Year: 1995

What’s un-Christian about the Christian right

Much of the Christian Coalition’s political agenda conflicts with the true meaning of Christianity: self-sacrifice, helping those in need, and universal love. The group favors a $500 tax credit per child, regardless of income, yet it does not favor the Earned Income Tax Credit.

There is something very strange about the Christian Coalition’s “Contract With the American Family,” released with much fanfare in May. The document says a lot about the usual conservative agenda–tax credits as rewards for doing right, abolishing the Department of Education, policing the Internet, and so on. But there’s little of the thing you’d most expect to find. There’s not one word that Jesus himself actually said.

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If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?

Throughout the tumult of the elections last year political commentators were perplexed by a stubborn fact. The economy was performing splendidly, at least according to the standard measurements. Productivity and employment were up; inflation was under control. The World Economic Forum, in Switzerland, declared that the United States had regained its position as the most competitive economy on earth, after years of Japanese dominance.

The Clinton Administration waited expectantly, but the applause never came. Voters didn’t feel better, even though economists said they should. The economy as economists define it was booming, but the individuals who compose it–or a great many of them, at least–were not. President Bill Clinton actually sent his economic advisers on the road to persuade Americans that their experience was wrong and the indicators were right.

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Green Taxes

There’s a different way to think about tax reform that the Washington opinion establishment seems to have missed. Instead of using taxes simply to raise revenues, the government could raise … More

The Green Revenue Path

For all the talk of radical tax reform in Washington, there’s a basic question that the politicians and experts have somehow missed. The leading proposals, whether Democratic or Republican, are justified by what they wouldn’t tax — capital gains, interest income, etc. — not by what they would tax. Purporting to encourage savings and investment, these proposals would all tend to shift the burden of taxation in one way or another from income onto work — that is, onto the folks who, in Sen. Phil Gramm’s apt phrase, “pull the wagon.”

There’s a better way, one that doesn’t penalize the things — work and enterprise — that America needs most. Instead of taxing the creation of wealth, the government ought to tax the depletion of it. The federal government should be moving toward elimination of payroll and income taxes and toward taxation of the use of finite natural resources and the pollution that results. Instead of using taxes simply to raise revenues, the government could raise revenue in a way that helps reduce the need for both government and taxes.

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Corporations and the Public Interest

When people talk about “the market” they usually confuse two totally different things. One is the enterprise economy of small-scale business. The other is the corporate economy of hulking bureaucratic institutions.

Most of us love markets in the former sense. We love farmers’ markets, flea markets, New York-style street fairs, and classified ads. When we go to Washington, DC, we generally don’t eat in government cafeterias. We head over to the neat little restaurants in DuPont Circle or Adams Morgan – a “market” experience. When I was in Warsaw not long after the fall of the communist regime, the new outdoor markets really did feel like seedlings breaking through the concrete.

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TV & Me

When I was little, my uncle got me into the Peanut Gallery of the Rootie Kazootie Show, a Howdy Doody knockoff that had a brief run in the early fifties. … More

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