Social Justice in Book of Mormon-Era Governments

I recently came across the following verse in the Book of Mormon, Helaman 6:39:

And thus they did obtain the sole management of the government, insomuch that they did trample under their feet and smite and rend and turn their backs upon the poor and the meek, and the humble followers of God.

At this time in the history of the Book of Mormon, the Lamanites are righteous and the Nephites are not, so much so that the Nephites have allowed the Gadianton robbers to take control of the government.  Upon taking control the Gadianton folks immediately started harassing and making life miserable for the poor.

 

There are various ways to interpret this verse, we don't really know for sure exactly what was going on, but it struck me that this verse may be evidence of social justice in Book of Mormon-era government.  The assumption of the verse seems to me to be that previous to the robbers taking over the government, the government was in the business, to some unknown degree, of helping the poor.  Following the take-over the policy is reversed and the robbers used the government as described.  Why else would the author describe of the oppression of the poor and meek in the same sentence he states that the Gadianton's took over the government if not to draw that contrast?

Nearly Half of Americans Aren't Paying Income Taxes: Bad But Maybe Not in the Way You Suppose

It has recently exploded all over the internet that nearly half of American households do not pay income taxes.  There are enough deductions and credits for families making around $50,000 and less to avoid the income tax completely, though they still are paying federal payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and others.

While some see this as a broken tax system, I see it as a broken economy.  While some gripe that half of Americans aren't pulling their weight, I see it as nearly half of Americans are not making enough money to pay income taxes.  They live below the line where we have decided that a person is only making enough to cover basic expenses and should not bear the weight of income taxes on top of it.  Instead of trying to figure out how to get those people to start paying income taxes at their current salary, lets instead focus on how to get these people making enough money to be able to afford taxes after their basic needs are met.

Elder Oaks and Preserving Religious Freedom

There is considerable discussion out there about Elder Oak's talk given at Chapman University about religious freedom.  It is the sort of message that leaves me torn and restless.  As a deeply religious person I agree completely with the general sentiment expressed in his conclusion:

We must never see the day when the public square is not open to religious ideas and religious persons. The religious community must unite to be sure we are not coerced or deterred into silence by the kinds of intimidation or threatening rhetoric that are being experienced. Whether or not such actions are anti-religious, they are surely anti-democratic and should be condemned by all who are interested in democratic government. There should be room for all good-faith views in the public square, be they secular, religious, or a mixture of the two. When expressed sincerely and without sanctimoniousness, the religious voice adds much to the text and tenor of public debate.

No one should ever feel embarrassed or intimidated for expressing strong religious beliefs in the public square, and I agree that religions have much good to offer public policy on a more abstract level.  But at the same time, I disagree with Elder Oaks that religious expression should be given a special, elevated status in such discussions:

Progressive Taxation

A recent poll showed that over 60 percent of Americans think that the government should tax the rich in an effort to reduce the budget deficit.  Polls also consistently found that a majority of Americans wanted the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy to expire.  Conservatives, inexplicably, won that battle in their larger war against progressive taxation.

So with all the recent talk about taxes, I wanted to try to explain why liberals, and a majority of Americans generally, support a progressive tax scheme.  A progressive tax is one where the tax rate increases with taxable income.  So a person making a smaller salary pays a smaller percentage in taxes than a person making a larger salary.  Currently in the US, we have a progressive federal income tax that ranges from 10% for the lowest income earners to 35% for the highest marginal rates.

Mainstream conservatives typically oppose a progressive tax for moral reasons.  They argue that it is unfair to tax the wealthy at higher rates just because they have a lot of money, that it is a form of class welfare, that the poor are getting off easy, and that it disincentivizes hard work.  These arguments miss the point.

Early Mormon Cooperatives

I've been reading Building the City of God by church historians Leonard Arrington, Dean May, and (kind of) Feramorz Fox.  I wrote a post about the Law of Consecration and Stewardship here.

Not long after the saints arrived in the Great Basin, "gentile" traders and merchants arrived and started making huge money off the saints.  Brigham Young was against trading of any sort, but especially among the members.  His thought was that a man should be making something, or producing something, and that work in shops was okay for women, but not for men.  What's more, he was against the idea of a man gaining wealth at the expense of the producers.

Because members of the church were strongly discouraged from getting involved in trading, the gentile merchants had the market to themselves and became very rich at the expense of the saints.  This became very alarming to many members, who petitioned Pres. Young to allow the members to get involved in trading at a cooperative level.  At first he balked, but eventually relented.  Here is how the authors of the book describe the evolution of his thought process:

Finally, it is important that Brigham Young believed strongly in social equality.  Ideologically opposed to gradation of wealth and status among his people, he sought instinctively for a scheme that would prevent aggrandizement of a few at the expense of the many.  His opposition to the first association of Mormon traders proposed to him in 1860 was based partly upon these grounds.  He consistently encouraged the widest possible ownership of the new cooperatives, to prevent the establishment of a wealthy privileged class.  The cooperative movement was, thus, wholly consistent with his own social philosophy.

The Law of Consecration and Stewardship

I am currently reading the excellent book Building the City of God, which is a study of early communitarian efforts by the saints.  Though I'm obviously no historian, I thought it might be interesting to write a few posts about what I'm reading as I go along.  I just finished the section on the Law of Consecration and Stewardship, which was Joseph's early attempts in Kirtland and Missouri to get the saints to live a more perfect economic system.

The basic gist of the plan went something like this:  First, all members deeded their real and personal property to Edward Partridge, the presiding bishop.  In the earliest iterations of the Law the person would completely forfeit all property if they left the church, i.e. the church had full rights to the property.  Later, when civil courts eroded that away, the person could get real property back, but not personal property and not any of the yearly consecrations.  Second, Partridge would lease and loan back those respective properties to the individual, depending on their needs.  Third, the individual, though a steward over the land, would have the control to do with the property whatever he or she desired.  Finally, at the end of the year the individual would consecrate to Partridge any excess gains above what they needed.

Ending the Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy

The Bush tax cuts are set to expire at the beginning of the year and the bombs are starting to fall in the political war over this issue.  Democrats want to let them expire for those making over $250,000 while extending them for everyone else.  Republicans want to extend them for everyone.  So, essentially, the argument is whether or not to extend the tax cuts for the very wealthy.  The two top marginal tax rates would go from 33% and 35% to 36% and 39.6%, respectively.

A second area of disagreement also has to do with taxing the wealthy, this time in the form of capital gains, which are disproportionally slanted towards the rich.  Those rates would go from 15% to 20%, and eventually to 23.8%.

Read up on the issues from both sides here, here, here, and here.  Another excellent resource is the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which lays out the argument for how letting the tax cuts expire for the wealthy and extending them for everyone else will reduce the deficit ($300 billion per year), almost universally benefit small businesses, and spur the economy and job growth.

The Haves and the Have Nots

There are two stories in the Deseret News that offer a nice little contrast. In the first, the DesNews scrutinizes the political donations of the Huntsman family. The article states that the family, as a whole, donated about twice as much to Democrats as to Republicans (but this is not what the post is about). In the second, the DesNews finds that 82% of low-income families are fully employed and still not able to meet the basic necessities of modern life, such as food, shelter, and health care.

So what we have here in Utah, in part, which is a microcosm of our nation as a whole, is on the one end a very successful family worth billions of dollars and on the other end 94,000 working families with 243,000 children, struggling to keep a home or apartment, food on the table, and basic health care.

You should know right now that I am in kind of a liberal/upset mood, so I'm going to get a little indignant here.

This is ridiculous and it makes me angry. I have no beef with the Huntsmans, they donate a lot of time and money to charitable causes and they seem like good people. But we've created a society where two people with the same drive and work ethic live in two separate worlds. In one world your family owns several mansions and offers you the best education and best connections that money can buy, and in the other the kids are in over-crowded classrooms without physical and psychological security or basic healthcare. In one world you expect to inherit millions of dollars from the family business and in the other you inherit callouses on your hands and a healthy distrust for a society that will just wear you down.

And yet all we hear is that the government better not touch my money. The government better stop encouraging lazy people to live off the Nanny State. The government is singularly ill-equipped to deal with social problems. The Invisible Hand will sort it all out!

All of which is nonsense. The rich receive so much more benefit from society and the government each day than the poor do in years. The rich grow rich from the physical labor of the poor. The government is not perfect, but we have seen again and again the injustices of a laissez-faire philosophy. We have seen slavery, monopolies, gender and racial inequalities, depressions and recessions, and the like.

I'm not calling for socialism, and I'm not calling for complete income parity. I'm calling for a society that fosters the hopes and dreams of all of its members, each of whom has something important and essential and meaningful to offer. I'd like to see better public schools that give every kid a chance to learn and succeed, affordable higher education available to anyone that wants it (including more emphasis on vocational schools), a public health care system that makes sure every family has their basic health care needs met, and no family (absolutely zero families) worrying about what they are going to eat tomorrow because the cupboards are empty.

This is what being a liberal is all about. Equality. Do those beliefs make me less of a Mormon than a conservative? I openly scoff at the idea.

There are plenty of ways liberals and conservatives can work together, and I respect many, many conservatives and think they present a lot of good ideas. But the goal of both political ideologies must be equality and security (which are completely intertwined), and you can't just come to the table with ideas that merely reinforce a system that leads to the rich getting richer and getting more opportunities, and the poor getting poorer with fewer opportunities.

If conservatives want to champion less government involvement that is fine, but that is not enough. They have to come up with ideas that replace government action that promotes equality. Can we rely on individuals acting independently with human compassion alone to create justice and equality? History has shown that we cannot. The only society that I can think of that achieved such total equality was this one, and I'm not sure we should just sit around and wait for that to happen again any time soon.

The Obama Budget - Ending Income Inequality

SO got the ball rolling on President Obama's budget below, and I'd like to take a look at another aspect. The gap between the rich and the poor in America is the largest it has ever been. The chart below from the Heritage Foundation begins to tell the story:


This may be hard to read (you can find it online here), but the top one-fifth of income earners in America own about one-half of the wealth. The bottom two-fifths combined own about one-eighth of the wealth. But it is even more extreme, as the following chart from Think Progress shows:

This may again be hard to read (and you can find it online here), but you will see that the top one percent of Americans own twenty percent of the wealth, those between the top five and one percent own about fifteen percent of the wealth, and those between the top ten and five percent own about twelve percent of the wealth. This is the classic example of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The powerful are consolidating their power and the powerless are losing power. We cannot seriously call this either freedom or democracy.

The budget that President Obama proposed recently is the first major step shrinking the gap and assuring equality, opportunity, true freedom, and the American dream for every American. As SO mentioned in his post, the budget cuts taxes for 95% of Americans and allows the Bush tax cuts to expire on those making over $250,000 a year, which essentially puts the tax scheme back to Reagan-era levels.

The budget makes it easier for people to get unemployment benefits. It also temporarily increases food stamps and offers assistance to low income families to pay utility bills. Remember, over four million people have lost their jobs in the past year. We cannot simply ignore the fact that America is the wealthiest nation on earth while all around us are good, hard-working people struggling to put food on the table and pay the heating bill.

As for education, the great equalizer in America, the budget offers a new $2,500 credit to make college more affordable and replaces the old college student loan program with a new program run through the Department of Education which makes more money available for cheaper, including more Pell Grant money. My wife and I would never have made it through college with two bachelors degrees and one graduate degree without government assistance, and we are more than happy now to contribute to a system that allows expanded reach for others that are in the same situation we were in.

A substantial amount of money also goes to preschool programs, raising academic standards and test scores, and performance-based pay for teachers.

One of the greatest forces driving the separation of the rich and poor is also addressed in the budget: health care reform. Not only are the rich more wealthy (clearly) and more powerful, they are more healthy. While the poor delay medical care because of the cost and lose more work hours because of illness, the rich have ample health care opportunities. The budget lays out over $630 billion over the next ten years for the health care overhaul while suggesting guiding principles for Congress.

America can only be great if we are all great together. Opposing unchecked free market principles that only reward the elitist wealthy at the expense of the remaining 95% of the population is not socialism, it is a way to ensure freedom to all Americans in reality, not just in principle. The budget proposed by President Obama begins our progress toward more equality for all our citizens.