{"id":6603,"date":"2012-03-08T23:28:48","date_gmt":"2012-03-09T04:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=6603"},"modified":"2012-03-08T23:28:48","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T04:28:48","slug":"on-fixing-the-moral-deficit-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2012\/03\/08\/on-fixing-the-moral-deficit-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"On ‘Fixing the Moral Deficit’ (part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

(Part 1 of this review here, by proxy<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

At the end of Ronald J. Sider\u2019s most recent book, Fixing the Moral Deficit: A Balanced Way to Balance the Budget<\/a>,<\/em> there\u2019s an appendix of \u201cAction Steps\u201d for readers. The first of these reads as follows:<\/p>\n

Read and reflect on a few dozen of the hundreds of biblical verses about God and the poor. Then prayerfully ask God to help you share God\u2019s love for poor, hurting persons. If you need help finding the verses, see the two hundred pages of biblical text on the poor in Ronald J. Sider, For they Shall Be Fed: Scripture Readings and Prayers for a Just World<\/em> (Nashville: Word, 1997) or just go through the dozens of verses in chapter three of Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger<\/em> (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I second both of those recommendations. Rich Christians,<\/em> in particular, is a powerful book, in which Sider presents a relentless argument for life-changing generosity.*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In that book, originally published in 1977, Sider sets the stage with two long, insistent chapters, one laying out statistics on the scope, depth and impact of poverty around the world, and the other laying out the massive collection of biblical imperatives, laws, stories, histories, parables, proverbs, psalms and suggestions urging God\u2019s children to give generously to those in need. Sider follows those chapters with the core of the book, the case for what he calls a \u201cgraduated tithe\u201d \u2014 a way of structuring personal generosity to resist the creeping influence of affluence.<\/p>\n

Rich Christians<\/em> also included a coda that included policy suggestions, but the main thrust of the book was Sider\u2019s call for personal, voluntary, individual, private generosity.<\/p>\n

So, predictably, the fledgling religious right recoiled and condemned the book as a Stalinist manifesto. Sider was called a Communist, a radical class warrior driven by the politics of envy.<\/p>\n

Rich Christians<\/em> became a best-seller, and the thousands of Christians who actually read it knew that those wild criticisms were baseless and ridiculous. But the critics were brutal and they had a bigger platform than Sider had \u2014 they had Christian radio, magazines and the direct mail outrage-machines of the religious right. The nasty intensity of that criticism meant that in the less-politicized \u201cmainstream\u201d evangelical press Sider and his book were categorized as \u201ccontroversial\u201d \u2014 the standard evangelical approach to marginalizing someone with an inconvenient message. People who hadn\u2019t read the book had heard something or other about it \u2014 something bad.<\/em> It was some kind of radical left-wing Contra thing or something, rumor had it. That\u2019s what they\u2019d heard, and they figured where there\u2019s smoke, there must be fire.<\/p>\n

Sider was stung by that criticism and the viciousness of the attacks. As an earnest, guileless Mennonite, he has always assumed the best of everyone, approaching even the cynical political operatives who attacked him and his book as though they were simply fellow Christians responding reasonably in good faith. So Sider set out to engage them in constructive dialogue.<\/p>\n

One result of that dialogue \u2014 which has gone on now for more than three decades \u2014 is that the central contention of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger<\/em> is no longer instinctively condemned as \u201ccontroversial.\u201d Even on the furthest fringes of the Christian right, Sider\u2019s contention about \u201cGod\u2019s love for poor, hurting persons\u201d is now accepted as something yesofcourse, everyone acknowledges as true. That\u2019s an enormous achievement and a testimony to Sider\u2019s patient determination over many years.<\/p>\n

But the influence worked in both directions. The fierce attacks on Rich Christians<\/em> made Ron Sider a more cautious writer. The voices of the external critics who battered him now seem to have been incorporated by his internal editor.<\/p>\n

The policy agenda sketched at the end of the first edition of Rich Christians was a basic wish-list of the sorts of things anti-hunger advocates and development agencies were calling for in 1977. Each subsequent edition and revision of the book moved further away from that, incorporating more of a neoliberal outlook. When you read that first edition, you came away with the vivid sense of a writer who was passionately driven to help the neediest. That passion can still be found in the later revisions, and in the many books Sider has written since, but it\u2019s less compelling and less contagious, muted by a palpable sense that every word has been weighed by someone trying to avoid being attacked again as a leftist commie.<\/p>\n

That same dynamic seems to explain this new book from Sider. Harrumphing about deficit is a surefire way to establish one\u2019s credentials as a serious and sensible moderate centrist. And in the current context \u2014 with America haltingly emerging from a global financial crisis and still mired in the greatest employment crisis since the Great Depression \u2014 that seems to be the primary reason for anyone to be discussing deficits instead of those things.<\/p>\n

Fixing the Moral Deficit<\/em> contains elements of Sider at his best \u2014 glimpses of why he can be an immensely challenging (in the best sense) and rewarding writer. It also contains a great deal of what can make his writing immensely frustrating.<\/p>\n

Happily, this book neatly segregates those aspects. It thus yields two helpful and constructive sections. One revisits the central theme of Rich Christians<\/em> and For They Shall Be Fed,<\/em> summarizing the biblical case for helping the poor. The other makes a strong defense of government programs aimed at assisting the poor and helping the needy survive. Sider repeatedly insists that such programs must be protected from budget cuts that would hurt the needy they serve. Unfortunately, the overall trajectory of the book and the very fact<\/em> of the book \u2014 its central contention that a balanced budget is an urgent moral imperative \u2014 contradicts and undermines Sider\u2019s emphatic insistence on that point.<\/p>\n

The remainder of Fixing<\/em> argues that the federal budget must be balanced, but it doesn\u2019t offer much in the way of a coherent approach to doing that. There are plenty of specific ideas, but little sense of how they might fit together \u2014 or recognition that several of them are contradictory.<\/p>\n

The first hint of trouble comes before the first page. In a list of abbreviations used in the book, Sider includes \u201cSimpson-Bowles\u201d as shorthand for the \u201cReport of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,\u201d which was chaired by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. That commission never approved a report. The \u201cSimpson-Bowles\u201d report represents only the opinions of Simpson and Bowles.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t get better once you discover why that two-man report is cited in later chapters of Sider\u2019s book. It\u2019s tossed into a pot with Rep. Paul Ryan\u2019s austerity budget and a passing nod to President Obama\u2019s plan, then stirred in the hopes that some reasonable compromise will emerge\u00a0 \u2014 since, after all, the truth must always be somewhere in the middle.<\/p>\n

The book lacks a clear picture of what the federal government does or what it spends its budget on. The federal government, essentially, is an insurance company with an army. Everything else is just nibbling around the edges. And Fixing the Moral Deficit<\/em> spends most of its energy nibbling around the edges.<\/p>\n

In the short run, America is running large deficits because we\u2019re still stuck in a glacial recovery from a crippling recession. Revenue is far below where it should be, and where it would be if we were back at full employment with robust economic growth. War also turns out to be really expensive \u2014 and two wars turns out to be twice<\/em> as expensive. (Oddly, Sider \u2014 an outspoken pacifist \u2014 barely mentions the perpetual war machine of 21st century America as a factor in the federal deficit.) We\u2019re also contending with the self-inflicted fiscal wound of the redistributive Bush tax-cuts, which are still \u2014 at least in theory \u2014 set to expire.<\/p>\n

But in the long run, there\u2019s really only one factor: the rising cost of health care.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the core of America\u2019s long-term budget worries: Medicare and Medicaid. Fix those two things \u2014 get health care costs under control \u2014 and we could screw up every other budgetary effort and still wind up OK. Fail to fix those two things and even if everything<\/em> else is handled perfectly, we\u2019d still be in trouble in the long run. Sider mentions<\/em> Medicare and Medicaid, but he doesn\u2019t put them at the center of this discussion, where they belong. (Nor does he dwell on the single largest effort to \u201cbend the cost curve\u201d of those programs, and the single largest deficit-reduction step taken since the Clinton administration: the Affordable Care Act.)<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re looking for the solution promised in the book\u2019s subtitle \u2014 a \u201cway to balance the budget\u201d \u2014 you\u2019ll be disappointed. You may find some useful nuggets here and there that suggest possible ingredients to such a \u201cway.\u201d Two paragraphs raise the possibility of a carbon tax as maybe, perhaps, something that might play a role. There\u2019s a tentative call for something like a Tobin tax. But there\u2019s no sense of how those ideas fit together into a larger plan, and little recognition of the kind of political difficulties that such proposals would face. (The politics of this book are mainly of the Green Lantern variety \u2014 where anything is possible if we just supply enough willpower.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

So again, let me refer you to that first action step from the book\u2019s appendix:<\/p>\n

Read and reflect on a few dozen of the hundreds of biblical verses about God and the poor. Then prayerfully ask God to help you share God\u2019s love for poor, hurting persons. If you need help finding the verses, see the two hundred pages of biblical text on the poor in Ronald J. Sider, For they Shall Be Fed: Scripture Readings and Prayers for a Just World<\/em> (Nashville: Word, 1997) or just go through the dozens of verses in chapter three of Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger<\/em> (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I emphatically recommend that you do this. Get a hold of an early edition of Rich Christians<\/em> \u2014 the brown one, if you find one, or the purple one. Read it and you\u2019ll see why Ron Sider is someone I admire and respect greatly.<\/p>\n

But if you want to understand America\u2019s federal budget, or you\u2019re interested in how it can be restored to balance in the long run, then, well, I\u2019d recommend the bloggers cited in the previous post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013<\/p>\n

* Full disclosure: I worked for Ron Sider throughout the 1990s at Evangelicals for Social Action and he was my adviser when I was a student at Palmer Seminary. He has been a friend, a mentor and a colleague, and I like, respect and admire him a great deal. I\u2019ll let you decide whether that discounts or reinforces the discussion here.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"On 'Fixing the Moral Deficit' (part 2)","description":"(Part 1 of this review here, by proxy.) At the end of Ronald J. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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