All others pay cash: The Shepherd-Balkin Amendment

November 2, 2011 By Fred Clark 44 Comments

In other church-state news yesterday, the House of Representatives voted 396-9 to reaffirm that America’s “national motto” is still our national motto.

That motto, officially adopted in 1956, is “In God We Trust.” It replaced what had been up until then America’s unofficial motto of “E pluribus unum.” Replacing an affirmation of unity amidst diversity with an expression of sectarian faith is, generally speaking, not a Good Thing.* But this symbolic step backwards, redundantly reaffirmed last night by the House of Representatives, hasn’t wrought much damage because frankly the designation “official motto” is almost completely meaningless.

If you’re wondering how such a measure could possibly be constitutional, that’s why. Because it’s meaningless. The House vote was a “concurrent resolution,” which is Congress-speak for “stuff we vote on instead of things that matter.” The resolution is toothless, lacking the force of law. Phil Plait is correct that Congress making non-laws respecting the establishment of religion still violates the spirit of the First Amendment, and that lawmakers voting for such measures are not doing a very good job of fulfilling their oath to defend the Constitution. The symbolism of this sort of thing is not good, but that’s all it is — some not-good, but hollow and mostly meaningless, symbolism. The Supreme Court even ruled that this is all it is, deciding in 1984 that the replacement motto had “lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.”

That Supreme Court ruling, by the way, does have the force of law. So if you choose to interpret “In God We Trust” as a reminder of the ultimate sovereignty of God or some such, then legally speaking, you’re interpreting it incorrectly. The official, legal meaning of our official motto has nothing to do with God, but is something more like “That thing on the coins, blah-di blah blah blah.”**

For the record, the nine representatives voting against this sectarian symbolism included eight Democrats and one Republican, Justin Amash of Michigan, who explained his dissent this way:

The fear that unless “In God We Trust” is displayed throughout the government, Americans will somehow lose their faith in God, is a dim view of the profound religious convictions many citizens have. The faith that inspired many of the Founders of this country — the faith I practice — is stronger than that. Trying to score political points with unnecessary resolutions should not be Congress’s priority. I voted no.

That’s how I would have voted, too, had I been a member of Congress — unless I had been able to convince my colleagues to support my amendment to the measure. I’m calling this the Shepherd-Balkin Amendment, named after storyteller Jean Shepherd, author of In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, and constitutional scholar Jack Balkin, who was the first commentator I read affirming the “jumbo coin” strategy I’m adopting here.

Yesterday’s nonbinding resolution “encourages the public display of the national motto in all public buildings, public schools, and other government institutions.” I would take that further.

My amendment would encourage: “the public display of the national motto on 2,000 $1 billion platinum coins to be minted by the Secretary of the Treasury and to be distributed throughout the nation for the repair, maintenance and construction of public buildings, public schools, public roads, public bridges, public pipelines, public employment rolls and other government institutions.”

With the Shepherd-Balkin Amendment included, I would enthusiastically vote for the resolution the House passed last night.

Yes, the hollow symbolism of the measure violates the spirit of the Constitution. But in exchange for $2 trillion for infrastructure, teachers, librarians, police, emergency personnel and safety inspectors, I’d be willing to swallow a little harmful symbolism. (In that spirit, I’ll further suggest that those 2,000 $1 billion platinum coins should bear the likeness of Ronald Reagan.)

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* The only people who think it’s a Good Thing are those who belong to the sect in question. Ah, but who is that? And are all those who claim to be members of this elevated sect really members of it? Can they prove it? How can they prove it?

Historically speaking, the answers to that last question always involve duress. Ultimately, the only way to really, truly prove one’s membership to the satisfaction of whatever authorities are entrusted with deciding such questions is by not floating when cast into a lake with stones tied to one’s feet. This is why it’s important not to entrust authorities with such questions — why church and state must be separate.

** Reason No. 2 for the strict separation of church and state. Any officially approved, privileged or established sect will ultimately become nothing more than a vague civil religion existing only to affirm the legitimacy of those officials who make it official. But then, for many American teavangelicals, “a vague civil religion existing only to affirm the legitimacy of those officials who make it official” isn’t viewed as a Bad Thing.

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Unlike conservatives, I'm in favor of economic growth

August 16, 2011 By Fred Clark 94 Comments

A handful of items worth repeating, and worth following the links to read in full:

Nobel laureate Peter Diamond:

Infrastructure spending is not a vehicle for dealing with a normal recession. But once you recognize this recovery will be slow, you realize this is a time when we should be doing major spending on infrastructure. And a lot of the infrastructure investments are stuff we’re going to have to deal with eventually, so doing it now doesn’t actually add to the trend debt problem, and doing it now means we’re doing it with otherwise unused resources, both in terms of labor and capital, so that makes it cheaper for the economy.

Warren Buffett: “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich“

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Joel N. Shurkin: “Clean Energy Is Booming and Creating Jobs“

Clean energy is now creating more jobs for the energy produced than coal or natural gas, and solar energy is the fastest growing industry in the United States, according to industry and academic sources.

Solar energy alone employed 93,502 American jobs in 2010 and could grow from 25,000-50,000 this year, economy willing. Solar also is producing more jobs than any other energy source, and could generate four million jobs by 2030. Fifty percent of solar firms expect to be adding jobs this year in the teeth of the recession.

The Economist’s Democracy in America blog:

Substantively, the economy needs the government to spend more right now. Here’s what I’ve heard from CEOs and investment-firm research directors this past week: the S&P downgrade, while meaningless in direct terms, implies there will be greater pressure on American politicians to reduce deficits by cutting spending. … That is going to be negative for global growth and raises the likelihood of stagnation or a double-dip recession in developed markets. Hence plummeting equity values and a likely substantial hit to corporate profits, especially financial-sector profits, in the second half of the year. Obviously, that means substantially lower tax receipts (wiping out some of the intended deficit-cutting effects). And stagnation will exacerbate consumers’ continuing unwillingness to spend, as well as prolonging companies’ rational preference for sitting on cash rather than expanding and hiring new workers.

The silver lining is that companies’ and other investors’ desire to sit on cash is driving down the US government’s cost of borrowing to chthonic depths unplumbed by exchequers of yore. … The government can save huge amounts of money by speeding up needed expenditures now, on infrastructure and other things, rather than waiting until later, since the government is paying negative after-inflation interest rates.

And the Bureau of Economic Advisers’ huge downward revision of GDP growth statistics for the past three years makes it clear that the 2009 stimulus bill (ARRA) was highly effective … careful analysis by Daniel Wilson for the San Francisco Fed finds there were about 3.7 million more jobs in the economy in March 2011 than there would have been without the ARRA.

Nouriel Roubini: “Is Capitalism Doomed?“

The right balance today requires creating jobs partly through additional fiscal stimulus aimed at productive infrastructure investment.

It also requires more progressive taxation; more short-term fiscal stimulus with medium- and long-term fiscal discipline; lender-of-last-resort support by monetary authorities to prevent ruinous runs on banks; reduction of the debt burden for insolvent households and other distressed economic agents; and stricter supervision and regulation of a financial system run amok; breaking up too-big-to-fail banks and oligopolistic trusts.

Over time, advanced economies will need to invest in human capital, skills and social safety nets to increase productivity and enable workers to compete, be flexible and thrive in a globalized economy. The alternative is – like in the 1930s – unending stagnation, depression, currency and trade wars, capital controls, financial crisis, sovereign insolvencies, and massive social and political instability.

Steven Pearlstein: “Blame for financial mess starts with the corporate lobby“

Want to know who is to blame, Mr. Big Shot Chief Executive? Just look in the mirror because the culprit is staring you in the face. …

You helped create the monsters that are rampaging through the political and economic countryside, wreaking havoc and sucking the lifeblood out of the global economy. …

… Over the past decade you financed and supported the growth of a radical right-wing cabal that has now taken over the Republican Party and repeatedly made a hostage of the U.S. government.

When it started out all you really wanted was to push back against a few meddlesome regulators or shave a point or two off your tax rate, but you were concerned it would look like special-interest rent-seeking. So when the Washington lobbyists came up with the clever idea of launching a campaign against over-regulation and over-taxation, you threw in some money, backed some candidates and financed a few lawsuits.

The more successful it was, however, the more you put in — hundreds of millions of the shareholders’ dollars. …

Somewhere along the way, however, this effort took on a life of its own. What started as a reasonable attempt at political rebalancing turned into a jihad against all regulation, all taxes and all government, waged by right-wing zealots who want to privatize the public schools that educate your workers, cut back on the basic research on which your products are based, shut down the regulatory agencies that protect you from unscrupulous competitors and privatize the public infrastructure that transports your supplies and your finished goods. For them, this isn’t just a tactic to brush back government. It’s a holy war to destroy it — and one that is now out of your control.

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The greatest degeneration

August 10, 2011 By Fred Clark 135 Comments

I’m a big fan of these homefront propaganda posters produced by the U.S. government during World War II.

There’s a peppy, can-do spirit about them. The posters convey what folks back then might have called “moxie.” And they presumed that the people reading them would share that spirit. The assumption was that Americans were full of moxie.

And that assumption, for the most part, proved correct. World War II could not have been won without the concerted effort of millions of people who never donned a uniform — people who sacrificed, recycled, conserved, rationed and cooperated to support the massive armament and mobilization that made victory possible.

That can-do spirit is part of why former NBC newsman Tom Brokaw labeled them “the greatest generation.” That same spirit lived on, for some time, after the war. And it lives on still in the tangible world that generation left behind for those of us who live here now.

Just look around — we’re all still living among, and living off of, the framework they built for us. Most of our national infrastructure was built during the Depression by New Deal jobs programs, or during World War II, or in the decades just after that war. Look at the highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, railways, pipelines, power grids, communication lines, reservoirs and all the rest of what makes our life as it is possible.

Without the foundation of that infrastructure built by that generation, our lives as we live them today would not be possible. The greatness of the “greatest generation” isn’t just, as it’s often said, that without them we’d all be speaking German, but also that without the nation they built for us, none of us would be able to commute to work. Not that we’d have to, because without the infrastructure they paid to build, most of our jobs couldn’t exist.

The key phrase there is “paid to build.” It’s not just that they enlisted or volunteered or recycled or conserved, but that they paid taxes at a level sufficient to build a better nation for the generations that would follow. As those generations have taken over the nation we inherited, we’ve steadily shrunk both those taxes and our national reserves of moxie. Both have dwindled to puny, inadequate levels.

For 40 years or more we’ve been coasting off the momentum of our predecessors, and there’s little to indicate that we still possess either the will or the capacity — the moxie — it would take to ensure there’s any of it left for the generations to follow ours 40 years from now. (I believe we hit Peak Moxie in 1969, with the moon landing, and have seen a steady depletion in moxie reserves ever since.)

[Read more...]

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A prayer for infrastructure investment

July 28, 2011 By Fred Clark 55 Comments

From The Atlantic: “Another Dust Bowl?”

After a spring filled with reports of devastating floods and tornadoes, another climatological disaster is taking shape. Fourteen states across the south, particularly Texas, are facing a lethal combination of record heat and low precipitation.  The Office of the Texas State Climatologist reports that this past June was the hottest June in recorded history. Twenty-five Texan cities broke heat records. Meanwhile, water supplies are drying up and crops are dying. …

One consequence of this dry, hot weather: More water main breaks.

Water main breaks are not just a winter event in Topeka, Kansas. Recent spells of dry, hot weather have city crews out frequently to repair broken lines and restore service.

Topeka city spokesman Dave Bevens [said] that the city was on pace to have between 550 and 600 water main breaks in 2011. A typical year would produce roughly 400 breaks in the city.

That’s the sort of thing that makes you think maybe it’d be a good time for a massive reinvestment in our crumbling national infrastructure.

But where ever would we find the millions of workers who would have to be hired for such an undertaking?

I mean, sure, the American Society of Civil Engineers just released a study showing that deferred maintenance of America’s transportation infrastructure cost the country more than $129 billion in 2010.

But those same engineers also say that fixing those problems would cost about $94 billion a year. And where are we supposed to get that kind of money? We simply can’t afford to save each American household $1,060 a year, or save the 180 million hours in travel time the ASCE says we’re wasting due to our crumbling transportation infrastructure.

In Oklahoma and Texas, they’re taking a less labor-intensive approach to responding to the drought. As Bruce Prescott reports, “Governors Seek Prayers for Rain, Deny Climate Change“:

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin is using her bully pulpit to call Oklahomans to pray for rain.

More than 40 percent of Oklahoma is experiencing an exceptional drought, the most severe category measured by climatologists.

Currently, 58 percent of Oklahoma is facing either an extreme or an exceptional drought. Meanwhile, a record-setting heat wave continues throughout the state with no end in sight.

Oklahoma needs rain. So does Texas.

Seventy percent of Texas is in the category of exceptional drought.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry issued a call for prayer in April, but those prayers have not been answered. In fact, the drought in Texas is much worse than when Perry issued his call for prayer.

Both Fallin and Perry are among the prominent politicians who are skeptical about the scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change.

The drought is awful and praying can’t hurt. It obviously shouldn’t be states’ only response, but it can’t hurt.

What can hurt is blithely ignoring future droughts and inviting calamity by pretending to be “skeptical” about science.

I realize there’s an ethical dilemma here. Gov. Perry and Fallin have taken a lot of money from companies promoting anti-science climate denialism. That money entails an implicit quid pro quo. For Perry or Fallin to stop denying the facts at this point, after already accepting this money, would be almost like stealing. And stealing would be unethical. (“An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.”)

One does wonder, though, how long Govs. Fallin and Perry can continue denying climate change in the face of, you know, a changing climate.

Climate change is making the need for a massive reinvestment in our infrastructure more urgent, but even without the effects of climate change, that need becomes more urgent every day because so much of our infrastructure is really, really old.

A major Bronx water supply line burst this morning … flooding Jerome Avenue for several blocks near 177th Street, halting traffic, disrupting subway and bus service, and damaging two nearby gas mains. … Speaking at a news conference, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said it was not clear why the pipe, which was installed in 1903, had burst. “It has been doing yeoman’s work, but unfortunately, after 108 years, it’s not,” he said.

There’s only so long you can try to save money by putting off fixing the roof. Then it starts to get really expensive really fast.

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Larry Summers on 'the jobs deficit'

July 21, 2011 By Fred Clark 30 Comments

From an interview with Larry Summers by Walter Isaacson at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference:

The biggest problem the country has right now is not the budget deficit. The biggest problem the country has right now is the jobs deficit. Yes, there’s a risk that we will misplay things and make the mistakes of the 1970s, and have inflation and have excessive borrowing.

But far and away the larger risk is that we will make the mistakes of 1937, and that we will not have a recovery that is sustained, that we will make the mistakes that Japan made, and that we will have a decade or two of stagnation. The right question to be focused on is how to stimulate demand.

Look out there, guys. The Treasury bond rate, Treasury note rate for 10 years is 2.85 percent. Nobody is failing to invest because 2.85 percent is too much. They are failing to invest because there are no customers in their store. They are failing to invest because their factories are sitting empty. They are failing to innovate because they’re not sure how large the market for the product will be. That is the problem that we need to address.

… We’ve been flying out of the recession, but we’ve been flying out of it dangerously close to stall speed, and doing something about that should be our top priority.

… We have schools across this country where we tell our kids that education is the most important thing in the world, but we ask them to study in classrooms where the paint is chipping off the walls.

We can borrow money to invest in fixing that, at 2.8 percent. Twenty percent of the people in the country who are doing construction are unemployed, and we’re not trying to do something about that, when we have a major demand problem? It just doesn’t make any sense.

We have infrastructure in this country — I mean you can argue whether we need a new high speed rail system or whether we don’t need a new high speed rail system, but I don’t know what the argument is for letting bridges collapse. I don’t know what the argument is.

You can fly to Europe, you can fly to Asia, any of those places, and you compare Kennedy Airport with the airport where you land, and you ask yourself which is the airport of the greatest country, richest, most powerful country in the world? … You can say airports aren’t that important or whatever, but it is symbolic of an approach to infrastructure that probably never made any sense, and certainly doesn’t make any sense when you can borrow money at 2.8 percent and you’ve got 20 percent of the construction workers unemployed.

So I’d rather see us focus on the jobs deficit. I’d rather see us focus on the public investment deficit. I’d rather see us focus on the human capital deficit. …

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Making work

June 6, 2011 By Fred Clark 239 Comments

The previous post was a bit of a bitter joke. I’m not seriously advocating any of those ideas as the best ways of addressing America’s jobs crisis (although we should be teaching music and art and it is probably long past time to try something other than the isolation strategy that has failed to work with  Cuba for five decades now).

But I am dead serious when I say that it’s time — right now — to be doing everything possible to address that jobs crisis. No tool should go unused. No attempt should be left untried. No method should be off the table. There are hundreds of things we could and should try before also resorting to rebuilding the Great Pyramid in Vegas (or Indiana), but with 9-percent unemployment for the foreseeable future, I’m not going to rule out even something as absurd and intentionally ludicrous as the Pyramid Project.

“But that would just be make-work,” critics protest.

They say that as though that would be a bad thing. When the No. 1 problem is that there’s not enough work to go around, what’s wrong with making some? Right now there’s not enough of the stuff. High time to make more, I’d say.

The classic example of make-work is paying people to dig holes and then fill them back in. Even that would be preferable to the current situation, which involves not paying 13.9 million people and forcing them to sit idle on the sidelines. Digging holes and refilling them would be pointless and Sisyphean, but it would be better to be Sisyphus drawing a regular paycheck than to be one of our millions of long-term jobless whose unemployment insurance benefits have run out.

Still, I’m not advocating hole-digging and hole-filling because that would only address half of the problem of our current jobs crisis. It would meet the desperate need for work of those 13.9 million Americans with no source of earned income, but it would not address the damage being done to our economy and our society of losing the productive contributions of nearly 14 million people.

The current crisis — to again borrow one of my favorite phrases from Wendell Berry — is a solution neatly divided into two problems. We have people who desperately need work to do. And we have work that desperately needs doing.

It takes years of specialized training to reach the point at which one doesn’t see the obvious “therefore” — or, even worse, the point at which one doesn’t view that obvious next step as desirable or possible. It takes the sort of training in which one learns to argue for the sanctity of efficient markets by insisting that the massively inefficient failure of those same markets is the best of all possible worlds. The sort of training that allows one to pretend to think that idling 14 million productive people while simultaneously neglecting urgently necessary tasks is the definition of “efficiency.” The sort of training that suggests we humans are powerless cogs with no agency who must accept the destiny decreed by the mystical and unalterable Market God, obscenely rechristening enslavement to that cruel God as “freedom.”

No, thank you. I much prefer the sort of freedom that means we are free to act, free to do that which is necessary before calamity forces the Market God to recognize it as such. Free to reject the idea that 13.9 million of us are just losers for whom no work, no income, no purpose can be found. Free to fix crumbling bridges, to repair obsolete pipelines, to upgrade an aging 20th-century power grid and plan ahead for the clean energy needs of our children and grandchildren.

There is work to be done — a lot of it. Anyone who says otherwise is blind. Those wholly lacking vision cannot be relied upon to lead. Without vision, the people perish. We are not facing a crisis, as some have suggested, of “structural” unemployment — the sort of thing J.K. Galbraith imagined in The Affluent Society, wherein the jobless are left idle because, unlike in agrarian times, we do not need their productivity. Their work is needed just as much as they need work to do.

So we don’t need to worry about make-work. We don’t have to worry about hiring people to dig hole and refill them — we have way too many holes already that urgently need filling.

And those holes are not static. They’re getting bigger every day. Entropy never misses a day of work. The interest that is piling up on our neglected and deferred maintenance is compounding faster and more expensively than any merely financial debt.

Ah, but what about the debt and the deficit? What about the argument that we can’t afford to put people back to work because our government is already spending more than it’s taking in?

This should not be confusing. It is not complicated. Employed people earn incomes and pay taxes. Unemployed people do not earn incomes and therefore do not pay taxes, but they do constitute government expenses in the forms of unemployment assistance and other emergency benefits.

Turning an unemployed person into an employed person is the most efficient way to reduce a budget deficit — it replaces an expense with a source of revenue. Allowing employed people to become unemployed people is the most efficient way to create a budget deficit — it replaces a source of revenue with an expense.

Saying we “can’t afford” to put people back to work because of budget deficits is like trying to save money by quitting your job to cut down on the cost of commuting. It’s exactly that counterproductive and exactly that destructive. It hurts people. It hurts some more directly than others, but it winds up hurting everyone.

We have people who desperately need work to do. And we have work that desperately needs doing. I wrote about some of that work in a series of posts last year — 1. Water; 2. Sewers and storm drains; 3. Offshore wind farms; 4. The Grid; 5. Bridges — but those posts barely scratched the surface of the necessary and urgent work that remains undone. So I think we’ll pick up where we left off and add to that list.

We have work that needs doing. We have people who need work to do. Do the math.

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They're spreading blankets on the beach

May 5, 2011 By Fred Clark 159 Comments

The Economist: “America’s transport infrastructure: Life in the slow lane”

America’s dependence on its cars is reinforced by a shortage of alternative forms of transport. Europe’s large economies and Japan routinely spend more than America on rail investments, in absolute not just relative terms, despite much smaller populations and land areas. America spends more building airports than Europe but its underdeveloped rail network shunts more short-haul traffic onto planes, leaving many of its airports perpetually overburdened. Plans to upgrade air-traffic-control technology to a modern satellite-guided system have faced repeated delays. The current plan is now threatened by proposed cuts to the budget of the Federal Aviation Administration.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that America needs to spend $20 billion more a year just to maintain its infrastructure at the present, inadequate, levels. Up to $80 billion a year in additional spending could be spent on projects which would show positive economic returns. Other reports go further. In 2005 Congress established the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission. In 2008 the commission reckoned that America needed at least $255 billion per year in transport spending over the next half-century to keep the system in good repair and make the needed upgrades. Current spending falls 60 percent short of that amount.

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A survey of Protestant pastors found 41 percent of them strongly disagreeing with the statement: “I believe global warming is real and manmade.”

That’s up from 27 percent in a similar survey in 2008.

Hmm. Maybe if I showed them this data from Grist’s Jess Zimmerman, pointing out that the last time CO2 levels in the earth’s atmosphere were this high was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene Epoch?

But alas, the same slice of Protestant clergy who don’t believe in climate change also don’t believe there ever was a Pliocene Epoch or a 3 million years ago.

Maybe I’ll take them to see Carbon Nation.

Richard Flory: “This Just In: Gays and Lesbians Attend Evangelical Colleges!”

Via Tony Jones, “Douglass Blvd. Christian Church votes for marriage equality and ends practice of signing marriage license.” The Louisville, Ky., church:

“… voted to end the practice of signing marriage licenses because they give legal benefits to heterosexual couples that are not available to homosexual couples. Until the church’s ministers may confer identical legal benefits on homosexual and heterosexual couples, they will perform only religious wedding ceremonies.”

Good advice from Ezra Klein: “I hew to a strict policy of not learning about wine, as I don’t get paid enough to develop a taste for it.”

Consumerist: “McDonald’s Hires 62,000 at Job Event, Turns Down 938,000”

So next time you hear some condescending, privileged jerk preaching resentment toward the poor — “Why don’t they just get a job flipping burgers?” — you can remind them that Mickey D’s has 20 applicants for every job opening.

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Church historian Martin Marty tries to make sense of “Why Some Religious Right Champion ‘Atlas Shrugged.’”

Give [Ayn] Rand in her writings credit … She made clear that if anyone would come after her, they had to deny all their impulses toward selflessness, take up their blinders and billfolds, and follow her.

Marty is confused that anyone could profess to be an admirer of Rand’s while also professing to be an adherent of the Christianity that she vilified and the tenets of which she urged her admirers to contradict.

Me too.

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Ross Douthat makes his “Case for Hell.”

Hell is logically necessary, Douthat argues, for reasons of simple fairness. Good people like himself have been working all day in the vineyard. They’ve been working really hard.

Would it be fair if a bunch of Johnny come latelies waltzed in just before quitting time and, without even really breaking a sweat, got paid the same wages as those who have worked all day? Of course not.

What kind of sick and twisted God wouldn’t recognize that those who have worked harder are better people and thus deserve to be more richly rewarded?

And to be perfectly fair, those latecomers who never put in a full day’s work shouldn’t just be paid less – they should be paid nothing and, instead, should be tortured forever and ever and ever without end.

Because that’s only fair.

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And since today marks five years since I met the Slacktivixen, a bit of lovely sappiness from Bright Eyes:

YouTube Preview Image

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