“My friends know that I’m a pretty strong constitutional conservative,” wrote one of my Facebook friends last Wednesday afternoon, “But I’m not sure how a law that would have strictly forbidden a national gun registry is supposed to lead to a national gun registry. Feeling lost,” he concluded with a sad-faced emoticon.
He was referring to the fact that despite 90 percent of Americans supporting legislation to institute criminal background checks for all gun purchases, including online and at gun shows, the U.S. Senate was unable to pass it.
How did this happen?
Well for one thing, gun lobbying groups and right-wing pundits smeared the proposed legislation. To manipulate individual gun owners, and more importantly Congress, to protect all gun sales, they misrepresented the bill as mandating a national gun registry.
As the New York Times reported: “The National Rifle Association mobilized members to blanket the Senate with phone calls, e-mails and letters.”
On Fox News, Eric Bolling argued the legislation mandated a national gun registry, even though it specifically strengthened an existing law outlawing such a registry. And on his April 10 program, right wing radio announcer Mark Levin implied the law would create a database of gun owners and perhaps even lead to genocide. Another Fox News contributor, Erick Erickson, tweeted liberal doctors might one day diagnose Christians as “too crazy for gun ownership.”
Where do they get this stuff? They make it up to get credulous voters to advocate for their point of view. And apparently it works on Congress people, too.
As The New York Times article noted, our Senator Charles E. Grassley contributed nothing more to the debate than the tired old saw: “Criminals do not submit to background checks now. They will not submit to expanded background checks.”
Yet a recent NBC news report noted: “The numbers show that background checks do keep guns out of the hands of at least some people who are not supposed to have them. Nearly 1.8 million applications for firearm transfers or permits were denied between the passage of the [Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act] law in March 1994 and December 2008, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The FBI and state law enforcement denied firearm purchases to 153,000 people in 2010 alone, the most recent year for which data is available.”
And another recent New York Times story, titled “Seeking Gun or Selling One, Web is Land of Few Rules,” reported: “A 2011 undercover investigation by the City of New York examined private party gun sellers on a range of Web sites, including Armslist, to see if they would sell guns to someone who said that they probably could not pass a background check. (Federal law bars sales to any person the seller has reason to believe is prohibited from purchasing firearms). Investigators found seventy-seven of 125 online sellers agreed to sell the weapons anyway.”
Ultimately, those sellers chose the money from the sale over the safety of the public. Profit before people.
If that’s what we value, we really are lost.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Sunday, April 14, 2013
What do we owe each other?
This question was penned recently by a high school student in Austin, Texas and shared by a friend on Facebook.
Deb’s students come from varied ethnic and economic backgrounds, many with numerous challenges to overcome, and she works diligently with love to give them a safe place to learn, grow and become themselves. She often posts about her classroom encounters.
But this question really stopped me. It echoed a question that popped out of my husband’s mouth during a discussion one evening: “Are we all in this alone?”
Well, are we?
Citizens, we know via polling, want to preserve social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment. But to hear politicians, pundits and even some of these same citizens, talk about these programs, they only serve deadbeat freeloaders.
In addition, plenty of citizens complain about income taxes without recognizing they pay for vital government services. Too many don’t understand our progressive tax system was designed to prevent income inequality because rates rise incrementally according to each level’s ability to pay.
Yet our progressive tax system has been systematically eroded over the last 40 years to benefit the wealthy. So today, we hear proposals for flat taxes as a way to “simplify” the tax code. (It’s a trap, people!)
And to get back to the original question, what’s wrong with paying taxes to help build our national, state or local community? Do we really all go it alone?
Did you build the road you drive to work on? Do you put out your own fires? Do you have your own hospital and school? Do you check your own food supply and develop your own vaccines? Or do you take advantage of all these services via your government?
Generally speaking, we all do better when we ALL do better, including, as they are called in the Good Book, the least among us. In fact, most major faiths call for hospitality or care of others.
How does America do by this standard? According to an article by Paul Buchhelt titled, “Five Ugly Extremes of Inequality in America,” out of 141 countries, we have the 4th highest degree of wealth inequality, ranking behind only Russia, Ukraine and Lebanon.
And a recent YouTube Video titled “Wealth Inequality in America,” laid bare the difference between our beliefs about wealth distribution and the reality. As the video notes, the top 1 percent owns 40 percent of the nation’s wealth; the bottom 80 percent only has 7 percent between them.
So to answer “What do we owe each other?” I think we, first, have to acknowledge our common life. We are connected.
In a recent blog post titled, “On God’s Side: For the Common Good,” Rev. Jim Wallis writes: “That old but always new ethic simply says we must care for more than just ourselves or our own group. We must care for our neighbor as well, and for the health of the life we share with one another. It echoes a very basic tenet of Christianity and other faiths — love your neighbor as yourself — still the most transformational ethic in history.”
Because as Wallis concludes, “Our life together can be better.”
Deb’s students come from varied ethnic and economic backgrounds, many with numerous challenges to overcome, and she works diligently with love to give them a safe place to learn, grow and become themselves. She often posts about her classroom encounters.
But this question really stopped me. It echoed a question that popped out of my husband’s mouth during a discussion one evening: “Are we all in this alone?”
Well, are we?
Citizens, we know via polling, want to preserve social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment. But to hear politicians, pundits and even some of these same citizens, talk about these programs, they only serve deadbeat freeloaders.
In addition, plenty of citizens complain about income taxes without recognizing they pay for vital government services. Too many don’t understand our progressive tax system was designed to prevent income inequality because rates rise incrementally according to each level’s ability to pay.
Yet our progressive tax system has been systematically eroded over the last 40 years to benefit the wealthy. So today, we hear proposals for flat taxes as a way to “simplify” the tax code. (It’s a trap, people!)
And to get back to the original question, what’s wrong with paying taxes to help build our national, state or local community? Do we really all go it alone?
Did you build the road you drive to work on? Do you put out your own fires? Do you have your own hospital and school? Do you check your own food supply and develop your own vaccines? Or do you take advantage of all these services via your government?
Generally speaking, we all do better when we ALL do better, including, as they are called in the Good Book, the least among us. In fact, most major faiths call for hospitality or care of others.
How does America do by this standard? According to an article by Paul Buchhelt titled, “Five Ugly Extremes of Inequality in America,” out of 141 countries, we have the 4th highest degree of wealth inequality, ranking behind only Russia, Ukraine and Lebanon.
And a recent YouTube Video titled “Wealth Inequality in America,” laid bare the difference between our beliefs about wealth distribution and the reality. As the video notes, the top 1 percent owns 40 percent of the nation’s wealth; the bottom 80 percent only has 7 percent between them.
So to answer “What do we owe each other?” I think we, first, have to acknowledge our common life. We are connected.
In a recent blog post titled, “On God’s Side: For the Common Good,” Rev. Jim Wallis writes: “That old but always new ethic simply says we must care for more than just ourselves or our own group. We must care for our neighbor as well, and for the health of the life we share with one another. It echoes a very basic tenet of Christianity and other faiths — love your neighbor as yourself — still the most transformational ethic in history.”
Because as Wallis concludes, “Our life together can be better.”
Monday, April 8, 2013
If you mandate it, why not fund it?
As I was doing my morning reading last week, I did a quick check of my Facebook page to discover a post by a friend and member of a local school board. It linked to a KMA story about the Iowa Senate passing a school radon bill. My friend’s comment noted without the funding, the bill wasn’t much help to schools.
In other words, it’s just another “unfunded mandate.”
From my years tracking state education legislation, I can say this follows the usual pattern of picking issues and pushing through one-size-fits-all fixes. These fixes often turn into political theater, giving legislators issues on which to run their next campaign. But they create headaches for local level officials charged with implementation because they are passed without the funding that would make them work.
In this case, without additional funding to help schools pay for installation of any needed radon mitigation system, requiring it becomes a burden more likely to erode a district’s education program by taking money away from kids’ learning or other district needs. Currently, that’s how the legislation reads.
And such legislation distracts from the real responsibility of legislators to tax and spend for the common good. Their job, first and foremost, is to provide the means (money) for public services, not the details of their operation.
As one southwest Iowa legislator noted when I made a visit to the Capitol in February, from the beginning of his legislative career, he specialized, serving on agricultural and human service committees. Too many issues come before the legislature for him to be an expert in all, he said.
Which leads me to ask why legislators are passing legislation at this level of detail, instead of appropriating adequate education funds to allow local officials to do the job of providing safe schools? Ironically, this same legislator registered a similar complaint about working with the federal government on water quality standards in Iowa.
But getting back to radon, it is very definitely a public health issue, and we want to protect our children. If it’s a priority, then it’s the legislature’s job to appropriate the funds to pay for this public safety law. However, without the funding, it’s simply marketing for the next election.
If legislators are serious about public needs, they need to be willing to fund them. That’s why Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to tax. And our state constitution states: “Government is instituted for the protection, security, and benefit of the people.” No government can perform these duties without funds.
Likewise, schools can’t fix a radon problem without funds.
So if state legislators really want to protect our schools from radon, they need to provide the funds for it. Either attach appropriations to the radon bill or increase allowable growth to cover it instead of asking schools to cut already tight budgets or local property taxpayers to pick up the bill.
In other words, it’s just another “unfunded mandate.”
From my years tracking state education legislation, I can say this follows the usual pattern of picking issues and pushing through one-size-fits-all fixes. These fixes often turn into political theater, giving legislators issues on which to run their next campaign. But they create headaches for local level officials charged with implementation because they are passed without the funding that would make them work.
In this case, without additional funding to help schools pay for installation of any needed radon mitigation system, requiring it becomes a burden more likely to erode a district’s education program by taking money away from kids’ learning or other district needs. Currently, that’s how the legislation reads.
And such legislation distracts from the real responsibility of legislators to tax and spend for the common good. Their job, first and foremost, is to provide the means (money) for public services, not the details of their operation.
As one southwest Iowa legislator noted when I made a visit to the Capitol in February, from the beginning of his legislative career, he specialized, serving on agricultural and human service committees. Too many issues come before the legislature for him to be an expert in all, he said.
Which leads me to ask why legislators are passing legislation at this level of detail, instead of appropriating adequate education funds to allow local officials to do the job of providing safe schools? Ironically, this same legislator registered a similar complaint about working with the federal government on water quality standards in Iowa.
But getting back to radon, it is very definitely a public health issue, and we want to protect our children. If it’s a priority, then it’s the legislature’s job to appropriate the funds to pay for this public safety law. However, without the funding, it’s simply marketing for the next election.
If legislators are serious about public needs, they need to be willing to fund them. That’s why Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to tax. And our state constitution states: “Government is instituted for the protection, security, and benefit of the people.” No government can perform these duties without funds.
Likewise, schools can’t fix a radon problem without funds.
So if state legislators really want to protect our schools from radon, they need to provide the funds for it. Either attach appropriations to the radon bill or increase allowable growth to cover it instead of asking schools to cut already tight budgets or local property taxpayers to pick up the bill.
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