McConnell
and Trump are suddenly pretending to be fiscal hawks and rejecting calls for a
bailout of the states. While the national debt has exploded since 9/11 and has
reached new heights under Trump, suddenly there's a reticence to use the fiscal
tools of the Federal Reserve and the banking system to help the states weather
the trials of the pandemic.
And yet why? Is it really out of a concern for fiscal policy?
More likely this is a tactical move the likes of Paul Ryan would applaud. They
want the states to declare bankruptcy. Why?
Because once bankruptcy is declared, state finances are
wrested from the control of legislature and handed over to the judiciary.
Judges have the power to renegotiate debt obligations and have the power to
sunder existing contracts in order to reorganise and recover solvency.
Corporations sometimes don't make it and collapse. States cannot and so a
solution has to be found. One of the greatest line items in state budgets and
one of the great sources of mounting debt and deficits are the pensions for
state employees.
Since the New Deal, the Right has been trying to destroy
anything that smacks of the welfare state or any kind of social safety net
reliant on the state as opposed to for-profit private industry. Never mind that
fact that the massive pension funds are invested in the markets. It's not good
enough. They want the powers of the state to be privatised and handed over to
those holding the reins of the markets. It's a good old fashioned power
struggle, a tug of war.
It's easy to villainise the Right on this issue. Avarice
motivates them and for some there is a naive retention of the notion that the
private sector will be more efficient and more just. The tools of tyranny are
removed from the claws of the state (or so they say) and using such arguments
they can give their position an ideological and moral gloss.
Of course their opponents see it otherwise. For them, the
safety net is sacred, wedded to the social contract and essential for democracy
to function. The safety net is therefore moral, a promise to provide for the
weak, the poor and the aged and such mechanisms create a society in which
everyone is invested – as opposed to the oligarchic structure which results
from a privatised social order.
The state leads the way and sets the example in paying
workers fair and living wages and providing good benefits packages. To the poor
and working classes a state position with its benefits is highly regarded. The
Right usually tries to dismiss the state sector as substandard and indeed (when
compared to Wall Street and other sectors) state compensation packages are
lacking.
Basically the state jobs are not a ticket to wealth but to
the middle class (which from a Christian perspective is wealth). But contrary
to the mammon-glorifying Right, large sectors of the American population view
the state employees as doing just fine – even better than fine. In a poor area
like my own the state employees and retirees are often the wealthier people in
town – more like the low end of the Upper Class tier than merely middle class.*
The problem is that at this point there are just too many
state employees. The bureaucracies have multiplied and there are so many on the
rolls and on the retirement rolls that it's breaking state budgets. Add in the
fact that people are living longer – not that people didn't live to be eighty
or ninety before, but that far more people are living to those ages – and you
have a system in crisis.
I always think of my grandfather. He was a letter carrier for
something like twenty-five years (give or take) and then retired fairly young
and lived until he was ninety. He ended up taking the pension for about as long
as (if not longer) than he worked for the postal service. That kind of reality,
people living for decades in retirement – kills budgets. Some always will but
if you get too many, then the system starts to break.
That's how a pension system works. There will be those that
live long and those that don't. My in-laws both died at around age sixty and
never saw any of their social security or private pension money. They had paid
into it for years and yet never benefitted from it. That's how it works. The
system is counting on that. But nowadays with state workers (who get good
health care) living longer and in greater numbers, the system can't take it.
And so McConnell and others continue to look for every chance
they can to break the system apart. There are legal and contractual aspects to
the question and so it can't be easily remedied by means of legislation. It
would get bogged down in the courts and there would be a surge of energy to
remove such politicians from office. So instead, they try to kill these systems
by incremental means and Covid-19 is potentially providing a golden opportunity
to push states to the breaking point – a point that allows states to
renegotiate pension contracts and effectively break their promises and remove
their obligations.
In other countries the pension systems are nationalised and
thus the rules are uniform. Everyone is invested and thus everyone has an
interest. In the United States the mix of private and public pensions as well
as what could be described as layered pensions which function in a supplemental
fashion to the existing social security system have the effect of divide and
conquer. For poor non-state workers, the plight of retired state employees is
of no concern. Let's face it, to many working poor, the state workers are
people that didn't work very hard or for very long and yet did (all things
considered) rather well for themselves. Since I live in a rural area I can
think of retired state employees who I know (from personal experience) were
largely lazy and incompetent who are now retired, traveling the country in
RV's, taking cruises and living a pretty comfortable life – while other people
who have worked very hard have nothing to show for it and will in the end be
reliant on their $1200 a month social security check – eventually unable to
afford their homes and end up living in a HUD-subsidised apartment block.
As a Christian I do not pursue wealth and have little
interest in the comforts and perks that are offered by the world system. I
don't look for justice or equity and as one who cannot morally invest himself
in the system, these questions are largely outside my purview.
So why address them at all? It's simply this, that most
Christians, most Evangelicals do not follow the New Testament on questions
concerning the world system and its mammon-based order. And so these issues are
very much at the forefront of people's minds – even people sitting next to me
(as it were) in the pew. These issues also enter the pulpit as pastors are keen
to wade into these topics and for many of them the sanctification of society
(the false quest they have bound themselves to) involves the fiscal order and
questions of labour.
In Evangelical circles the proclivities tend to be Right-wing
and yet to the frustration of leaders and academics they cannot get their
congregations fully on board with their views. And why is that? Because their
congregations are still filled with hordes of teachers and other government
employees who rely on the system and (despite their complaints) support it and
certainly benefit from it.
This clouds the debate and the debates often miss the salient
point – whether Christians should be in the employ of the state at all and whether
a middle-class lifestyle is compatible with the pilgrim ethic laid out by the
New Testament.
While wrestling with these issues as Christians within our
culture isn't easy, there are answers for us, for the Church – even if people
don't want to hear them. But in terms of the general cultural debate it can be
safely said that there are no easy answers to these questions. As indeed there
cannot be. The world is fallen and there are no solutions this side of heaven.
All of man's systems are but bandages placed atop a festering cancer – which always
ends up bleeding through.
Those that demand reform have a point. It can't go on like this.
As mentioned previously the retired state workers do well. In my small town
they stand out. I can think of many retired state workers – some who have been
retired a very long time who have the nicest houses with boats, multiple
vehicles and seem to have the money for their vacations, toys and constant home
improvements. And their numbers are growing. I keep thinking about how their
neighbours are in many cases growing poorer and yet are providing the revenue
to keep the retirees afloat. It's not sustainable.
And yet at the same time I don't buy into the privatisation
argument of the avaricious members of the Right. Their greed would literally
break society and in the end turn against them. They would push people to the
breaking point and in their poverty they would rise up against them. Many of
them simply do not understand the realities of regular people.
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*Of course these labels have become confused in recent years
as the true middle is disappearing – the lower end falling into the realm of
the working class or even working poor, while those at the higher end of the middle
class spectrum have grown rather wealthy and by an earlier generation's
standards would be considered members of the lowest tiers of the upper class.
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