America: A Modern Sodom and Gomorrah
I read this
and felt like
.
President Obama is meeting with Republicans from the House of Representatives today and the House is proposing their budget which
- Eliminates Obamacare
- Guts Medicare and turns it into a voucher system that is not pegged to rising costs of healthcare and makes seniors pay more out-of-pocket
- Reduces Pell Grants to 2008 levels, and is something else not pegged to rising costs of an industry
- Reduces Medicaid
- Does away with Dodd-Frank legislation which is helping to reform the banking industry after they took us for a run (and are still taking us for a run due to the legislation not having all the teeth it needs to enact meaningful long-lasting reforms)
- Allows the wealthy and corporations to pay lower taxes, which actually won’t make companies do work here if the workers are not skilled enough and if they can get away with paying foreign workers less money in their countries
- Makes the Bush tax cuts permanent.
How does this help America succeed? Is the idea that the less rich people have to pay in taxes, the more they’ll hire or spend to get the economy moving again? That did not work from 2001-2012, and it won’t work now. Why are they proposing something that made them lose a major election in 2012? The money not collected from rich people for taxes would be shifted to the middle class to collect and I’m sure they’re in favor of “everyone having skin in the game,” so the taxes that poor people get back in the form of a refund would be eliminated so that “we all play fair,” as the poorest people live on $15,000/year after paying $6,000 in taxes and the richest live on $500,000/year after paying $125,000 in taxes.
Who is going to “make it” after all out of those two groups, the person who has $500,000 left over or the person who has $15,000 left over?
I know, I know. If the poor would just stop being so darned lazy, they’d be happier with much more success and upward mobility if they’d just apply themselves and work harder. You get rewarded for hard work, always, and those rewards always come on time when you have a boss and company that aren’t getting hit hard by a struggling economy and lack of trust in such a “dependable” system. Even when it’s going well, if the boss doesn’t like you, you won’t get very far with rewards for hard work. There is only so much room at the top, right?
So, if the poor are lazy and just need to apply themselves, and if we’re a nation that shouldn’t use tax dollars to help the poor, but should leave that to private citizens to give to the poor, how exactly are the poor getting helped? If you call them lazy bums but say your dollars can help them through private donations, I don’t think you’re in a giving mood if you think they’re lazy and will waste the money.
Wouldn’t it have been the governments of Sodom and Gomorrah that would have given money to their poorer neighbors and helped them out? Wouldn’t the government as well as private citizens have helped the poor and needy within their city walls? Ezekiel stated that was why Sodom was destroyed – the sin of pride and lording their success over their neighbors and a callous unconcern for the poor and needy.
Now, sure, America gives to poorer nations – that help us with our strategic interests. (Haiti was the first time I remember us officially helping a poorer nation that had nothing to give back). And even people who feel that private citizens should give to the poor have a limit with it. These people are mostly the same people who feel that the poor have no excuse for being poor and are lazy.
Finally, these people lord their success over the poor and won’t help a panhandler and only give a small percentage to the poor through a church or charitable organization that keeps a list of other groups that only help certain people who “qualify”. That’s a mixture of pride and targeting specific people who meet a criteria for assistance. When did Jesus require that of us in order to save us? When did Jesus list a set of acceptable guidelines to determine who was more meritorious in the Alms For The Poor business?
I think these people think of the poor as somehow being people who don’t live anywhere near them, when in reality, “the poor will always be with you” -Jesus. This means that the poor are wherever you are. In reality, most people are actually working poor, but we don’t think of ourselves that way because we have cars, flat screens, and computers.
So, I am against this budget. America is big enough to help out those who are less-than and if they have to depend on private citizens who view them as nothing more than lazy moochers, then they’re doomed and I feel bad for them and how God will view our nation. It may not be the gays or the “coming race war” that brings down America. It very well may be our internal pride and a growing unconcern for the needy.
Ezekiel 16:49: “’Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.'”
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Category: Christianity, Conservatives, Politics
