Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Taxes & the Bible

In my revised standard approach, my comments are in bold, while the original is in italics.

The New York TIMES / December 25, 2007

Professor Cites Bible in Faulting Tax Policies
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

At a time when some voters are asking how the religious views of candidates will shape their policies, a professor's discovery of how little tax the biggest landowners in her state paid to finance the government has prompted some other legal scholars to scour religious texts to explore the moral basis of tax and spending policies.

The professor, Susan Pace Hamill, is an expert at tax avoidance for small businesses and teaches at the University of Alabama Law School. She also holds a degree in divinity from a conservative evangelical seminary, where her master's thesis explored how Alabama's tax-and-spend policies comport with the Bible.


Professor Hamill says that since Judeo-Christian ethics "is the moral compass chosen by most Americans" it is vital that these policies be compared with the texts on which they are based. Another professor says she is the first to address this head on, inspiring work by others.

Her findings, embraced by some believers and denounced by others, has also stirred research everywhere from Arizona State to New York University into the connection between religious teachings and government fiscal practices.

Her latest effort is a book, "As Certain as Death" (Carolina Academic Press, 2007), that seeks to document how the 50 states, in contravention of her view of biblical injunctions, do more to burden the poor and relieve the rich than vice versa.

In lectures and papers, Professor Hamill has expanded on her theme, drawing objections from some critics who say that the religious obligation to care for the poor is a matter of personal morality, not public policy.

Professor Hamill asserted that 18 states seriously violate biblical principles in the way they tax and spend. She calls Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas "the sinful six" because they require the poor to pay a much larger share of their income than the rich while doing little to help the poor improve their lot.


Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, & Texas are usually thought of as links in the "Bible Belt." You'd think that they'd be more obedient to Biblical Principles, all else equal. Nevada, on the other hand, is the official Sin State. Isn't it strange that it finds itself in the same league as the rest. (I don't know what's happening with S. Dakota. Whatever happened to prairie populism?

The worst violator, in her view, is her own state of Alabama, which taxes its poor more than twice as heavily as its rich, while holding a tight rein on education spending.

The poorest fifth of Alabama families, with incomes under $13,000, pay state and local taxes that take almost 11 cents out of each dollar. The richest 1 percent, who make $229,000 or more, pay less than 4 cents out of each dollar they earn, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, an advocacy group whose numbers are generally considered
trustworthy even by many of its opponents.


In Alabama's defense, shouldn't we also look at the benefits that the poor receive?

Professor Hamill said what first drew her to the issue of fiscal policy and biblical principles was learning that Alabama timber companies, which own more than two-thirds of the land in the state, pay an annual property tax of only about 75 cents an acre.

"The Bible commands that the law promote justice because human beings are not good enough to promote justice individually on their own," she said. "To assume that voluntary charity will raise enough revenues to meet this standard is to deny the sin of greed."

Richard Teather, who teaches tax at Bournemouth University in Britain and has written on the moral dimensions of tax evasion, said that governments have publicly raised the issue of morals and taxes.

"The tax authorities say you have a moral duty to pay your taxes, but you cannot look at that in isolation," Mr. Teather said. "Over here in Britain we have a lot of tax breaks for the very wealthy, which are not generally available to most people, and quite high level taxes for the middle and upper-middle classes, so this doesn't look like a moral system."

Professor Hamill, by her reading of the New Testament, concludes that at least a mildly progressive tax system is required so that the rich make some sacrifice for the poor. She cites the statement by Jesus that "unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required, and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more."

Some of her critics, however, say that the tithes described in the Old Testament show that a flat tax, in which everyone pays the same share of their income to government, should be seen as the biblical standard.


doesn't it also say something about what to do about widows, i.e., stone them?

Gary Palmer, president of the Alabama Policy Institute, agreed that taxes on the poor were much too high in the state, but said that the solution was not to raise taxes on the wealthy, but to lower them on the poor. He characterized Alabama's sales taxes on food and medicine as immoral.

Some of Professor Hamill's critics, in letters and e-mail to her and others, argue that she just wants to soak the rich, wrapping what they called her socialistic views in biblical cloth.


hey, wasn't JC a "socialist" of some sort?

Until Professor Hamill focused on fiscal policies in light of Judeo-Christian moral principles, most scholarly work on religion and taxes was largely devoted to the issue of tax evasion. That was prompted, in part, by a 1992 updating of the Catholic catechism that listed tax evasion as a sin and by enforcement actions aimed at pacifists who refused to pay war taxes.

Professor Hamill said her research found that just one state, Minnesota, came within reach of the principles she identified, because its tax system is only slightly regressive and it spends heavily on helping the poor, especially through public education.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.

17 comments:

  1. Several interesting concepts flow from the focus of Prof. Hamill's work and the criticisms it evokes. First, we need to recognize that the religiosity that one professes is not necessarily the religiosity, nor morality, one may practice. Prof. Hamill has simply discovered that politicians use the badge of religion a means of identifying themselves as part of the masses, who remember are readily shown to be asses.

    It is interesting to note that some of Prof Hamill's critics fall back on that most hackneyed of claims that asking the rich to pay their fair share is tantamount to "soaking" the rich. God forbid that the rich should take a turn at the soaking they wring from the poor. Or is that a hosing they've been giving out?

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  2. well,

    of course Jesus said "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's."

    but it is rather foolish, it seems to me, to talk about taxes from a moral or religious sense.

    when it is so easy to show that taxes are needed to pay for the things we want government to do. and that the people who have the money are the ones who will have to pay the taxes.

    you don't, if you are smart, tax the poor because they don't have good tax lawyers, because you end by shooting your economy in the foot.

    what is wrong with current tax policy is that in fact the rich and powerful are too stupid to understand what is in their own self interest.

    actually, this was something jesus tried to explain to the rich of his time. the question about morality is ... well, hell, even jesus left that question as an exercise for the reader.

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  3. Well, it looks as if we in MInnesota have more work to do, if the taxes here are regressive at all.

    There is a lot in the Bible about caring for the poor, the vulnerable, widows and orphans, strangers and prisoners. In the OT, the admonitions are addressed to the Jewish government. The kings and the rich are told quite clearly that oppressing and neglecting and unfairly judging the poor makes God very, very angry. As Amos tells us, God hates the worship of people who do not care for the poor. And it goes both ways, according to the Bible. Somewhere in Proverbs is the line Cornel West likes: he who oppresses the poor hates his Maker.

    The NT was written in countries occupied by the Romans. It apparently never occurred to Jesus or his followers to talk to the Romans about morality. So in the NT, the emphasis is on personal action rather than government action. The conclusion one draws from this is -- if believers have government power, they should use it to help the poor. If they have no access to government power, they should do what they can as individuals. In either case, if you do not use what resources you have to help the poor and vulnerable, God will send you to hell. This is said very clearly in Matthew 25.

    Of course, there is another tradition in Christianity which says that all that matters is you personally believe in Jesus and do what the minister or priest tells you.

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  4. P.S. I am not a religious person, but I grew up with a mother who knew all the parts of the Bible about helping the poor and quoted them. She was a social worker, who worked in Chicago during the Great Depression and in New York in the 1960s and 70s. According to her, "We are put on this earth to help one another," a good summary of some parts of the Bible. And she said, "The problem with the poor is, they have no money. All other problems are secondary."

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  5. eleanor

    while on the whole i agree with you (i think) it may be worth mentioning that Jesus does not seem to have favored forcing other people to do the right thing (Matt 25 not withstanding).

    i will vote for pro-social policies probably out of a sense of morality, but the Right (in spite of their religious supporters) claims that it is theft for those of us with moral feelings to take money away from other people to pay for them. they think we should rely on private charity and church membership.

    while i think that it might be nevertheless moral for a society to democratically tax itself for moral purposes, i think a better argument can be made that social spending makes the country stronger and ultimately makes the rich richer. this is in principle a provable argument, and it avoids the problematic good samaritan who forces at gunpoint the inkeeper to care for the fallen man at his own expense.

    that said, i don't see any problem with using religious feelings to sway voters to one candidate or another... if you don't mind the occasional religious war.

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  6. and while it may have been true in your mother's day that the problem with the poor was that they had no money, i am not sure that is still the problem.

    aside from the truly poor, the problem with the poor today is that they have no meaning in their lives. they worship money like the rest of us, and since they can't get it, they find their lives pointless.

    add to that the jobs that are virtual slavery, or body and soul destroying

    and housing that is the free at last equivalent of slave shacks in blighted neighborhoods...

    and you might begin to suspect that the problem with the poor is not going to be solved simply by giving them more money.

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  7. Coberly:

    I think you are right to say that political and economic arguments for a more equitable society are better than religious arguments.

    I think my mother was right in saying the cure for poverty is money. Why would the rich defend their money so very fiercely, if it wasn't amazingly useful stuff?

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  8. eleanor

    money's useful. and needed. but more is needed.

    we need to figure out how to create a society where "poverty" is not degrading in fact, and not felt so by either the rich or the poor.

    one reason why i get a little antsy with my liberal friends who seem to think that all the poor need is a higher credit card limit.

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  9. BTW & FWIW, in no way do I endorse JC's ideas. I'm one of those A people. -- JD

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  10. Alabama tried to change their tax policy a couple of years ago to one more in tune with what Professor Hamill but that was voted down.

    As far as South Dakota goes, taxes are mainly sales tax and property tax with a few fees. There is no income tax and business taxes are pretty low

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  11. econoclast

    i lost track of what an A people is, so i can't tell if you are being eronic.

    but whatever you think about the divinity of jesus, you do no credit to yourself as an intellectual by saying "in no way do i endorse JC's ideas."

    as ideas for social sanity or mental hygiene it would be hard to find any that work better.

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  12. I wrote: >>BTW & FWIW, in no way do I endorse JC's ideas. I'm one of those A people.<<

    coberly responds: >lost track of what an A people is, so i can't tell if you are being eronic.<

    I wasn't being ironic. Mostly I was fixing it so that blogger would send me copies of comments. But I did use the abbreviation A (for agnostic) simply because I was making fun of myself for using so many abbreviations.

    >but whatever you think about the divinity of jesus, you do no credit to yourself as an intellectual by saying "in no way do i endorse JC's ideas."<

    I have three problems with Christ's ideas:

    (1) I am not familiar enough with the New Testament to know what they were exactly (that is, I am ignorant);

    (2) those ideas seem to be subject to a wide variety of interpretations, from the left to the right of the standardly-defined political spectrum and also from the Roman Catholic to the charismatic perspectives; and

    3) I think it's a mistake to endorse anyone's ideas completely.

    Jim

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  13. Jim, coberley,
    Then you have the added conundrum in that the words of Christ were in fact the words of his various desciples, written hundreds of years after his "death"(?). In addition to which, assuming that one could attribute to Christ those values most often described as christian ideals, he would seem to stand outside of the mainstream religious ideologies of today. Christ is noted to have promoted an inclusive humanism with his preachings, if preaching is even the right word to use.

    Religious ideals are often in conflict with the intentions of their professed adherents. The ideals are humanistic, but the adherents frequently have great difficulty exhibiting humane behavior. So why would any one expect a fair and balanced tax code to be supported by a political class that bases much of its policy making on religious ideals? That's little more than the public face of the political process, that it has any ideals at all beyond the personal interests of the political class.

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  14. jim

    re 2 nd 3

    you would like jc then, he agrees with you. he goes out of his way to leave his ideas open to interpretation: he spoke always in parables

    "lest the wicked hear, and hearing turn, and i should save them."

    he didn't think much of authority, either, even his own:

    many will preach in my name, so as to fool the very elect.

    call no man father.

    judge a tree by its fruit.

    but he's not being cute. he appears to have some definite ideas about right and wrong... he just seems to prefer you work it out yourself.

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  15. coberly writes:
    JC "goes out of his way to leave his ideas open to interpretation: he spoke always in parables."

    exactly like the oracle at Delphi!

    JD

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  16. jd

    no. not exactly.


    jack

    i think i agree with what you are saying, but "bases much of its policy making on religious ideals" is probably wrong. bases much of its rhetoric to appeal to the superstitions that underly religious ideas.

    unless, of course, you think that a policy against murder is based on a religious ideal.

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  17. I can see that that line could have been misinterpreted. The particular sentence has to be read in the context of the entire paragraph. Yes, our political class evidences little more than a cynical rhetoric when they begin spouting their religious ideals. The list of absurdities in this context goes on endlessly, but is best represented by the fervor for capital punishment in some of our most religiously fervent "leaders."

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