Death, Taxes, And The Bible

As a people, we are living a good bit longer than folks did even a couple of generations ago, but we all know that every last one of us is going to die, no matter what. And we have also believed that, just as the grim reaper will find us eventually, so will the tax man. Or will he? The tax man, that is, not the grim reaper.

If tinkering with the tax code --- to date pretty much a bipartisan business --- keeps moving in the direction its current tinkerers apparently think it should --- then some people in our country may wind up saying good-by to this world without ever saying hello to tax men and women at all. Not very many, of course. Payroll taxes either will remain the same or increase. Rebates on and cuts in income taxes will benefit the very large majority of taxpayers very little. And so, most of us will still be able to chant the "death and taxes" refrain for about as long as we pray "Even so, Lord, quickly come."

But by design, there are a privileged few who are going to be relieved of this burden for a long time to come. They are the ones whose incomes are large enough to keep their Social Security and Medicare taxes annoying, but relatively inconsequential in their larger schemes of things. They are the ones who will pass on the benefits of their successes unencumbered by estate taxes. And if their bought and paid for tinkerers can keep on disguising their real agenda, they will be the ones who will pay no taxes on their capital investments at all. Three guesses as to how they will be making their money then. The first two don't count.

Many of the people tinkering their way to this kind of Promised Land are good Christian people who seem to have gained assurance of the rightness of their cause by some version of the very "trickle-down" economic theories that experts in the field have been questioning for decades. If the richer are permitted to do what they need to do in order to get richer, the thinking goes, the poorer will get richer too. A pouring down rain raises all boats. At least, if it doesn't sink some of them first.

For my pre-November election studying this year, I've been taking some fresh looks at, of all things, the Bible. This can be a tricky business at best, and downright dangerous at worst, when the subject at hand is economics. For instance, one thing you find in the Bible is a rather consistent denunciation of the practice of putting bread on the table and a boat down at the marina by using money to earn interest. And the people who pay the interest are just as guilty as those who charge it. If you are of a Fundamentalist leaning, and want to argue that everything the Bible says is binding on us today in the same ways as it was when the Bible first said it, let me know how you are doing with refinancing your life-style in the light of this teaching. Better yet, why not just get it over with and share everything you've got with all the rest of us, right now?

Looking to the Bible for guidance on the decisions we make about money does not have to be as tricky or as dangerous as we might otherwise think it is. For instance, one Old Testament text from The Book of Amos defined a starting point more than adequately both for ancient Judaism and early Christianity:

"Listen to this, you that grind the poor and suppress the humble in the land while you say…"When will the sabbath be past so that we may expose our wheat for sale, giving short measure in the bushel and taking overweight in the silver, tilting the scales fraudulently, and selling the refuse of the wheat; that we may buy the weak for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals?" (Amos 8:4-6, REB)

Jesus' economic theory lines up with the prophet's quite well. It assumed that we must begin all our decision-making with a concern for the poor. By contrast, working hard on not being poor, and doing so at the expense of the poor, is a sure way to get locked out at the gates of heaven. But at least the surroundings will not be strange to us. For it is precisely on the outside and not the inside of those gates that most of our tax tinkering has been going on.