Then social justice faction is raising its voice on economic policy.
It is now almost a cliché when religious leaders state that the federal budget is a test of our nation’s moral values because it reflects our fiscal priorities. We have been saying that individually and collectively for decades.
How are we doing in this measure of morality?
A key moral issue of our times is extreme wealth inequality in the U.S., along with structures that block people from accessing what they need to rise out of poverty, such as a lack of affordable housing or access to healthcare. Like Pope Francis, we at NETWORK believe there is an urgent need to address these twin injustices. The federal budget is one of our country’s most important tools to make that happen.
However, most major budget proposals coming from Capitol Hill do little or nothing to address inequality – or, even worse, they exacerbate it. This is not a partisan view. In fact, powerful and wealthy voices motivated by self-interest have seen their influence greatly increase across party lines in recent years. Their voices drown out those of millions of people with less clout.
In 2011, appalled by years of skewed budget priorities, my organization joined a coalition of 37 faith groups representing Jewish, Muslim and Christian traditions. Our goal was to formulate a new budget plan rooted in our faiths’ teachings about compassion and justice....Talk Poverty
Why a “Faithful” Federal Budget Must Address Inequality
Sister Simone Campbell | Executive Director of NETWORK, A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby, and author of A Nun on the Bus: How All of Us Can Create Hope, Change, and Community
2 comments:
Simone's heart is in the right place and her messaging is excellent, but she loses me on the details, and of course she does not understand functional finance.
I.e., she defends O-care and offers no specific proposal for affordable universal health care.
She doesn't propose a meaningful safety net, instead merely suggests minor tweaks to existing programs.
Incremental improvements have their place but our messed up system is far beyond that.
No one on the American political scene today is pushing anything equivalent to Huey Long's 1934 Share Our Wealth proposal. It makes me sad.
Ah, sniffing around on TalkPoverty's website turns up an admission that is is part of Center for American Progress which is a neoliberal Democratic propaganda outlet.
CAP and it's ThinkProgress website occasionally publishes something worthwhile, but mostly their job is to herd the left back into the Democratic party.
The problem with people's hearts being in the right place is that if the policy they espouse fails, then the whole project is discredited. It's an ongoing issue on the left.
Nor do I think that MMT is a solution, although it would make a bad system better.
The capitalist model is essentially a rightist one and there is no way to fix that internally that would be permanent since the problematic assumptions and institutional arrangements would remain in place.
Foundational assumptions and institutional arrangements have to be revised or the transition from feudalism to capitalism to socialism will never be completed. The result is an oligarchy of the haute bourgeoisie as owners of financial capital, industrial capital, intellectual capital, and land.
Absolute property rights are the basis of classical liberalism and that assumption has to be addressed. The issues arise from prioritizing property over people. It's immoral and also uneconomic since it leads to horrific waste of resources including human resources and environmental resources.
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