Jesus is getting pulled out of the sky yet again to play mascot to a new liberal WWJD policy push.
This time it’s off to the South and questions of unjust taxation. While Reese Witherspoon settles down with her life’s love, Alabama is asking, as one paper put it, “What would Jesus do about [the] tax system?”
The question is floating in Virginia as well, where Virginian-Pilot columnist Patrick Lackey decries the state’s “regressive tax system” that “piles misfortune on misfortune” upon the poor.
“Families earning less than $16,000 pay 9.1 percent of their earnings in state and local taxes,” Lackey writes, “nearly twice the effective rate for [the] richest 1 percent.” It’s worse for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s relatives. “Alabama families earning less than $13,000 pay 10.3 percent of their income in state and local taxes, nearly three times the rate for the richest taxpayers.”
Of course, the comparison contains a bit of a red herring to start with. You can make comparisons all day long about disparities in “effective rates,” but dollar for dollar the “rich” fork over gobs more money. Nowhere is this clearer than with the federal income tax.
Notes WND editor Joseph Farah in his new book, “Taking America Back”:
- According to IRS statistics, before the Bush plan was implemented – the top 1 percent of American income earners paid a disproportionate 34.8 percent of federal tax dollars. … Compare the burden of this 1 percent to the share paid by the bottom 50 percent of the taxpayers. They pay only 4.2 percent of federal taxes collected – even though they earn 13.7 percent of the income.
If the question is equity among taxpayers, the rich, as a rule, get the shaft – not the poor. But you wouldn’t necessarily pick that up from the rhetoric going around.
“If [Alabama] continues to tax the poor in such an inequitable and oppressive fashion, then that reflection of our citizenry is not consistent with Christian love, compassion, mercy or justice so many of us espouse,” penned Presbyterian Sunday school teacher Bob Montgomery in a widely distributed op-ed.
My guess is that doesn’t also go for the rich, who pay vastly greater sums in terms of absolute dollars. (Remember, “rich” can mean a household income of around $270,000 – hardly a big sum if living in a large metropolitan area.)
If we’re wondering what Jesus would say, I’m betting he would say with his brother James, “if you show partiality you are committing sin …” (James 2:9). Since the overall tax burden in this country hits the rich the heaviest, isn’t that de facto partiality to the poor? The lowest income earners don’t even pay federal income tax. (The darker corners of my soul wish for that kind of partiality, I must confess.)
That said, let me state that I still think Lackey and Montgomery are correct.
The state and local taxes in question are awful – even un-Christian. But the remedy isn’t to “shift the tax burden from the backs of the poor,” as Lackey writes. That’s just as bad, because “shift” merely means hitting the rich with the bill.
As Thomas Sowell has argued, “Tax issues are not simply about whether one class pays more than another, but are also about the repercussions of particular kinds of taxes on economic development and national employment, which affects everyone.”
Shifting the tax burden to Uncle Scrooge and his upper middle-class friends in the long run only hurts the poor. Burdensome taxation harms government revenues because rich folks stop investing their cash in businesses, etc. – and that in turn hurts poor folks who would otherwise benefit from those jobs.
If we’re being equitable about it, rich and poor alike should be taxed at a rate much lower than present rates. How low? God seems to manage running all of Christendom on just a tithe (that many Christians don’t even bother to pay), and, as Ray Stevens so eloquently put it, “If 10 percent is good enough for Jesus, it ought to be enough for Uncle Sam.” If the government were actually abiding by the limits set in the Constitution, such a rate would just about cut it.
The question is: Would 10 percent be good enough for the liberals who use Jesus like a prop in their ad campaigns? Doubtful. Their Christ is often much more like a baptized Marx in a white robe casting out demon dollars and running capitalist pigs off cliffs.
This exploitation of Jesus is beyond shameless. Clearly, in answer to Ronnie VanZant’s question in “Sweet Home Alabama,” no, their conscience does not bother them.
Instead of shifting the tax burden to the rich, Jesus would lower it for all: Tax unto others as you would have them tax unto you. What “tax the rich, not the poor” folks are proposing is roughly opposite of what Jesus would actually support. And that’s why I can almost hear him saying now, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
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