution as brutal as slavery, but Noll said the power of the pro-slavery position was its theological simplicity. The Old Testament and New Testament were filled with passages that sanctioned slavery. In a nation where most people believed in the infallibility of Scripture, those passages settled the debate.
"You had very serious people who said the Bible certainly supports slavery, and any attack on the slave system was therefore an attack on the Bible," Noll said.
The difficulty in the abolitionists' position was its nuance. They had to reject an inerrant approach to the Bible and appeal to the broad sweep of Scripture, which opposed the oppression of a group of people. Those arguments, however, never gained traction among ordinary people who were accustomed to treating the Bible as infallible, Noll said.
Noll said he grew depressed while writing the book because unprecedented reverence for the Bible led not to peace but to the bloodiest war in history.
"Once positions hardened," he said, "the Bible became a bullet rather than a book."
_______________
mp
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Back to the Estate Tax
[This is from Larry Solum's Legal Theory blog:]
August 23, 2006
Book Annoucement: Death by a Thousand Cuts by Graetz & Shapiro
Death by a Thousand Cuts:
The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth
Michael J. Graetz and Ian ShapiroTo read the entire book description or a sample chapter, please visit: http://pup.princeton.edu
/titles/7919.html This fast-paced book by Yale professors Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro unravels the following mystery: How is it that the estate tax, which has been on the books continuously since 1916 and is paid by only the wealthiest two percent of Americans, was repealed in 2001 with broad bipartisan support? The mystery is all the more striking because the repeal was not done in the dead of night, like a congressional pay raise. It came at the end of a multiyear populist campaign launched by a few individuals, and was heralded by its supporters as a signal achievement for Americans who are committed to the work ethic and the American Dream.
"This is one of the most interesting books about politics, and power, and the way the world is going, that you are ever likely to read. What makes it so fascinating is that it is a mystery story. The mystery is this: how did the repeal of a tax that applies only to the richest 2 percent of American families become a cause so popular and so powerful that it steamrollered all the opposition placed in its way. . . . This is not simply a story about the United States. . . . [T]he moral of the tale is far wider than that. . . . Instead this is a tale about the power of narrative in politics, and the increasing ease with which individual stories can be made the be-all and end-all of political debate."--David Runciman, London Review of Books
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Recommended Reading
IMHO, former-MOJ blogger Kathleen Brady's work on religious liberty is superb. To download/print/read Kathleen's latest piece, click here. This is the abstract:
| This article addresses the
protections afforded by the First Amendment when government regulation
interferes with the internal activities or affairs of religious groups.
In previous pieces, I have argued that the First Amendment should be
construed to provide religious groups a broad right of autonomy over
all aspects of internal group operations, those that are clearly
religious in nature as well as activities that seem essentially
secular. In my view, such autonomy is necessary to preserve the ability
of religious groups to generate, live out and communicate their own
visions for social life, including ideas that can push the norms and
values of the larger community forward. Democratic self-government, in
particular, depends for its strength on religious and other private
groups that are able to generate and supply novel and unorthodox ideas
that make improvements in the status quo possible. In this article, I address several criticisms that have or could be made of my position, and I clarify and expand my argument in response to these criticisms. I begin by engaging scholars who have viewed my position as one form of a familiar defense of religious group freedom. I am essentially arguing, these scholars say, that religious groups merit special protection from government control because they are good for us; religious groups provide us with important social benefits that would be compromised by state interference. As these scholars observe, this type of defense is subject to a predictable critique. The problem with such an argument is that autonomy has costs as well as benefits, and I have not demonstrated that the benefits associated with a broad right of autonomy outweigh the costs. Indeed, many scholars believe that the balance tips in the opposite direction. The type of broad autonomy that I envision will unleash abuses that will outweigh the benefits that I identify. In the first part of my article, I clarify and expand my argument as I distinguish it from this familiar form. I have, indeed, pointed to important social improvements generated by religious organizations, but my argument has not been that freedom for these organizations is appropriate because these social benefits outweigh the costs. Rather, freedom is important because we do not now and, indeed, never will have a complete understanding of what is socially beneficial and what is harmful (at least this side of the eschaton). Our understanding of which ideas and forms of life are truly progressive is always imperfect and in the process of development. Autonomy for religious groups is essential because these groups are an important source of alternative ideas that make development and improvement possible. Indeed, my argument goes even further. When I argue that religious group autonomy is essential to preserve the ability of groups to develop and communicate new ideas that push the larger community forward, I have had in mind something more than a vague idea of social progress or improvement. What I have had in mind is greater understanding of truth, including social and political truth. What is really at stake is this knowledge of truth, and what could be more important? In the second part of my article, I address several additional objections that are likely to be made in response to these clarifications. These objections relate to the connection that I draw between religious group autonomy and truth. The first of these objections challenges my assumption that freedom will advance our understanding of truth. The second objection challenges the appropriateness of using religious or other comprehensive ideas about truth as a basis for law and political life. The third objection challenges the very existence of the type of truth that I refer to. While my readers may initially react skeptically to the link that I draw between religious group freedom and truth, I hope to demonstrate that this link is not only plausible but also compelling.
|
|
Tuesday, August 8, 2006
On the Proposed Repeal of the Estate Tax (and Other Matters)
Thought this column, in part about the proposed repeal of the estate tax, might interest MOJ-readers and even help relieve some summer doldrums:]
Everybody's Business
My Country, Right and Wrong (but Why So Wrong?)
LIKE many people, I am attracted to puzzles. I don’t do crossword puzzles, and I no longer read many mysteries, but I am impressed at the number of conundrums there are in this world.
One of the ones that continues to baffle me is the criticism of oil companies in Congress and in the mainstream media, because oil companies have been very profitable. No one has been able to prove price-fixing. The Federal Trade Commission specifically studied the subject, and found neither price-fixing nor gouging by any major oil company.
I agree the profits are very large in absolute numbers, but in relative terms they are nothing like investment bank profits. Why do we not raise an eyebrow when hedge funds make huge profits by moving around pieces of paper and roiling markets — creating no social good I can see — but raise a ruckus when oil companies make profits while keeping the whole nation going?
I see the hand of an archaic envy here, and it’s a dangerous hand.
A second puzzle, and this is a killer: “Supply side” economists say that by lowering taxes, we create more prosperity and more tax revenue because we stimulate economic activity. One way, supposedly, is that people work harder — that is, more hours a week. With taxes cut, we keep more of what we earn, so we’ll work more.
(Of course, you could also say that if we keep more of what we earn, we won’t need to work as much, so we’ll work less. But no one pays much attention to that, so we won’t either for right now.)
And, in fact, if you think about it, how else could income tax cuts stimulate economic activity except by encouraging Americans to work more or else by having more Americans in the labor force?
Yet, the number of hours Americans work per week has barely budged in the five years since President Bush’s tax cuts, and is very much less than the number of hours worked per week on average in 1959, when tax rates were far, far higher than they are now.
Moreover, the percentage of male Americans in the labor force has fallen by 10 full percentage points from 1959 to now. Overall labor force participation has barely changed since 1989 — almost entirely because of very large growth in the female labor force — and has moved almost not at all since the Bush tax cuts were passed.
If the personal income tax cuts are not working to stimulate the economy through added labor, then just how are they working — or are they working?
A puzzle: we have all heard corporate executives say that American workers are paid too much; that our industries cannot compete with foreign makers because our labor costs are so high that if we used American union labor, we would see profits evaporate.
And yet, hourly wages in this country, adjusted for inflation, are below what they were in 1972 (when my pal, Richard Nixon, was president) by a substantial amount. But to hear corporate leaders tell it, this is still far too high to allow competition with foreign entities.
Now, you would think that if this high-priced American labor were in fact pressing corporate backs to the wall, profits would be stagnant or falling. But in fact, in the last several years — and especially the last few quarters — corporate profits as a percentage of sales were the highest they have been since 1965 — roughly 9.6 percent before tax and roughly 7.4 percent after tax.
In total, profits are by far the highest they have ever been, running at a rate of very roughly $1.38 trillion in the first quarter of 2006. As a percentage of gross domestic product, profits are also the highest they have been since the statistics began being kept in 1959 — roughly 12.7 percent.
Don’t get me wrong. I like profits, a lot. They are what the capitalist society is all about. But why are we outsourcing, why are we moving our work overseas, if our corporations are so profitable? And if our corporate world is so profitable, how come so little of the growth goes to workers’ wages? How come — as an average number — basically none of the growth goes to the ordinary worker’s wages? I am not saying this to encourage strikes. I am genuinely puzzled about it.
Could it be that just the threat of moving jobs overseas (very few have in fact actually been moved as yet) keeps labor cowed? Is the vast labor force of Asia and the Third World in fact something like “the reserve army of the unemployed” that Karl Marx described in his critique of capitalism?
I hate and detest Marx and everything he stands for, but he was a shrewd observer. In any event, what’s going on? How can retail stores keep wages so low? All service jobs that have to be done in person are not going to be shipped to Guangdong or Mumbai. Then why don’t their wages rise?
Next mystery: in a nation with stupendous deficits even at the peak of the business cycle, with forecast deficits of nuclear-disaster status, how can it be important to repeal the estate tax? Isn’t there enough income and wealth inequality in America? Don’t we need the revenue? How on earth can any social good come from making taxes on the rich even lower than they are? How does this bind the nation together in time of war?
Don’t get me wrong about this one, either. My father died in 1999. My sister paid a stunning tax on his estate and I would have preferred to keep the money. But my father was intensely grateful to this country for the opportunities it had afforded him. So are my sister and I. We don’t see any unfairness in paying back to the government that pays the soldiers and marines and pilots and sailors who defend us and allowed our little family to move to the suburbs. (Actually my sister lives in Brooklyn, but that’s another story.)
Why should the very rich not pay their fair share of the burdens of government? I could see a different argument if we were not hundreds of billions in the red, but in the real world, how can repeal or a drastic cut in the estate tax make social, moral or fiscal policy sense?
HERE’S my final puzzle: in a world that is clearly going down the tubes, where the forces of barbarism are on the march and the forces of civilization cannot stop them, why don’t we all spend a large part of every day being grateful we are where we are?
This country, with all of its problems, with all of its inequality and puzzles, is a verdant, lovely garden compared with the shrieking lunacy in so much of the world outside it. Let’s appreciate it enough to keep it.
Every question and criticism I make is within the context of a deep pride and thankfulness for being in America. I wake up in America the way I wake up in my own skin, to paraphrase my new hero, Philip Roth, and it’s an old skin, but it’s mine and I love it.
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
The Estate Tax Revisited
[This, from dot.Commonweal:]
Linkage
August 2, 2006, 7:46 pm
Since we've been talking about proposals to repeal or reduce the Estate Tax, I thought I would provide a little update. Congressional Republicans are supporting a bill that would tie reductions in the estate tax to an increase in the minimum wage.
Some things just leave you speechless. I wonder how the Catholic Social Teaching experts over at Mirror of Justice would parse this one... :-)
by J. Peter Nixon (Permalink)
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
CST and Estate Taxes
[This is from dot.Commonweal:]
Estate Tax Debate
August 1, 2006, 12:49 am
Several of the participants of the Mirror of Justice
blog have been having a running debate over the last several days about
Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and the proposed repeal of the Estate
Tax. I can't possibly link to all the individual posts, so you'll just
have to click over and scroll from the bottom.
Now I have to confess that prior to reading these posts, I could not have imagined someone making the case for repealing the Estate Tax on the basis of CST.
But now, I am happy to say, I can imagine it. I just don't find it convincing!
Now I have to confess that prior to reading these posts, I could not have imagined someone making the case for repealing the Estate Tax on the basis of CST.
But now, I am happy to say, I can imagine it. I just don't find it convincing!
Speaking of taxes ... and tax cheats
Is there a justification in CST for this?
New York Times
August 1, 2006
Tax Cheats Called Out of Control
Among the billionaires cited in the report are the owner of the New York Jets football team, Robert Wood Johnson IV; the producer of the “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” children’s show, Haim Saban; and two Texas businessmen, Charles and Sam Wyly, who the Center for Public Integrity found in 2000 were the ninth-largest contributors to President Bush.
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Saban, who are portrayed as victims in the report, are scheduled to testify today before the Senate Permanent Investigations subcommittee. They are expected to say that professional advisers assured them their deals to avoid taxes were more likely lawful than not. The Wyly brothers told the committee that they would invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and thus were not called to testify. The report characterizes them as active participants in tax schemes.
Cheating now equals about 7 cents out of each dollar paid by honest taxpayers, as much as $70 billion a year, the report estimated.
“The universe of offshore tax cheating has become so large that no one, not even the United States government, could go after all of it,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat whose staff ran the investigation.
Senator Norm Coleman, the Minnesota Republican who is chairman of the subcommittee, adopted the minority report on Sunday as the product of the full committee.
The report details how the Quellos Group, a tax shelter boutique based in Seattle, “concocted a tax shelter” using $9.6 billion “worth of fake securities transactions that were used to generate billions of dollars of fake capital losses.”
Senator Levin said that when investigators asked for trading records they were first told the trades were private, over-the-counter transactions. He said investigators asked for trading tickets or other evidence of who owned the $9.6 billion worth of stock and were told the stocks were never owned by the parties involved.
“They just wrote down numbers on paper and claimed losses,” he said. “It was just like fantasy baseball, except the taxes not paid were for real.”
Quellos, in a statement, said, “we fundamentally disagree with the report, which presents a one-sided view.” It said the transactions, which the Senate committee describes as fabrications, were real and involved “a significant possibility of economic gain and loss.”
The investigation, which took 18 months, involved 74 subpoenas, 80 interviews and the collection of more than two million documents, and yet Senator Levin said “the six cases we present are just examples, just a pinhole look.”
The 400-page report recommends eight changes, some of them aimed at going after the law and accounting firms, banks and investment advisers that the report says enable tax schemes that rely on complexity, secrecy and compartmentalizing information so that advisers can claim they had no idea that the overall transaction was a fraud.
[To read the whole article, click here.]
_______________
mp
Martha Fineman's Response to Rob Vischer
I shared with Martha Fineman--who is my colleague here at Emory--Rob's post on "family diversity". Here is Martha's responsse:
A good place to start for my work is with my newest book – The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency
(New Press 2004). Judith Stacy and others
have written extensively on the lack of social science information supporting
the superiority of the nuclear family when it comes to raising children (having
adequate money seems to be a big part of the equation for success, as distinct from having formally
married or being heterosexual parents). Our Emory colleague, Anita Bernstein, has edited
a collection (NYU Press) that takes on the marriage issue from diverse perspectives
– Marriage Proposals: Questioning a
Legal Status. There is also have a collection I edited,
published by Cornell University Press, titled Feminism
Confronts Homo Economicus, which has a section on family and welfare
policies and generally takes on the kind of “rational” economic
approach implicit in Professor Vischer's comments.
_______________
mp
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa
This back and forth about CST and the estate tax is getting heated ... and I feel somewhat responsible, since it was my post (of a NYT article) that got the discussion started. So, by way of making amends, let me suggest that we take a deep breath and focus for a while on a less controversial topic: same-sex unions. In that spirit, read on:
New York Times
July 30, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Same-Sex Marriage Wins by Losing
Seattle
THERE were community meetings in Seattle on Wednesday. Some of the
couples who had sued to overturn Washington’s ban on same-sex marriage,
a case they lost before the state’s Supreme Court earlier that day,
were going to appear. Gay and straight elected officials who support
“marriage equality” were going to make speeches. I probably should have
been there too.
But I had a previous engagement.
The Seattle Mariners were playing the Toronto Blue Jays at Safeco
Field. My 8-year-old son — adopted at birth by my boyfriend and me —
loves the M’s almost as much as he hates the way a breaking news story
can keep me late at work. He would never have forgiven me for skipping
the game.
I didn’t feel too bad about missing the meetings. Washington’s high
court rejected same-sex marriage for much the same reason the New York
Court of Appeals did earlier this month. The speeches in Seattle would
no doubt be similar to those made in New York, and I didn’t need to
hear them again.
Basically, both courts found that marriage is like a box of Trix: It’s for kids.
In New York, the court ruled in effect that irresponsible
heterosexuals often have children by accident — we gay couples, in
contrast, cannot get drunk and adopt in one night — so the state can
reserve marriage rights for heterosexuals in order to coerce them into
taking care of their offspring. Without the promise of gift registries
and rehearsal dinners, it seems, many more newborns in New York would
be found in trash cans.
At least the New York court acknowledged that many same-sex couples
have children. Washington’s judges went out of their way to make ours
disappear, finding that “limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples
furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race, and
furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where
children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological
parents.” Children, the decision continues, “tend to thrive in families
consisting of a father, mother and their biological children.’’
A concurring opinion gave the knife a few leisurely twists: due to
the “binary biological nature of marriage,” it read, only opposite-sex
couples are capable of “responsible child rearing.”
These stunning statements fly in the face of the evidence about gay
and lesbian parents presented to the court. Similar evidence persuaded
the high court in Arkansas to overturn that state’s ban on gay and
lesbian foster parents.
What the New York and Washington opinions share — besides a willful
disregard for equal protection clauses in both state Constitutions — is
a heartless lack of concern for the rights of the hundreds of thousands
of children being raised by same-sex couples.
Even if gay couples who adopt are more stable, as New York found,
don’t their children need the security and protections that the court
believes marriage affords children? And even if heterosexual sex is
essential to the survival of the human race (a point I’m willing to
concede), it’s hard to see how preventing gay couples from marrying
increases heterosexual activity. (“Keep breeding, heterosexuals,” the
Washington State Supreme Court in effect shouted, “To bed! To bed! To
bed!”) Both courts have found that my son’s parents have no right to
marry, but what of my son’s right to have married parents?
A perverse cruelty characterizes both decisions. The courts ruled,
essentially, that making my child’s life less secure somehow makes the
life of a child with straight parents more secure. Both courts found
that making heterosexual couples stable requires keeping homosexual
couples vulnerable. And the courts seemed to agree that heterosexuals
can hardly be bothered to have children at all — or once they’ve had
them, can hardly be bothered to care for them — unless marriage rights
are reserved exclusively for heterosexuals. And the religious right
accuses gays and lesbians of seeking “special rights.”
Even if you believe that marriage plays a special role in the lives
of heterosexuals with children (another point I’m happy to concede),
can it not play a similar role in the lives of homosexual couples,
whether they’re parents or not? Marriage, after all, is not reserved
for couples with children. (Perhaps it will be soon, if courts keep
heading in this direction.)
When my widowed grandfather remarried in his 60’s, he wasn’t seeking
to further the well-being of his children, who were grown and out of
the house. He was seeking the security, companionship and legal rights
that marriage provides. The survival of humankind was the furthest
thing from his mind.
These defeats have demoralized supporters of gay marriage, but I see
a silver lining. If heterosexual instability and the link between
heterosexual sex and human reproduction are the best arguments
opponents of same-sex marriage can muster, I can’t help but feel that
our side must be winning. Insulting heterosexuals and discriminating
against children with same-sex parents may score the other side a few
runs, but these strategies won’t win the game.
So I’m confident that one day my son will live in a country that
allows his parents to marry. His parents are already married, as far as
he’s concerned, as my boyfriend and I tied the knot in Canada more than
a year and a half ago. We recognize, even if the courts do not, that
it’s in his best interest for us to be married.
And while Wednesday was a dark day, the M’s beat the Blue Jays 7 to 4, so it wasn’t a total loss.
The Seattle Mariners were playing the Toronto Blue Jays at Safeco Field. My 8-year-old son — adopted at birth by my boyfriend and me — loves the M’s almost as much as he hates the way a breaking news story can keep me late at work. He would never have forgiven me for skipping the game.
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