Budgets & Morality
It has been said by some that budgets are “moral” documents. I think I would rather say that budgets reflect our ethics. It seems to me that morality and “God-talk” have become watered down in the past 15 years in public discourse and used to divide rather than find solutions for the common good. Brian McLaren offers some interesting words on the topic.
Budgest are Still Moral Documents
by Brian McLaren | Feb. 25, 2011You’ll be hearing in coming days, if you haven’t already, about the What Would Jesus Cut? campaign, launched byJim Wallis and the good people of Sojourners. It assumes that massive budget cuts are coming, but raises the question of where we start. If budget cuts are a fiscal necessity (more on that in a minute), asking what we cut is a moral necessity, hence the campaign’s title, intended to attract the attention – and stimulate the conscience – of American Christian voters. We all need to be reminded in the midst of what can become budget-frenzy that budgets are moral documents, and that the love of money can cause people to all sorts of evil things.
Cutting programs that save lives in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is morally unacceptable. Far better to ask questions like these:
How can we increase taxes on what we want less of (pollution, waste, pornography, tools of violence) and reduce taxes on what we want more of (work, earning, education, research and development, alternative energy, etc.)?
Why does a small segment of the super-rich control a larger and larger portion of national wealth, what are the consequences of this trend, and what should be done about it?
What percent of the national budget should be spent on the military? Are we heeding Eisenhower’s well-known but too-little-heeded warning and advice about the “military-industrial complex?”