The Special Olympics and What’s Wrong with our Country

The Special Olympics was in the news lately, because the Department of Education wanted to cut funding for it.

Apparently, the Department of Education has been a major funder of the Special Olympics.  The Department wanted to end funding for it, because the Special Olympics is a private organization that receives huge amounts of private donations, and the Department wanted to cut federal spending.  But people complained, and the money was restored. 

Our federal government is $22 trillion in debt, and we as a nation expect that every worthwhile cause, every human problem, every human need, must be addressed with money from the government. 

Our country was founded on the principles of human liberty, unalienable rights.  The government existed to secure those rights.  As a consequence, the federal government was small, only concerned about things like defense, coinage, and the Post Office.

With great liberty comes great responsibility, so we had the moral code of the Ten Commandments, Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  All from the Bible.

But that was all ruled to be religious, and we can’t have that, so now we have secularism.  So instead of loving your neighbor, we are told just don’t hate him.  Tolerate him, or ignore him.

Now we can’t spend enough money to protect our people from each other or themselves.  We say we don’t want socialism, but we want our government to do everything for us.  We can no longer take care of ourselves.

banning bump stocks and trucks

A nationwide ban on bump stocks has finally gone into effect.  Bump stocks were used in the 2017 mass shooting that killed 57 people.   The White House was asked if the ban applied to criminals and the black market.  A spokesman said: The law is the law.  We have no doubt but that they will comply.

In other news, France has finally banned all trucks from its country after a truck was used to kill 87 people two years ago.  There had been protests from several retail organizations saying that trucks had beneficial uses, but the French Parliament said that the safety of its people was its highest priority.

In related news, a number of Mideast and African countries have joined together in a rare act of solidarity to prohibit the manufacture, sale, and possession of fertilizer, a primary ingredient in the making of bombs, which kill hundreds if not thousands of people a year.  When asked how they will grow their crops, they replied: We must think of the safety of our people first. 

Beware of the graduated income tax (in Illinois) - a letter sent to the paper

The news media are flush with an advertisement promoting the graduated tax in Illinois.  And the main point of the ad is that 97% of the people will not be affected by it. 

Now the Tribune has a big article about a “poll shows support for Pritzker’s income tax.”  I hope the Tribune follows up with an editorial explaining to its readers the problems lurking below the surface here.

1)         Pritzker wants people to vote for something that doesn’t affect them.  He wants people to vote for something that affects OTHER people.  Pritzker calls this a fair tax, but I don’t think it’s fair to have people totally unaffected by something vote for that same something for other people.

2)         Once this graduated tax system is in place, it will be very easy to adjust tax rates and income levels in the future for everybody.  When everybody pays the same rate, politicians are accountable to everybody.  When everybody can pay a different rate, politicians are accountable to almost nobody, because the groups adversely affected will almost always be a smaller proportion of the population. 

THE answer to the DREAMER question: a letter to the newspaper

The whole DREAMER question should be easy to resolve and in a bipartisan manner (Senators introduce bill to give Dreamers path to citizenship, March 27). 

Give legal status with a path to citizenship in exchange for securing the border.

What does securing the border mean?  Democrats don’t want a wall.  Fine.  Give them 3 months to secure the border.  Six month? 

A secure border would mean that we no longer have a problem with people trying to cross our southern border.  Some may parachute over or be stuffed in the back of a truck, but we have no more night videos of lines of people crossing over or hordes massing and climbing our fences.

If the Democrats can’t secure the border their way, then we build the wall.  Full funding.  When the wall is completed and the border is secure, then dreamers can have full legal recognition and a path to citizenship.

smoking and voting in Illinois - a letter to the newspaper

Newspapers not only report the news, but they also help create news, like the editorial (March 15) that pushes to have the age raised in Illinois for people to be able to buy tobacco products.  It will save lives and help keep people off the harmful habit of smoking. 

This is all fine.  I have no problem with that. 

I do have a problem that nobody who advocates for raising the age for buying tobacco, alcohol, and guns sees a problem with 18 year olds being able to vote in our elections.

 

The idea behind raising the age for tobacco, alcohol, and guns is that someone under the age of 21 is too immature, too much governed by emotions rather than reason, or just doesn’t know enough to make wise decisions about their personal lives and behavior.  Yet we deem them mature enough, reasonable enough, and wise enough to make decisions for the sake of our country.

Nobody sees a problem here?

So What Exactly Does Gender Equity Look Like?

Gender equity is one of those phrases that sounds good in the abstract, but like a lot of rules, there also seem to be some exceptions that a general rule won’t allow.

For example, if there is to be no discrimination on the basis of sex, then what do we do with women’s sports, women’s colleges, sororities. women’s professional groups, women’s locker rooms and bathrooms.  This is why the ERA didn’t pass.  There were too many questions about what this would look like in the future.

There is one issue about gender equity, to which I believe we need to give more thought.

Only women can have children.  Whether you believe God made it that way or it is the product of mindless evolution, this is what we have.  On average, every woman needs to have 2.1 children for a society to maintain itself

You may say there are too many people in the world, so we can use a smaller population.  The problem is that a lower birth rate only gives you a greater number of older people who need to be supported and fewer people to do that.

In the past, this was a major reason why immigration was considered so important: to provide workers who would pay into the system.  But now we have family immigration, where immigrants can bring in their entire families, so frankly it no longer helps the demographics. 

In the name of equality, we as a society have denigrated motherhood.  Not openly but in many quiet subtle ways. Having a career is more important than having a family.

A friend posted this on her Facebook page: “Your children are the greatest gift God will give to you, and their souls the heaviest responsibility He will place in your hands. . . .  When you are old, nothing else you’ve done will have mattered as much.”

Rent Control: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

I have been surprised by the push for rent control that I have been reading about in the papers.  I’m old enough to remember that this was tried before on a large scale back in the 70s, though I didn’t pay as much attention to it as I would today.

I do know that it didn’t work out well.  You want to control the income of landlords, but will you also control their taxes and maintenance costs?  What will probably happen is that you will see a mass conversion of rental apartments into condos. 

People become landlords to make money.  If you make that more difficult, they will adapt.  And you will end up with fewer apartments to rent.  And people will still be displaced. 

Violence in a Free Society

England, which has very strict gun control, is experiencing a dramatic increase in knife violence (March 8).

The debate that is going on there about this is very instructive.  It centers on two matters:

1)         Reducing violence depends on an increased police presence to discourage violence.

2)         Reducing violence depends on government programs and money to provide alternative activities and services to care for bored and troubled people.

Note that both approaches require massive amounts of government spending to take care of people who apparently cannot take care of themselves. 

Stricter gun control no doubt will save some lives, but it won’t solve the problem of gun violence or violence in general.   There are laws against drugs, but our country is flooded with them.  Laws only change the source for the item in question. 

Our Founders knew that liberty comes with great responsibility.  That is why for almost 200 years the moral code of our country was the Ten Commandments, Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto other as you would have them do unto you, all from the Bible.  Mass acts of violence are a new thing in our country.  It wasn’t unheard of in the past, but it was uncommon enough that nobody thought that we had this huge problem in our country.

The best secularism can produce is tolerance, which can mean no more than to ignore your neighbor.

When I was a kid, our country openly acknowledged God both in public life and our schools.  And we felt safe.  We didn’t worry all the time about locking our cars and our homes or walking alone at night.  Now that the courts ruled that God has no place in our public schools and life, the costs of keeping us safe are enormous. 

Is this too simple?  Actually, no.  We believed in self-responsibility and self-control, from our Christian heritage.  Secularism doesn’t do that.

The Bigger Dangers of a Graduated Income Tax in Illinois

In making his pitch to voters in Illinois, Governor Pritzker uses some common tactics that people should reject, because one day it can used against them too.

The first tactic is: I’ll give you a tax cut if you vote for a tax increase on somebody else.  Such a deal, who could resist it?  Someday you could be the one that other people are voting against.  It doesn’t have to be on taxes.  It could be school vouchers, a free speech case, who knows?  In this case, the wealthier people are the minority who don’t have enough votes to win here.  It’s easy for people to vote for what other people should do.  I don’t think that is the best or even a good way to run a country or a state.

The second tactic is: He tells you what he plans to do, but the structure he wants to create will allow him or anyone else to change it later on however they like with a lot less trouble.

Now with a flat income tax, any changes in tax policy affect all votes, and politicians are held accountable to everybody.  By changing the tax structure to a graduated tax, it doesn’t lock in whatever Pritzker wants, but it allows the legislators to make any tax rates they want.  Pritzker will not be governor for life, and even so, he can always change his mind in the future, citing new developments.  But the structure will then be in place to raise taxes however they like.

Should the Census Ask a Question about Citizenship?

Every ten years, our nation conducts a census to see who’s living here and how many of them there are.  But this isn’t done out of curiosity.  There is a reason. 

The census determines the number of representatives a state has in Congress and the number of electoral votes a state has in the Presidential election. 

The question is being raised whether the country has the right to know how many of the people living in any state are citizens.  Or, to put it another way, should people who are not citizens, whether they are here legally or not, have a say in how our government runs.  If the answer is yes, then why do we even have citizenship?  And why is voting limited to citizens? 

Most recently, a judge ruled that asking for a person’s citizen status in the census violates the Constitution, because the Constitution requires “that the census accurately count the U.S. population.”  But the judge fails to explain why such a question would hinder that.  The census is not asking only citizens to fill it out.

The fact is that certain politicians want illegal residents counted in the census to bolster their state’s representation in Congress and their voice in the Presidential election.  It would also increase their funding from the federal government. 

Tariffs, Trade, and Trade Deficits - a letter sent to the Wall Street Journal

Much has been written about tariffs lately, and there are few people who write about them who favor them.

We forget that we didn’t even have an income tax until 1913, and that taxes on imports paid for almost entire federal budget for most of our nation’s history.

Apparently taxing imports hasn’t hurt consumers as much as the detractors claimed it would, since imports have increased a lot in our country. 

But let’s cut to the chase.

The purpose of tariffs is to keep jobs in the United States.  Period.  You can always make something cheaper somewhere in the world, so jobs will always leave our country for cheaper production costs elsewhere.  Try to find anything made in America anymore. 

When we made everything here, good paying jobs were plentiful and middle-class jobs could support a family on one income.  You could always buy foreign products, and they always cost more, and nobody cared, because you were buying true foreign products, like French wine or Swiss chocolate.  They were not American products made somewhere else and sent back here.

The single greatest thing we can do for our economy is to bring all the jobs back here.  When people aren’t working, we lose twice: we lose the taxes on their incomes, and we usually pay them while they’re not working.

We lost the jobs when we stopped taxing imports, and the way to bring them back is to do it again.  There will be some adjustments in our economy, because economies adapt to what you give them.  But taxes on imports are a voluntary tax.  You don’t have to pay them, if there is an American alternative, which is the goal.  And, of course, government revenue from tariffs reduces the need for income taxes.  It only doesn’t look that way, because the government is on a mission to spend as much money as possible.

Critics of tariffs claim that American producers only want them in order to stifle foreign competitors and maintain artificially high prices.  But when you have five American manufacturers making televisions here again, competition drives the prices down.  Do you still want to save a few dollars by having them made somewhere else and shipped here?   You will end up paying more in subtle ways like higher taxes, lower wages, and higher unemployment.

The upsurge in diseases in our country., and just what might be the problem

There has been a upsurge recently of certain diseases in our country that most people had long forgotten about.  The blame for this has been entirely on people who have resisted having their children vaccinated for fears that the cure can be worse than the problem.

But nobody says a word about the unknown number of illegal aliens who come into our country.  Our border agents recently apprehended over 60,000 people in one month, people who were trying to enter our country illegally.  How many didn’t they stop?  And how many of those who came in undetected were checked first for their health or vaccination status? 

We want background checks for every person buying a gun in our country, but then we don’t care who might come into our country or whether they have background checks, a health screening, or a vaccination shot.

Something is wrong with this picture.

The Most Important Issue of our Nation, and Nobody is Talking About It - a revised version sent to the Wall Street Journal

The Most Important Issue of our Nation, and Nobody is Talking About It

Our country has never been more divided or in more turmoil than it is today, and I wanted to find out why.  How did we get here, and what can we do about it?

I have seen articles asking what it means to be an American.  I think we need to go back a step and ask: what is America?

The reason for our being is found in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

”

Our nation was founded on two truths: all people are created equal and God gave them unalienable rights.  The being created equal part means that there is no royal line of people who are rulers because they were born different from other people.

It’s the second part that changes everything.  God gave people unalienable rights.  But wait.  What God?  And how did they know that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.

The courts would call this a religious teaching.  The Founders called it a fact.

It was the God of the Bible who gave unalienable rights to human beings.  And it was the Bible and Christianity from where the Founders came to know of these rights.  Islam does not know of unalienable rights.  Nor does any other religion. 

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights.  And without unalienable rights, you don’t have the United States of America, at least the one our Founders fought a war in order to be able to create.

But the courts have ruled that all this talk about God is religion, and that is not permitted in the public sphere.  So we haven’t been teaching this to our children, and we certainly haven’t been teaching this to the millions of people who have been moving here for generations.

So now when all these people start voting, getting elected to public office, and making laws, they will do it without an understanding of what our country is/was all about.

They know that we are all about rights, but unalienable rights are very different from government-given rights.  Unalienable rights require a Higher Power to give them.  Unalienable rights are things that you can do without the government’s permission, interference, or regulation.  Government-given rights are generally rights that require the government to compel the behavior of other people in the giving of these rights.  All these rights come at an enormous expense that requires more and more money from some people to give to more and more other people.

New rights are being created with every election cycle.  Since this shift in our country from unalienable rights to government-given rights, the government has not been able to keep spending even close to its revenues.  And it no longer even tries to, because public spending is now the highest good.

Along with unalienable rights came a necessary high moral standard, because great freedom requires great responsibility. 

For most of our nation’s history, the moral code was the Ten Commandments, Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, all from the Bible.  Now since all that has been ruled religious sentiment, the new moral code is tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  Only one part of this code applies to individuals and that is tolerance, which can mean nothing more than ignoring your neighbor. 

One major consequence of this change in rights and values has to do with gun violence.  Guns have always been a major part of American culture.  In the Federalist Papers, we were described as an “armed” people, unlike those who were in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings and despots.  We used to have gun clubs in high schools, and you could buy guns at Sears or a local hardware store like you were buying a screwdriver, but now guns are a problem.  Why?  We have exchanged our religious values for secular ones, and they are simply inadequate for governing a free people.  Instead of being taught to love your neighbor, now we are taught simply to ignore them.

Our country is divided between those who know of a ‘traditional’ United States, who unfortunately are in most cases unable to define exactly what that is or why that is good.  And the rest of the country wants to remake it according to a new secular value system where they are still working out all the rules.  The previous full-blown secular systems in the world have been communism and socialism. 

Government-given rights leads inevitably in that direction, because it requires more and more things of the government and less and less of its people.

This is why our country is divided, and compromise is possible on only a very small number of things.  If we don’t go back to our roots, it’s only a matter of time before our country morphs into an entirely different country.  But because it is happening slowly, over generations, few people will even know it.

The Church and gay people Re: the recent vote of the Methodist Church that didn't affirm homosexuality

The Chicago Tribune (March 4) printed a major article titled: “We begged our fellow Methodists to love us.  They voted no.”

Actually they didn’t.  Love is not the issue. 

A religion claims to be built on what God has revealed to humans about His plans and purposes for them.  It is an all-encompassing worldview that covers all of life, including: what is good, and what is bad, what is right, and what is wrong, what is important, and what is not, what is true, and what is false.

As parents need to guide and educate their children for around 20 years before most kids feel or actually are ready to live independently of their parents, so a religion assumes the same role on matters pertaining to God. 

Just as the Ten Commandments aren’t up for a yearly vote to affirm or modify them, so the Church believes that God has made it quite clear what His design for sex is.  It’s not about love, but sex.  It’s not about who you love, but about some of the ways you might think are necessary to express that love. 

The more fundamental question is: has God revealed to humans His plans and purposes for life?  If He has, how?  Most Christians would say the Bible.  I am well aware of the issues of interpretation with the Bible.  My master’s degree and all my undergraduate work has been in the areas of Bible and theology. 

Please don’t accuse your fellow Methodists of not loving you.  The disagreements can get heated, because both sides see a lot as being at stake.  I want to say I feel your pain, without it seeming to be a cliché.  There are other denominations that accept homosexuality, and there are many churches in our country that are entirely independent. 

You have some tough choices to make.  I wish you well and hope you make the right ones.

Why We Need Old Politicians

The Tribune gave a lot of space to a writer who said “It’s time to retire the old (politicians) to facilitate the rise of the young.”  (March 4)

I couldn’t disagree more.  If she had written about the need to limit the amount of time a politician could spend in the same position, I would certainly agree with that.

The older I get, the more I appreciate older people, and not because I am one myself.  Getting older made me realize why older people are important in a nation’s leadership. 

Every generation grows up with a new normal.  We have a generation now who are voting who have never known anything but intense scrutiny before boarding an airplane.  They never knew a time when gun violence was rare, when you could buy a gun at Sears or the local hardware store without a FOID card and a background check, when there were gun clubs in public high schools. 

They have never known a time when most middle-class jobs could comfortably support a family on one income.  They never knew a time when schools could reference God and the Bible and even have prayer in school.  They never knew a time when everything was made in our country.  Sure, you could always buy foreign products, but they were true foreign products, like French wine and Swiss chocolate.  And they always cost more, but nobody cared.   

They never knew a time when government assistance was rare and even embarrassing to get it.  When a federal deficit of a billion dollars was considered irresponsible.  They never knew a time when it was hard to choose between a Democrat and a Republican.  There were more similarities than differences. 

Yes, I see real and significant problems when politicians stay in office more than a term or two.  But age is not the issue.  That’s why parents are older than their kids.  The kids need the experience of their parents to teach them.  And that’s the same for a country.

There is a story in the Bible that stresses this point.  When King Solomon (the wisest person who ever lived, at least up to that time) died, his son took his place.  When faced with an important decision, he first consulted the wise men who worked with his father and then with those who had grown up with him.  He forsook the advice of the elders and followed the advice of his contemporaries, and the text emphasizes this, and it literally divided the nation into two nations, almost had a civil war, and contributed to their later destruction as a nation.