(April 15-16, 2019)

An Easter Meditation

Under the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 the wealthy got wealthier, the poor became poorer, and the middle class citizen got screwed!

Quoted in Wikipedia, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in April 2018 that implementing the Tax Cut and Jobs Act [of 2017] would “add an estimated 2.289 trillion dollars to the national debt over 10 years [or 1.891 trillion after accounting for macroeconomic feedback effects], in addition to the $9.8 trillion increase forecast under current policy baseline and existing $20 trillion national debt.”  This means our national debt will increase to around $32 trillion dollars, even with economic growth by 2027.  Who is going to pay for this debt?  Our children will pay this debt, since many of us seniors will be retiring soon and be beyond our peak earning potential.

Read the Wikipedia article for yourself!  Under the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017, persons earning under $20,000 will incur a cost to themselves, due to fewer subsidies due to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.  Income groups between $20,000 and $40,000 will pay more in taxes, and those above $40,000 will pay less until 2025.  When the tax credits expire in 2027, individuals under $75,000 (about 76% of taxpayers) will pay more taxes but those above $75,000 will pay less taxes.  The Tax Policy Center (TPC) estimates that the bottom 80% of taxpayers (income under $149,000 – our great middle class will receive 35% of the benefit in 2018, 34% of the benefit in 2025 and none of the benefit in 2027.  Upper income Americans and businesses will mostly benefit regardless until 2025 and beyond.

This form of economics in the 1980s was called “trickle down” where the wealthy individuals and corporations would supposedly increase jobs and wages as they accumulated more and more wealth.  This was not true then, and is not true now!  The wealthy simply keep the wealth in their own pockets.  Now we can simply call this tax cut and jobs act “kicking the can full of national debt further down the road!” The wealthy are not going to pay this debt!   Let our children figure out how to pay off this national debt, that is, in addition to their own massive student loan debt. The Economist reported in 2014 there was approximately $1.3 trillion of outstanding student loan debt in the U.S. affecting 44 million borrowers who had an average outstanding loan balance of $37, 172.  I have been working to help my children pay off their student loans, collectively around $200,000 for my three children, including my parent plus loan.  I estimate at my current payment rate for these loans, it will take about 6-8 years for payoff of this debt.  This does not include my daughter’s graduate school debt for Vet School, which will be about $220,000 for four years of training, more or less.   This is the generation of citizens the Republican Congress and our President want to pay off our staggering national debt, after instituting a tax cut used ostensibly to buy off the Middle Class and the wealthy, so the Republicans can remain in office and in power a few more years.

For the last 20 years or more, we have continued to “kick the can,” further down the road, putting the payoff of our national debt further out in the future.  This debt has been incurred on top of existing national debt by our so called economically conservative Republicans.   I personally doubt the Democrats will do any better.  But the loss of the middle class earning potential should seriously concern all political parties.  Unless the middle class can begin to earn a larger piece of the pie and the businesses and wealthy Americans start kicking in their fair share of taxes toward paying the national debt, we are laying the foundation for a break down in our democracy.  If the “haves” continue to have more, and the “disenfranchised” become further disenfranchised, this does not bode well for our collective democratic life of our nation.  Call me a “radical,” if you like, but this is common sense to me.  Empowering our middle class is the key to our future democracy, just like the Founding Fathers sought to empower the landowner citizens of their day.  The great middle class needs to feel that they too can still have a reasonable chance to access and achieve the American dream.  If my children are not able to access and achieve the same dream I had a chance to access and achieve, they will lose faith in our democracy as a reasonable way of life and become open to other ways to gain their economic freedom.  The Republicans who are pretending to represent all of us while representing none of us will come to rue the day they did not pass the torch on to the reasonable middle class, but instead chose to empower a group of malcontents who believe might makes right and that sharing wealth and power is not democracy but “socialism.”  Republicans and others who bandy about the word “socialism” in an attempt to label their opposing democratic senators and representatives as “bad guys” are idiots!  They are doing nothing more than rending apart the fabric of democracy and are tearing our flag into tatters of its former glory, not realizing that their neighbors of any race, creed, color and constituency are the very people who will defend their own right to democracy in the event of foreign war.  If the idiots currently running our government and the White House ever come to their right mind and full senses, they will realize they are destroying the very institutions they claim to hold dear by their racist rhetoric, their ill-conceived policies and their lust and greed for more and more wealth and power.  The only solid government as conceived by our Founding Fathers is a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”  Democracy is not about us and them, but about us!  I hope and pray to God brings compassion once again into our national leadership toward their fellow human beings and sanity back into their hollowed out hearts and minds!

“Lord Jesus Christ, Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us!  On this week of your passion and death, as we prepare once again to celebrate the resurrection of your eternal life, remind us that we all are sinners in need of your saving grace and abundant power of redemptive life.  Redeem us from ourselves and grant that all who believe in your blessed name may be engrafted together into one common family of humanity, Jew and Greek, bond and free; so make us one in Christ Jesus our Lord.  As we pray today, for our democratic life, remind us that we are here on this earth only for a short season.  Bring about within us a transformation of life, so that in giving of ourselves we receive your blessing, and in laying down our lives for others, we find the true meaning of your eternal life, by dying to self and rising again to newness of life, hope and resurrection.  In Jesus Christ our Lord, we pray, world without end, Amen and Amen.”

Bill Wilson, servant of God by God’s grace and mercies, in Jesus Christ our Lord.  “Amen.”