SPQR

Wal-Mart

I don't know Pablo, at least I don't think I do, but he has made a comment or two here before. This is what he said on his blog the other day.

And I disagree.

Has anyone heard about what they're trying to do to Wal-Mart in Maryland? Force them to pay MORE for health care coverage of their employees. That's right what's more fascist than to TELL a private company how they should run their affairs? Hmmm?

yeah...the answer is very little...if any.

Of course "they did not set out to single out Wal-Mart" when they passed the law, but that's even more ridiculous. Look, those on the left are always ALWAYS touting that you can't legislate morality blah blah blah. Yet, what reason do they have for wanting to force corps to spend at least 8% of payroll on healthcare benefits? It's the moral thing to do to give everyone health care coverage. Well, you know what's gonna happen. Wal-Mart is just going to reduce net pay to employees by 8%.

Ensuring that workers are not exploited is a shining example of virtue.

Calvin College faculty protests Pres. Bush's commencement

Covenant's reasonably close theological brethren at Calvin are reacting to President Bush's upcoming commencement speech in a couple of ways.

I wonder what the response would be at Covenant. The article claimed 80% of Calvin's student body is Republican. I would imagine that Covenant's is similar, perhaps a bit higher. I also know that there are (or were) plenty of people who critically viewed policies from the left and right, and I would like to think that they would speak out if visited by the President.

Like most colleges, I think that the faculty of Covenant has proportionally more political liberals than the student body.

DR CAFTA

My school's senior class is heading off on their big trip to Costa Rica this weekend, but the capital San Jose, into which they are flying, is expected to be shut down Sunday due to DR CAFTA (Dominican Republic and Central America Free Trade Area) protests.

This seems like a good opportunity to teach them a lesson about globalization, so I prepared a little reading for them so that they will understand the protestors they will encounter.

What do you think?

Anti CAFTA perspective of the protestors you will see:

Speak out for the people of Central America!
CAFTA is a proposed free trade agreement, modeled on NAFTA, between the United States and the five Central American countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Like other free trade agreements, CAFTA would benefit mainly corporations and their stockholders, rather than ensuring the labor rights of people who work for those corporations. CAFTA would encourage privatization of public services, thereby increasing the cost of living and the resulting gap between rich and poor.
CAFTA would be especially harmful to women and small farmers, whose work is devalued in a free trade economy. Subsidized imports would take the place of the products sold largely by women, many of whom are expected to turn to work in factories. Women already constitute the majority of the world's poor, and the passage of CAFTA would only add to their number.

Ron Sider and Social Issues

Check out this World interview with the always articulate Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action.

As far as I know, Gene Edward Vieth has never publicly disagreed with the GOP. The guys over at Subcurrents had a pretty insightful criticism of his World articles and Postmodern Times a while back.

What do you think? Austina gave me one of his books last Christmas, and I recently got another one.

Resisting labels
INTERVIEW: Ron Sider speaks on abortion, health care, poverty, and calls for Democrats to "move to the center" on social issues | by Gene Edward Veith

Ronald J. Sider, Professor of Theology, Holistic Ministry and Public Policy and Director of the Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, is also President of Evangelicals for Social Action. He has published 27 books, including Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, called by Christianity Today one of the 100 most influential religious books of the 20th century. He is also the publisher of PRISM magazine and a contributing editor of Christianity Today and Sojourners.

Mr. Sider's new book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience (Baker, 2005), charges that "blatant disobedience" to the Bible has become "widespread in evangelical circles." Last year he was quoted as saying he was "within a hair's breadth of concluding that the [Bush] faith-based initiative is a cynical cover for ignoring the poor." WORLD has criticized over the years some of Mr. Sider's ideas, and we wanted to give him an opportunity here to make his case.

WORLD: You are pro-life. Given the millions of children slaughtered by abortionists, how can there be a more important social issue? How can Christians take seriously liberals' claim to stand up for the poor and marginalized, given their fanatical pro-abortion stance?

SIDER: I do not say that there is any issue that is "more important" than a pro-life movement to reduce abortion. What I do say—and so does the new official public policy document of the National Association of Evangelicals—is that anybody who wants to be genuinely Christian in their political engagement must embrace a "biblically balanced agenda." That means we must search in the Bible to see what it tells us about God's concerns. When we do that, we find that God cares deeply about the family and the poor, the sanctity of human life and racial justice and creation care. If we are going to be biblical, we must have a biblically balanced agenda.

WORLD: You make a strong biblical case that Christians should help the poor. But isn't "compassionate conservatism," with its personal involvement, faith-based initiatives, and individual attention to human needs, of more genuine help to the poor than welfare bureaucracies that subsidize poverty and therefore keep people poor?

SIDER: I have been an enthusiastic supporter of President Bush's faith-based initiative. I would be delighted if a revival of compassion would sweep through the churches with the result that every family on welfare would be "adopted" by a Christian family that provided more generously for their needs, and loved, prayed, and supported them into growing self-sufficiency and economic independence.

What I deplore is a failure to have the right kind of public policies that guarantee that any American who works full-time responsibly would get out of poverty and have affordable health insurance. Millions of Americans work full-time and do not even earn enough to reach the poverty level. Forty-five million lack health insurance. For the richest nation in history, that is blatantly immoral.

WORLD: You criticize Christians who support policies that are "pro-rich," meaning economic policies that are pro-business and pro-capitalism. But doesn't the evidence show overwhelmingly—for example, in nations like India—that free markets do more to eliminate poverty than socialistic welfare states?

SIDER: I am not anti-business or anti-capitalism. Read Chapter 8 of my Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (the fifth edition came out in April) where I explicitly argue that a market economy is the best framework we know today for organizing economic life. I also point out that the embrace of a market framework is the primary reason the poverty level has dropped dramatically in Asia in the last couple of decades.

What I object to are tax policies like those of the last few years that give about 70 percent of the tax cuts to the richest 20 percent. In fact, 26 percent went to the richest 1 percent. I embrace programs like expanded Pell grants so kids from poor families can afford college. I support expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit that rewards work and adds another 40 cents for every dollar earned by very low-income workers. I support removing the huge marriage penalty that still exists in the EITC. President Bush has rightly removed almost all other marriage penalties in the tax code, but not this one that hurts the working poor.

WORLD: You say that evangelicals should be working for "structural changes" in society and in the economy. Typically, those who demand structural changes are pushing for more governmental control of the economy. What structural changes do you think we should work for?

SIDER: In my chapter in Toward an Evangelical Public Policy I make it very clear that in a fallen world, centralized, unbalanced power is always dangerous. So I favor limited government. But that does not mean libertarianism. I develop a biblical argument that the king (government) is called by God to do justice for the poor. The key Hebrew words (mishphat and zedeqah) refer to both fair legal systems and fair economic systems where everybody has access to the productive resources so that if they act responsibly they can earn their own way and be dignified members of society.

What I want is a limited government that uses effective structural measures that discourage dangerous concentration of wealth in a few hands. I would have thought that conservatives would be worried about the current situation in the U.S. where the richest 1 percent have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. I also favor wise structural measures (for example, Pell grants) that strengthen everybody's access to productive resources.

WORLD: Your Sojourners colleague Jim Wallis also has a bestselling book, God's Politics. Both of you call for a combination of conservative theology and liberal politics. Given, as you say, that liberals drove out Christians with their aggressive secularism, how would such an alliance be possible?

SIDER: I do not call for "conservative theology and liberal politics."

As an evangelical, I do subscribe wholeheartedly to historic orthodox theology. But when it comes to politics, labels do not fit me very well. On issues of abortion, euthanasia, family and marriage, the label "conservative" is accurate for me. When it comes to health care, overcoming racism, and overcoming poverty, the label "progressive or liberal" often fits. But I have absolutely no commitment to ideologies of left or right. I am unconditionally committed to Jesus Christ and biblical authority. And I try to get the best, most objective socioeconomic data I can find.

WORLD: What is the religious left's strategy to gain electoral victory?

SIDER: I am not a part of some "religious left" and have no interest in seeing it gain electoral victory.

WORLD: Democratic Party leaders seem eager to gain votes by adopting some of the rhetoric of the evangelical left. Christian conservatives are frequently asked if they feel the Republican Party is "using" them; how are pro-abortion Democrats using your work?

SIDER: Political parties use us when we uncritically identify with one party and fail to critique its failures on the basis of a biblically balanced agenda. I wish evangelicals who endorse the Republican Party would be far more vocal in promoting a biblically balanced concern for economic justice, creation care, and racial justice in the Republican Party.

If all the Democrats do in their current soul-searching about the 2004 election is adopt a bit of religious and moral rhetoric, I will be among the first to denounce this as superficial hypocrisy. What I hope the Democratic Party does is genuinely move to the center on issues of family, marriage, the sanctity of human life, and the importance of faith-based organizations in overcoming social problems. I wish Democrats would support substantive measures to restrict abortion and strengthen wholesome two-parent families and the historic understanding of marriage.

My norm will always be: How does a biblically balanced agenda call me to critique and challenge every political party and ideology? Jesus alone is my Lord. —•

Drug Frenzy

Here is the next installment of Paul Krugman's indictment of our broken health care system. It ran a couple of days ago, but I was out of town.

A Serious Drug Problem
By PAUL KRUGMAN

There was a brief flurry of outrage when Congress passed the 2003 Medicare bill. The news media reported on the scandalous vote in the House of Representatives: Republican leaders violated parliamentary procedure, twisted arms and perhaps engaged in bribery to persuade skeptical lawmakers to change their votes in a session literally held in the dead of night.

Later, the media reported on another scandal: it turned out that the administration had deceived Congress about the bill's likely cost.

But the real scandal is what's in the legislation. It's an object lesson in how special interests hold America's health care system hostage.

The new Medicare law subsidizes private health plans, which have repeatedly failed to deliver promised cost savings. It creates an unnecessary layer of middlemen by requiring that the drug benefit be administered by private insurers. The biggest giveaway is to Big Pharma: the law specifically prohibits Medicare from using its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices.

Outside the United States, almost every government bargains over drug prices. And it works: the Congressional Budget Office says that foreign drug prices are 35 to 55 percent below U.S. levels. Even within the United States, Veterans Affairs is able to negotiate discounts of 50 percent or more, far larger than those the Medicare actuary expects the elderly to receive under the new plan.

After the drug bill's passage, Jacob Hacker and Theodore Marmor of Yale University estimated that a sensible bill could have delivered twice as much coverage for the same price.

Needless to say, apologists for the law insist that the prohibition on price negotiations had nothing to do with catering to special interests - that it was a matter of principle, of preserving incentives to innovate. How can we refute this defense?

One way is to challenge claims that the pharmaceutical industry needs high prices to innovate. In her book "The Truth About the Drug Companies," Marcia Angell, the former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, shows convincingly that drug companies spend far more on marketing than they do on research - and that much of the marketing is designed to sell "me, too" drugs, which are no better than the cheaper drugs they replace. It should be possible to pay less for medicine, yet encourage more real innovation.

Another answer is to point to the haste with which key players in the drug bill's passage cashed in - making the claims that they wrote a pharma-friendly Medicare bill out of genuine concern for the public's welfare look ludicrous.

Let's look at just two examples.

Billy Tauzin, who shepherded the drug bill through when he was a member of Congress, now heads the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the all-powerful industry lobby group, for an estimated $2 million a year. In his new job, he's making novel arguments against allowing Americans to buy cheaper drugs from Canada: Al Qaeda, he suggests, might use fake Viagra tablets to get anthrax into this country.

Meanwhile, Thomas Scully, the former Medicare administrator - who threatened to fire Medicare's chief actuary if he gave Congress the real numbers on the drug bill's cost - was granted a special waiver from the ethics rules. This allowed him to negotiate for a future health industry lobbying job at the very same time he was pushing the drug bill.

If all this sounds like a story of a corrupt deal created by a corrupt system, it is. And it was a very expensive deal indeed. According to the Medicare trustees, the fiscal gap over the next 75 years created by the 2003 law - not the financing gap for Medicare as a whole, just the additional gap created by legislation passed 18 months ago - will be $8.7 trillion.

That's about three times the amount President Bush proposes to save by cutting middle-class Social Security benefits.

In fact, I have a suggestion for Mr. Bush. One way to prove that he's really sincere about addressing long-run fiscal problems, that his calls for benefit cuts aren't just part of an ideological agenda, would be to put Social Security aside for a while and fix his own Medicare program. Oh, never mind.

Nonetheless, someone will eventually have to take on the health care special interests. Who might do that? I'll write about that in the next installment of this series.

Biblical implications of Social Security changes

Here are a few excerpts from Jim Wallis' email today regarding President Bush's proposed changes to Social Security.

The Judeo-Christian faith tradition has much to say about intergenerational commitments. The Old and New Testaments could not testify more clearly that we must "honor thy father and thy mother" - and care for widows and orphans, the ill, and the disabled. And there is no trust more sacred to biblical faith than the injunctions to care not only for our immediate families but also the larger family of all humanity, especially the least, the last, and the lost. In Jesus' words from Matthew 25, "As you have done to the least of these, you have done to me."

Privatizing Social Security threatens to dismantle our nation's commitment and breach a covenant held between child and parent, worker and retiree, employed and unemployed, able and disabled.

Social Security is an expression of national values - and for Christians, our biblical priorities.

Fostering dignity for families, children, and elders in need is the true measure of our compassion, the true measure of our commitment to - and covenant with - the common good. Those who want to radically change a system that has worked so well are saying, in principle, that "me" is better than "we," that private solutions are better than shared responsibility. They want to weaken and shrink the places where we solve problems in common. They would rather each of us seek our own private solution to the issues of security, which always works to the detriment of the most vulnerable.

We are intimately bound across lines of age, economics, and community. Let us not be a nation where "Father and mother are treated with contempt in you; the alien residing within you suffers extortion; the orphan and the widow are wronged in you" (Ezekiel 22:7).

The term 'reform' implies improvement, so I'll stick with Social Security 'change'.

This is a section of a WSJ: Classroom Edition article that my economics class read today:

For many people, said Franklin Roosevelt in 1934, old age is "the most tragic of all hazards." Thousands of old people wrote to Washington asking for help. "I'm a 60 yeaar-old widow greatly in need of medical aid, food and fuel," wrote a Virgini woman. "I pray that you would have pity on me."

Proponents in the US wondered why men and women who had been diligent, thrifty workers should suffer hunger and insecurity in their old age. In a letter to an editor, a postal worker pointed out that horses owned by the federal government lived out their old age on full rations. "For the purpose of drawing a pension," he declared, "it would have been better if I had been born a horse than a human being."