"Christian" Republicans Stand the NT on its Head

[Danmark]

https://thinkprogress.org/bad-theology- ... 42ef90b387
Question for debate: 'Does the Republican battle against programs to help the poor stand in direct contradiction to the words of Jesus Christ:

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.�
Matthew 25:41-46

[Wootah]

[Replying to post 29 by Danmark]

I would suggest that Jesus' words are for those social justice warrior Christians who virtue signal on the outside and do nothing with their own money.

My understanding is that right wing people give more.

Being taxed of our wealth is not a form of giving.

[Danmark]

Are you arguing that the poor would be saved if no one stopped these programs?

Surely the money wasted on governed programs is holding the poor back more.

Could you explain the logic of this claim, along with the evidence upon which you base it? I AM arguing that the poor are served by having affordable health care and a living wage.

My question is "Why are many Christians opposed to helping the poor?" Jesus was clear that we should help the poor. Today the religious right says the opposite. How is this not a rejection of the message of Jesus Christ?

[Peds nurse]

If there is separation of church and state, then the government cannot be held to religious or biblical standards, can they?

[Wootah]

Are you arguing that the poor would be saved if no one stopped these programs?

Surely the money wasted on governed programs is holding the poor back more.

Could you explain the logic of this claim, along with the evidence upon which you base it? I AM arguing that the poor are served by having affordable health care and a living wage.

My question is "Why are many Christians opposed to helping the poor?" Jesus was clear that we should help the poor. Today the religious right says the opposite. How is this not a rejection of the message of Jesus Christ?

Jesus wants you as an individual to help others. He does not want you as an individual to sanction state theft of others goods and allow some process of trickle down economics to see some pennies finally get into the hands of the poor.

edit: It's worse than that. The money the poor get is also 'shut up' money. It's designed to maintain their dependency and status quo of the system.

[tam]

Peace to you Peds! Good to hear from you.

[Replying to post 33 by Peds nurse]

I agree. Unless the political leaders of the state do not maintain that separation of church and state and instead use the bible, the words of Christ, and religion, in order to promote their own political agenda... to take away (or refuse to give) programs and assistance to the poor.

Because that is the case from the article Danmark listed. Quotes from politicians who are saying 'Lord, Lord', and at the same time (mis)using words from Christ and from Paul to promote NOT giving to the poor.

Therefore, their words (and conclusions) can be held up to Christ and His 'standards'.


Peace to you,
your servant and a slave of Christ,
tammy

[McCulloch]

I AM arguing that the poor are served by having affordable health care and a living wage.

My question is "Why are many Christians opposed to helping the poor?" Jesus was clear that we should help the poor. Today the religious right says the opposite. How is this not a rejection of the message of Jesus Christ?

Jesus wants you as an individual to help others.

Can you explain how a minimum wage doesn't help the poor? Can you explain how having affordable healthcare doesn't help the poor?

He does not want you as an individual to sanction state theft of others goods and allow some process of trickle down economics to see some pennies finally get into the hands of the poor.

How do you know what Jesus want? Jesus had very little to say about government relations. In fact, there is nothing recorded about what he would have wished government policy to be. However, he did once describe taxation, and he did not refer to it as state theft of others' goods. I am rather astounded that you presume to speak for him on this matter.

Jesus made it abundantly clear that he was concerned for the wellbeing of the poor and that he expected his followers to have the same concern. There is nothing in any of the recorded discourses of Jesus that he had any expectation that his followers would have any great political or economic power. He left no specific instructions for his followers if they should find themselves in a position of secular leadership. We can only speculate what he might suggest our governments' fiscal policies should be. But if we allow ourselves to speculate, would we not imagine that his priorities would be consistent with his general message: help the poor, house for the homeless, care for the sick?

I am also surprised about your misuse of the phrase, trickle down economics. This originally was an expression used to describe the idea that financial incentives given to the rich would actually help the poor, since it is the rich who create economic opportunities for the poor. As an economic theory, it has been thoroughly discredited. Minimum wages and affordable healthcare are just about the furthest thing from trickle down economics there is.

[Danmark]

Jesus wants you as an individual to help others. He does not want you as an individual to sanction state theft of others goods....
The money the poor get is also... designed to maintain their dependency and status quo of the system.

"Theft?" Seriously? It is hardly theft when we the people vote in a democracy to collectively share our wealth. Almost none of us would have any income or wealth at all, or at least much less, if it were not for the social compact, or do you suppose your wealth and income do not in part derive from the cooperation of others.

We agree to tax ourselves for our own benefit and the benefit of others. This is merely a reflection of the fact we all benefit from our social cooperative. The richest benefit the most, or do you suppose they could run their great enterprises without assistance from others and from the order government imposes. You would greatly benefit from reading some history of the 'Robber Barons' era, TR's trust busting, child labor laws and more. A good start would be THE JUNGLE by Upton Sinclair.

[Danmark]

Have you ever worked McCulloch? Honest question, how would you feel if 30% of your paycheck went to somebody who was able to work but chose not to?
....
Please stop writing incoherent stuff.
...
you have NOTHING to back up your misinformed claim.

What do you know about business McCulloch?
Your post just seems to reek of self entitlement.
....
... apparently in your world frycooks and janitors are just are valuable as EMT's and CNA's.

None of your unsupported personal references and insults are supported by documentation.

The point is not that fry cooks and janitors are "just are valuable as..." others. The point is that janitors and fry cooks deserve a living wage. As our neighbors, brothers, and sisters they ARE just as valuable as anyone else. The amoral ideology you are defending says that workers deserve nothing more than what the 'free' market provides, even if that wage is insufficient to feed them or support their families no matter how hard they work. The obscenity of this amoral 18th Century philosophy is that if the supposed 'free' market rewards the janitor with 15 cents an hour, then that is what he 'deserves' despite that fact those are starvation wages.

I can understand why an amoral economic philosopher might champion such an anti human policy. But I would think that a true Christian perspective would instil care and concern for the welfare of others that goes beyond some clinical evaluation of a person's worth based solely on supply and demand. Jesus said 'feed the poor.' Some Christians say the opposite.

[WinePusher]

None of your unsupported personal references and insults are supported by documentation.

The point is not that fry cooks and janitors are "just are valuable as..." others. The point is that janitors and fry cooks deserve a living wage. As our neighbors, brothers, and sisters they ARE just as valuable as anyone else. The amoral ideology you are defending says that workers deserve nothing more than what the 'free' market provides, even if that wage is insufficient to feed them or support their families no matter how hard they work. The obscenity of this amoral 18th Century philosophy is that if the supposed 'free' market rewards the janitor with 15 cents an hour, then that is what he 'deserves' despite that fact those are starvation wages.

Sigh. You know all the stuff you're regurgitating has been refuted and debunked right? Every educated person knows that capitalism has alleviated poverty and brought affluence to the masses far more so than any other economic system has. Every educated person knows that controlled economies have been cesspools of poverty and human misery.

What's ironic is that setting high minimum wages actually increases poverty, so all this stuff you keep saying about helping the poor is meritless since you're want to implement policies that will make the poor worse off.

I doubt you will even address this point head on since it completely destroys the premise of your thread.

I can understand why an amoral economic philosopher might champion such an anti human policy. But I would think that a true Christian perspective would instil care and concern for the welfare of others that goes beyond some clinical evaluation of a person's worth based solely on supply and demand. Jesus said 'feed the poor.' Some Christians say the opposite.

But the data actually shows that Christians are far more charitable than atheists are! Did you know that? Christians actually put their money where their mouths are and give away their money to a greater extent than nonbelievers do.

Sure, I'm sure you can probably find a few Christians who never do anything for the poor. I'm particularly opposed to huge mega churches and millionaire pastors and I think that there is a compelling case to tax them. But overall, the social science research shows that Christians (well, believers in general) give more than nonbelievers.

Btw, try to address my points head on rather than dodge them.

[WinePusher]

A famous 1990 study, by David Card and Alan Krueger, compared fast food employment in New Jersey and Pennsylvania after one state increased its minimum wage and the other didn’t. They didn’t find a significant effect on employment.
http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin-aer.pdf

There are those within the profession who will either dismiss the Card-Krueger study as poor research and there are others who view it as revolutionary research that overturned centuries of empirical evidence and microeconomic theory.

I tend to take a more moderate approach. Certainly the results of the paper cannot be simply dismissed. However, the methodology they employed is somewhat questionable. Consider this post I wrote a while back:

The highly controversial result of the Card-Krueger study is that the minimum wage doesn't impact employment. The reason why this result is highly controversial is that previous research on the minimum wage and labor markets (done by George Stigler, a Nobel laurete) showed that the minimum wage can actually increase employment in the presence of a monopsony.

The intuition behind Stigler's research is that if there's a market dominated only by one firm (a monopsony) then that monopsonistic firm will hire workers below the amount that would be hired under normal, generally competitive conditions and will pay these workers a wage below the wage rate that would be paid under competitive conditions. In other words, if you have a monopsony you're going to have under employment and lower wages. As such, Stigler purported that a minimum wage would simply offset these negative outcomes that are associated with monopsonys.

Card and Krueger heavily integrated the notion of monopsony into their paper in order to explain their conclusion (that the minimum wage didn't affect employment) and they go on to explicitly claim that the market for low skilled labor is monopsonistic. And as the post I linked explains, if this was true, if the minimum wage increased employment because the market for low skilled labor is monopsonistic, THEN there should also be a reduction in prices. The exact opposite happened, prices rose and this actually contradicts their usage of monopsony.

Based on this, I don't think we can reasonably draw general conclusions from their study. Certainly we can see that throughout the United States at the momeny, those municipalities that have implemented minimum wage laws are suffering from increased unemployment. Or is this something you deny?

Have you ever worked McCulloch? Honest question, how would you feel if 30% of your paycheck went to somebody who was able to work but chose not to?

I don't know how this is relevant, but yes, I have worked. Nine years for an investment broker and fifteen for an accounting, tax, consulting and financial services firm. Please explain how my point of view would be any less valid if I were a homeless teen at an internet cafe.

Honest question, how did you arrive at the 30% number?

30% is roughly the median income tax rate in America.

Let's say that 60% of your paycheque went to taxes. Then let's further imagine that one third of government spending went to social spending. If we further image that half of those receiving social assistance were freeloaders, able but unwilling to work. 60% times ⅓ times ½ equals 10%. I strongly suspect that you pay less than 60% of your paycheque to taxes. I am fairly sure that government spending on social services is less than one third. I also believe that less than half of social services recipients are freeloaders. So the total should be way less than 10%.

Well, there's really no need to engage in all this guess work. Data on government spending is readily available to the public. Mandatory spending, the component of the federal budget consisting of social service spending, is the largest. So the majority of taxes do go to fund "social services," some of which are absolutely vital (education and veteran's benefits).

But it would be hypocritical of WinePusher to pull a number out of a hat while at the same time criticizing me for making claims without evidence. So, there must be something wrong with my rather loose analysis. Please demonstrate to us that you are not a hypocrite by showing us specifically how you arrived at 30%.

What are you even talking about? If you take into consideration sales tax, state taxes, property taxes, capital gains taxes, then the majority of people are paying well above 30% to the government.

Minimum wages laws protect vulnerable workers from exploitation and are supposed to allow a living wage for everyone who works full time.

Minimum wage laws actually hurt those who are most vulnerable by destroying their job opportunities. People who actually understand labor economics agree on this fact.

What do you know about business McCulloch? Did you know that many business owners actually put their payroll on CREDIT CARDS?

I didn't know that. I talked to my banker about your claim. She said that any business owner who believed that they had to put their payroll on credit cards should talk to their bank about better options for short term business loans and should learn more about cash flow analysis. Those who regularly use very high interest interest loans such as credit cards to meet their payroll, will not be in business very long. My friend who used to own and run a used book store said that she never used credit cards to meet her payroll. Another friend who does the bookkeeping and is a sales clerk for a family owned spice store says that they never have used credit cards to meet their payroll. A couple we know who run a tea room and cafe also say that they have never used credit cards to meet their payroll.[/quote]

Yea, you totally missed the point of what I said. I'll make it more clear. Many small business struggle to pay their expenses, many small business struggle to make payroll. Arbitrarily increasing the wages of their workers without any corresponding increase in worker productivity will only drive them out of business and destroy those jobs, causing unemployment.

Please don't put words into my mouth that I have not said. In my world, everyone who works full time should be paid a living wage. Anything less is exploitative. Those with greater skills and abilities should be paid more.

[/quote]

You really can't see the glaring contradiction in what you wrote, can you?
In your world, a full time janitor makes the same as a full time EMT, even though the EMT objectively possesses greater skills than the janitor. Sorry, but real life doesn't work like that. You get paid based on what you can do and the value you can generate.

I agree that the janitor should be given social assistance if he cannot live on his wage, but you are not automatically entitled to a certain amount of money just because you put in 40 hours a week.