Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
The "trickle-down" theory: the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals. William Blum
We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem. Marian Wright Edelman
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, or steal bread. Anatole France
As you might gather from the wisdom lessons today, I want to talk about one of the biggest problems, or maybe one of the most significant opportunities, facing our nation at this time. I want to talk about money, both capitol and income, and its unfair and very unequal distribution. A topic which is arguably the most important issue facing our nation today and one that was not even mentioned in three hours of presidential candidate debates this week.
And to get to what I want to say, I want to remind you of two important parts of what I suspect was our shared childhood experiences. And these two images are very far apart.
The first is that popular board-game that was born in the early 1900's and marketed for most of the 20th century by Parker Brothers, called "Monopoly." In those hot Kentucky summers before anyone had air conditioning and when daytime TV was all soap operas, the kids in my neighborhood would all gather at Mickey Huffman's house because his house had a naturally cool basement. And we would lie on the cement floor of Mickey's basement and play monopoly for hours.
You all know how the game is played. Everyone starts with an equal distribution of cash and then you roll the dice and move your game piece around the board. If you land on a property that no one else had bought, you can buy it if you have enough cash, and if someone else owns it, you have to pay them to rent the spot for a turn.
It usually takes a couple of hours of combining strategy with the roll of the dice, but one player starts to rise and the others start to sink until, one by one, players go broke and have to drop out of the game and one person wins by making everyone else go broke.
Of course, for us, the real point of playing in the first place was so that we could hang out together in a cool place out of the sun.... so the winner would start going off script and loaning money to other players to keep them in the game. Everyone is happier when everyone is still playing and still has a stake in the game. Sadly, the real world rarely works this way.
The other image I want to call to mind, and one that might not have the same power for those of you who are much older than I am but I find that there are fewer and fewer people who fall into that category!....I want to ask you to think for a few minutes about the popular TV show, Star Trek.
It was brilliant and sometimes even prophetic for the time in which Gene Roddenberry was writing those scripts. One of the most adamant aspects of Roddenberry's view of the future was that there was no money. There was no accumulation of wealth and no profit motive to anything that anyone did. There was no price set on food, drink, clothes, or even living quarters. Everyone had what everyone needed. There was to be no currency in the futuristic Federation. Roddenberry was able to imagine a lot of things in the 1960's that did later come into existence but a society in which the basic necessities of life are simply provided without any need for currency we have not seen but, if you let yourself think about it, it is not only doable, it is logical to do so.
The concept of accumulated wealth based on a dollar value of property and investments is how the rich stay rich and how the poor stay poor. Imagining a way of sharing space, food, and resources without currency and without hoarding is crucial to a sane future.
One of the most purchased but least read books over the past two years was the French economist, Thomas Piketty's book on Capital. I am guilty as charged, I bought it and assumed that I had gotten the point in the first twenty pages and left the other 800 for posterity. The indisputable fact is that we cannot resolve poverty if we allow the wealthy to hoard most of the assets.
It would be like trying to join in on a game of monopoly after your friends had been playing for an hour. You might get the same starting cash from the bank that everyone else got at the start of the game, but if the property is all owned already, all you can do is fairly quickly fail. But that's exactly what we do in our economy. We tell new college graduates from poor families that they have the same chance as everyone else but the truth is, virtually all of the winners in a capitalist economy are the ones who start out with capital.
As Anatole France said, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, or steal bread." The people who have capital are the ones who have the influence to write the laws, they own the banks, they control consumer lending, and, surprise of surprises, they always end up on top of the pile of money.
We think of Great Britain as being more class conscious than the new world nation of the United States, and maybe that was true, but if you are born poor in Great Britain, you have a 30% chance of staying poor for the rest of your life. In the United States, if you are born in poverty, you have a 42% chance that you will always be poor. Compare that with a nation that has a socialist economy, like Denmark, and there you have nearly an 80% chance of working your way out of poverty.
In the USA, the system is designed to keep the rich, rich and to keep the poor, poor. It has not always been this way. The great American middle class rose up in the years following WWII at a time when the economy was much more balanced with both personal and corporate taxes.
In the years when we were playing monopoly, the highest tax bracket on the wealthiest earners in America was 91% and even with tax deductions and loop holes, the best a wealthy person might hope for was to get that down to about 50%. In those days, the average difference between an entry-level employee and a CEO was 1 to 50. Now the rich pay approximately 10 to 15% of their income in taxes and yet CEO pay is 350 times the pay of an entry-level worker. The NewsLeader this week listed some corporations where the ratio is 80 to one.....this is the stuff of revolution!
It is true that our tax code has become horribly complex but seriously folks, why do you think that is? Do you honestly believe that fast food workers have lobbied for all of these amendments and complications in the tax code? Do you see McDonalds employees banding together to demand special consideration for their tax posture? The tax code is complicated because the powerful wealthy have fought for every form of favoritism imaginable until the system is rigged so that they cannot lose.
When we were young, there was a national passion for what we called the "War on Poverty." But the War on Poverty has become, in many ways, a war on the poor. We blame the poor for being poor when the system is structured in such a way that they could hardly be anything else.
The middle class is taught to despise the poor and to blame their own hardships on the recipients of public assistance. In Arizona and Florida, governors have proposed administering drug tests to all recipients of food stamps and other forms of public assistance. In Arizona, after spending millions to test 150,000 people, they found a total of 3 people who tested positive.
There was about the same results in Florida except that in Florida, the drug testing company was owned by the governor. So Rick Scott makes millions of dollars on a program he initiated while saving the state nothing by humiliating tens of thousands of citizens. And there was no impeachment, no criminal malfeasance charges, and blue-collar workers still largely believe that the very poor are their enemies.
It reminds me of KKK members who are almost universally very poor, uneducated, and low functioning white people who believe that they are superior to blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Catholics, and the gay community. When, in fact, poor whites have a lot more in common with poor blacks than they ever did with their white managers and employers.
Conservatives who defend the system that keeps the rich on top of the economic pile, constantly try to get the poor to fight with each other because when the poor stop fighting one another and start to organize there will be a redistribution of wealth and that can happen in one of two ways:
It can happen peacefully through the reintroduction of a fair and justly progressive tax system, or it can happen violently through revolution.
I'm in favor of the peaceful method but as a person spiritually devoted to justice, I'm willing to say to the wealthy, it has to happen, one way or the other. Peace without justice is just surrender and there is nothing about our faith that would make surrender look like a legitimate approach.
If I may return to the Monopoly game again.... When one person wins, even they have lost because they can't keep moving their piece around the board over and over if they have put everyone who used to pay them rent out of business. This is what unbridled greed never seems to realize. I will say more about this next week, but when winning is defined as impoverishing everyone else, then even the rich lose. If you destroy your customers, you are out of business.
A year ago, when Seattle decided to raise the minimum wage in their city to $15 an hour, the 1% went nearly crazy announcing that this act of economic compassion towards the poor would result in massive layoffs and job losses that would kill their economy. What has actually happened? Unemployment has gone down by 25% because people who earn low wages spend every bit of a wage increase that has resulted in a huge boon to their retail economy.
How hard is it to understand that if you impoverish people, they won't spend money, and if you pay them a fair wage, they will spend it? Only those blinded by an evil degree of greed can believe that they are better off if more people are suffering.
As Marian Edelman said, we do not have a shortage of money in America. We have a shortage of morality, of decency, and compassion. If the church has any reason to exist, surely it is to increase compassion, inspiring our civilization to be more decent, and to make more moral choices.
What is certainly clear is that if we were hoping for some moral leadership from anyone in the huge field of Republican presidential candidates, that we have to accept that there is no getting blood out of a turnip.
Either you are the light of the world or we need to learn to live in the dark.
