Why Jews Should Not Be Liberals Page 17

  The following discussion on budget surpluses at the federal level may now seem irrelevant in light of the huge deficits we now face. At the time of my first writing, who could have anticipated the enormous economic disaster that 9/11/01 created, accompanied by our needed military buildup and our wars to defeat the Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq? Also, the unrestrained increases in government spending for domestic programs have added to the problem. This drastic change in our federal monetary picture illustrates the difficulty of making projections far into the future. The two income-tax reductions enacted under Pres. George W. Bush, and attempts to relax job-killing regulations, are certainly steps in the right direction. Hopefully, economic growth and controlled domestic spending will eventually minimize our budget deficits. I believe the discussion on this subject is still relevant to the major point that the principles of Judaism are more closely related to political conservatism than to liberalism.

  1. Suddenly, at the end of the 1990s, there was discovered that, unknown to many and not forecast by the most renowned economists, the United States was experiencing surpluses in its federal government budget of many billions of dollars. Not only was this phenomenon occurring in just one year, 1998-9, but the government economists were forecasting surpluses almost as far as the eye could see totaling into the trillions of dollars. How these surpluses came to be is debatable.

  Some say it was the Republican Congress, elected in 1994 as the first of its kind in fifty years that held federal spending to small annual increases in the years since 1994. Some say it was the Clinton inspired tax increase of 1993, which triggered the massive increases in federal tax collections. (It is doubtful if any tax increase ever contributes to the growth of an economy.) Many attributed the surpluses to the amazing technological revolution with the computer that improved efficiencies to the extent that more companies than ever earned greater profits, and thus paid more taxes. Some said that it was all due to Allan Greenspan, a libertarian or conservative Jew, who as head of the Federal Reserve System had kept interest rates low, who was really the godfather of our prosperity. Others said it was the growth of the Internet with the spawning of countless new companies with their soaring stock valuations that provided the spark and the increased capital gains taxes paid on the sale of those stocks. But whatever the reasons, we are now challenged with what to do with this excess money being collected by the federal government.

  As we enter into the debate of what to do with these surpluses, the liberals, true to their philosophy, argue that we must spend these surpluses by "investing" more dollars for education and other social purposes. The main reason for the current failure of our public education system is primarily that not enough money is being spent, so say the liberals. So if we spend the surpluses for this purpose, we will solve that problem. This of course, ignores the fact that as spending for public education has increased, the test scores of our children have declined.

  Then some of that surplus should be spent on more money for the poor and indigent. Five trillion dollars spent on welfare programs has not yet cured the problem, so we must throw some additional trillions at the problem to make it go away. This too, ignores the fact that our massive welfare programs have created a host of social problems of unwed mothers, fatherless youth, and broken families. Only now, beginning with the reformed welfare laws pushed through by the Republican Congress in 1996, and reluctantly signed by President Clinton, have we seen some meaningful reductions in the welfare rolls. But after all, how can more money hurt?

  Then of course, there are countless other programs and reasons and good ideas that require the expenditure of most of this "found" money. To liberals, the thought of returning most of this excess to those from whom it was collected is simply not included in their thinking. Once money comes to Washington, DC, it must be spent, and that is all there is to it. This is a golden opportunity for liberals to create more dependent classes by doling out more hard-earned taxpayers money.

  The latest scheme conceived by the liberals to avoid returning these surpluses to the taxpayers is to dedicate most of these massive sums to paying down, and eventually paying off, our national debt. This is truly a new idea. For all of these almost seventy years since FDR, the national debt was something that was simply out there, an always-available pot of gold to be tapped and expanded at will. To finance the debt we simply sold U.S. Government bonds of all different varieties, which are now held as secure investments by people and nations worldwide. We pay the interest on those securities without fail, and that interest comprises about 15% of our overall massive national budget, which today exceeds $2 trillion. To pay off the national debt which now exceeds five trillion dollars would take several years, assuming all of the financial projections come true which is highly unlikely, but suddenly the liberals have become fiscally conservative and have nothing but the long-term interests of America at heart. Quite a change of spots for this leopard!

  Nowhere are there heard any liberal voices crying out for returning the money to the taxpayers from whence these surpluses have come. Probably if a liberal did advocate this, he would soon lose his standing in the party. No, their attitude is summed up with the previously noted quote from their hero, President Clinton, who said that we cannot trust our citizens to spend their tax refunds for the right things. Those "right things" are the causes that are most dear to liberals' hearts.

  So what is wrong with this liberal position as it relates to Jewish law and tradition? Does Judaism proclaim that people are not capable of deciding how to spend their money? Does Judaism say that we must turn over the most important decisions of our lives to others? Does Judaism say that the average person does not possess the common sense to know what is important in his life? To the contrary, throughout the Torah are challenges to the Israelites to either accept or reject God's message, to choose the good or the evil, to live by or reject the Ten Commandments, all choices to be made by the individual, either to his benefit or his detriment.

  Nowhere does God say to His people, "I have laid a heavy burden on you to live righteous lives with many difficult decisions to make. If you have a problem in making those individual choices, then I suggest that you elect some super-wise people to make those decisions for you, and thus relieve you of the burden of those decisions. This also takes away your responsibility for any mistakes that may be made, as you can always blame those super-wise representatives for making those mistakes. This will show you just how much I love my people." That is not what God said to his people.

  In fact, He said, "I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed." (Deuteronomy 30:19) In the notes to the Soncino Pentateuch, titled "Free-Will In Judaism," it reads, "Jewish ethics is rooted in the doctrine of human responsibility, that is freedom of the will." It quotes Maimonides, "Free will is granted to every man. If he desires to incline towards the good way, and be righteous, he has the power to do so; and if he desires to incline towards the unrighteous way, and be a wicked man, he has also the power to do so. Since this power of doing good or evil is in our own hands, and since all the wicked deeds which we have committed have been committed with our full consciousness, it befits us to turn in penitence and forsake our evil deeds; the power of doing so being still in our hands. Now this matter is a very important principle; nay, it is the pillar of the Law and of the commandments."

  The Soncino notes go on to say that we are free agents in our choice between good and evil, and that this is an undeniable fact of human nature. It depends on man alone as to what happens to his life, and although he cannot always control his destiny, "God has given the reins of man's conduct altogether into his hands."

  When God gave Moses and the Israelites the Ten Commandments that commemorated their redemption from Egypt, His message was that of the God of freedom, and was directed to all the peoples of the world, as individuals. The entire thru
st of the Commandments and the other passages of the Torah is that individuals must make their own choices of how they live their lives, and that God has given us guidelines in how to make the most of our earthly existence.

  So, back to our opening question on what we should do with our tax surpluses. To be in harmony with our Jewish traditions we, of course, should return those monies to those who paid them in to the federal treasury. The liberals moan that any tax reductions would unduly benefit the "rich." Of course they would benefit those citizens who paid in the most taxes because that is where the surpluses come from. Five percent of American taxpayers are today paying 50% of the individual income taxes. Fifty percent of American taxpayers are paying 96% of the total individual income taxes. This also means that 50% of American taxpayers are paying only 4% of the total individual income taxes. No wonder that public opinion polls show so many citizens don't care about tax reductions.

  These excess tax collections should not be given away to those who did not pay them because that violates the doctrine of fairness. If one overpays for a product or service, the Talmud says that the payer must be made whole. Even liberals would agree that we do not get full value from government services for the taxes we pay, so why not at least reduce some of our overpayment. It would be interesting for the liberals to try and equate their positions with some element of Jewish tradition. I doubt if they can make that case, but certainly conservatives can!

  2. Education, its failures and successes, is perhaps the most important issue facing the electorate at this time. The poor test results, the inability of almost half of high school graduates to place the Civil War in the correct century, the fact that we are producing generations of illiterates who cannot fill out an employment application on their own, troubles most citizens. When the opposing forces discuss their solutions to the problems, the liberals, true to their beliefs, advocate more money for the public school system, smaller class sizes (which will require more union member teachers), and most recently, improved education and training for the public school teachers. This latter point has just been discovered when it was revealed that a high percentage of teachers could not pass the very tests they were giving to their students. The facts are that as more money has been spent, the results have not been what were expected, and that smaller class sizes are thus far showing negligible benefits. It would help if teachers were schooled in at least the subjects they are going to teach, but apparently we have not quite figured out how to accomplish this.

  The opposing forces, the conservatives, say that it does no good to look back on the past successes of public education; the fact is that today that system is failing our children and we need to make drastic changes. We need competition in education, just as we have in all other phases of our society. It is competition that spurs improvement, and it is accountability for results that is the bedrock of successful programs. To bring this about, we need to give parents freedom of choice in how they spend their hard-earned tax dollars for their children's education. Instead of having to pay those taxes to support public schools and then paying again for tuition for some private school, let us give parents something akin to the GI Bill of Rights, allowing them to send their children to any school of their choice: Catholic, Jewish, technical, trade, or whatever.

  Gary Becker, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for economics, and believed to be Jewish, spoke about competition in a lecture in Chicago given 12 September 1999. When government stifles competition among schools, "locally protected markets enable teachers' unions and government officials to capture the governance of public schools and manage them in their own rather than students' interests," Becker said. And contrary to popular belief, government run schools are not more democratic than private schools. Private schools, Becker said, are "far less segregated by race, income, social background, and every relevant characteristic." What it all boils down to is that competition is "the foundation of the good life and the most precious part of human existence, educational, civil, religious, and cultural as well as economic." Competition is "the most remarkable social contrivance invented during this millennium."

  Again, we get to the foundation of Judaism, that of individual choice in making the decisions of how to live one's life and bearing the consequences of those decisions. The liberals say that if we give parents this power that too many of them are simply too dumb to pick the best school for their kids. Liberals say that too many parents simply do not take the time to figure out where the best schools are, that they are too busy with their own pleasures to make educated decisions, and therefore, the public school system is the only alternative for these folk.

  Although liberals don't come right out and say it, they really are referring to black and Hispanic parents, living in the inner cities, who will be taken advantage of by charlatans who will offer private schools that will do an even worse job than the miserable public schools in those inner cities are now doing. It is not those "smart" white folk in the suburbs who liberals are worried about making bad decisions; it is really those "others" who cannot be relied on to do what is best for their kids. Isn't this hypocrisy at its worst, because this is the same part of the electorate that the liberals depend upon to keep their busybodies in office, election after election'? The Democrats are not shy about boasting that their core constituency includes blacks and Hispanics.

  The irony of this is that these inner-city parents are overwhelmingly in favor of school choice for their kids. It is these "dumb" parents that instinctively know that it is the current public school system that is failing their kids, and that parental choice of schools results in uplifted grades for the pupils in those schools. No matter how the teachers' unions try to downgrade this alternative approach to public schools, or try to offer a partial alternative in the form of charter schools, both common wisdom and actual results dictate that we must undergo a radical reform of our educational system via competition in order to achieve the results those children deserve.

  Gary Rosen, associate editor of Commentary, writes in his February 2000 article, "Are School Vouchers Un-American?" that today's voucher experiments are in response to the failing record of the public school system. Mr. Rosen writes that thus far, every study of existing voucher programs shows that the parents of the children involved are "vastly more satisfied with the quality of their children's education" than they were when their children were going to public schools. This satisfaction is due to several reasons including better classroom discipline and more rigorous homework assignments. Contrary to the liberals' thinking, these low-income parents are vitally interested in their children's academic progress, and "school choice is above all a way to save their children's minds..."

  Another result of the fledgling voucher programs is that the public schools in the local areas frequently respond to the new competition by making substantial improvements after many years of complacency. In New York, Florida, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin there have been meaningful improvements in some of the public schools competing with voucher programs in their areas. Mr. Rosen predicts that based on these results, if school choice were implemented on a broad national basis, this could generate a meaningful turnaround in the public schools in the inner cities which today frequently resemble battlefields more than schools.

  Again the Jewish position should be that of giving the power and responsibility of education to the parents and the families of their children. In the Soncino notes to Deuteronomy is written, "Jewish law and custom ordained the provision of elementary instruction to all the children of the community, rich and poor alike. Be ye heedful of the children of the poor, for from them does the Torah go forth, was the warning of the rabbis."

  The question is why'? Why is the Jewish liberal leader not in the forefront of the movement to expand parental choice? From the Biblical references quoted above, they are not reading their own liturgy. They are also being held captive, for whatever reasons, by the politically powerful teachers' unions, whose sole purpose seems to be maintaining the perks a
nd privileges of their members, and to hell with the educational results of those they are paid to teach. In California, the lobby that spends the most money to influence state legislation consists of the teachers' unions. They are the ones who have thus far successfully fought oft any expansion of parental choice. If Jewish leaders could somehow gather their imposing wits about them and see the light on this subject, they could provide the catalyst that would ignite the profound changes needed to improve the education system both in California and throughout these United States.

  3. The third prominent subject under discussion, once called the "third rail" of politics, is the Social Security system. Originally designed to provide a minimum retirement payment of $30 a month if one lived to be sixty-five, when the average age at death was sixty-three, the Social Security system has grown to be the elephant of American redistribution schemes. Politicians of both parties came to realize these past sixty years that by raising benefits they could not only get reelected easily, but the costs could be passed on to the next generation of taxpayers and elected officials. What a deal: Look good to your public, inflict higher costs only gradually, and hope and pray that somehow all would come out okay somewhere in the distant future. As with all Ponzi schemes, the Social Security mess has finally broken through the surface and is now perhaps the most talked about domestic political issue as we enter the twenty-first century. (Ponzi scheme: Collect money from Peter to pay Paul, and then hope Peter dies before his turn comes to collect benefits.)

  The alternative solutions proposed include raising taxes, increasing the retirement age, somehow improving the rate of return on monies collected, and variations thereof. The liberal position here does not differ from conservatives in the first alternative. No one wants to increase taxes, which already are at a combined 15+%. We have already decreed that the retirement age will increase by 2022 to sixty-seven from sixtyfive, and there appears to be a reluctance to increase that age further, although with the increased lifespan of most seniors, it is still a possibility that this alternative will be exercised. The majority of the discussion seems to center around how to invest the enormous sums that are collected annually, and are not yet being paid out in benefits to the current recipients. Should we continue to increase the IOUs that represent those surpluses or should some new way of investment be considered?