Pope Francis denounces ‘trickle-down’ economic theories in critique of inequality

[ComputerGeek25]

So you suggest we raise taxes on corporations, whose income is already double taxed?. But taxing income does nothing to redistribute wealth. wealth and income are different things,

I say we throw out the current tax code and implement a flat tax (doesn’t matter whether you’re a individual or corporation here) and a national sales tax. No deductions. Simple and fair.

 

[estesbob]

I say we throw out the current tax code and implement a flat tax (doesn’t matter whether you’re a individual or corporation here) and a national sales tax. No deductions. Simple and fair.

A very regressive tax, ,isn’t it? And a flat tax on what? Easy to determine for a person who gets a w2 but not so easy to determine for a business. And again it would do nothing to redistribute wealth.

 

[_thaddeus]

So what do you suggest we do about the wealth distribution in this country

It’s your country. Following Pope Francis’ exhortation would be a good start.

As mentioned, getting rid of corporate welfare should be agreeable to most. I don’t see the connection between getting rid of corporate welfare and raising taxes on corporations.

 

[Elizabeth502]

The no sections seem particularly challenging to many.

No to warring among ourselves [98-101]

Yes, for some, both here and in the secular media, initiating name-calling and other flame wars is an acceptable daily approach to discussing “income inequality.” Dare anybody suggest constructive solutions or approaches for empowering the poor, which happen to differ from the current assumptions about Government as the only and ultimate “solution,” then you might believe you have time-traveled back to Revolutionary France. One side or the other, or it’s the verbal guillotine for you.

No one accuse me of starting any flame wars. I entered this discussion constructively, tried to maintain those positive suggestions, and was accused of having positions I never held or hold.

No one should be creating enemies from people they should see as cooperating with the intentions of the Holy Father. But I guess for some people, identification with an official position is more important than anything else. This, by the way, is called ideology, which the Pope condemns as a goal or purpose in itself. And he’s correct. Jesus also opposed ideologies for their own sake.

Pope Francis may be a lot of things to a lot of different people, but neither a Socialist nor a Marxist is he, nor is he likely to become one during his Pontificate. It would be a good idea for some not to hold their breath waiting or such an improbable transformation.

 

[estesbob]

It’s your country. Following Pope Francis’ exhortation would be a good start.

As mentioned, getting rid of corporate welfare should be agreeable to most. I don’t see the connection between getting rid of corporate welfare and raising taxes on corporations.

So what exactly is “corporate welfare”. it appears it is nothing more that business deductions. For instance i fail to see how a section 179 deduction can be considered “welfare” its just accelerated depreciation and is available to everyone. who has business or rental income. And in the end it just amounts to a timing difference on how the deduction is taken-unless you are suggesting all business deductions are welfare?

 

[_thaddeus]

So what exactly is “corporate welfare”. it appears it is nothing more that business deductions. For instance i fail to see how a section 179 deduction can be considered “welfare” its just accelerated depreciation and is available to everyone. who has business or rental income. And in the end it just amounts to a timing difference on how the deduction is taken-unless you are suggesting all business deductions are welfare?

Don’t know what a USA “section 179 deduction” is.

Corporate welfare to me is the further concentration of wealth at the expense of taxpayers. I think it is dangerous to society.

These quick links may explain it better.

cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/corporate-welfare-state-how-federal-government-subsidizes-us-businesses

progress.org/banneker/cw.html

 

[stinkcat_14]

So you suggest we raise taxes on corporations, whose income is already double taxed?.

Where did I suggest that we should raise taxes? Did you read the document I linked?

But taxing income does nothing to redistribute wealth. wealth and income are different things,

This is irrelevant since I did not say anything about taxation.

 

[stinkcat_14]

A very regressive tax, ,isn’t it? And a flat tax on what? Easy to determine for a person who gets a w2 but not so easy to determine for a business. And again it would do nothing to redistribute wealth.

Calculating income for a business is very straightforward, income is revenue minus expenses. I don’t know how things would change under a flat tax.

 

[stinkcat_14]

So what exactly is “corporate welfare”. it appears it is nothing more that business deductions.

From the document that I originally linked, this is just from the US department of agriculture. There is nothing here that deals with business deductions. The list below is the amount of corporate welfare for different programs in millions. You think that all of these expenditures are necessary government expenditures?

Agricultural Marketing Service 1,289
Applied R&D 1,143
Farm Security and Rural Investment programs 3,175
Farm Service Agency 11,863
Foreign Agricultural Service 2,164
Risk Management Agency 3,829
Rural Business-Cooperative Service 372
Rural Utilities Service 1,330

For instance i fail to see how a section 179 deduction can be considered “welfare” its just accelerated depreciation and is available to everyone. who has business or rental income. And in the end it just amounts to a timing difference on how the deduction is taken-unless you are suggesting all business deductions are welfare?

Who here has called the section 179 deduction welfare? It is not mentioned in the document from the CATO institute. You are the only one who brought it up.

I will say that the deduction is sometimes unfair, because the government sometimes allows different sized 179 deductions based on what industry you are in. That is bad tax policy, but it is not corporate welfare.

 

[oldcelt]

Thank you Pope Francis.

 

[seekerz]

I wonder if you realize how offensive it is to others that you continue to maintain that you alone “make too much sense.” Apparently you do not see much of yourself in the MSNBC commentators (pick any of them), whose attitude is We right, everybody else wrong; let’s label those who disagree with us as “unreasonable,” “lacking sense,” “irrational,” “bigoted,” “right wing,” “lacking compassion,” “selfish,” fill-in-the-blank. I also find it interesting that you have singled me out, out of all the posters here, for particular ridicule and misinterpretation, when reading my posts could only conclude that I am very much oriented to solutions and not to ideology. (Precisely what the Pope said.) But what really irritates you (just as it does the MSNBC crew) is that my solutions are different from yours. They are not the solutions of the establishment Left. Therefore, they must be discredited by any means necessary, including by false assumptions and false caricature.

Again with the assumptions that you have some superior or unique position by virtue of “living with the poor” or working with the poor that others of us (you assume) do not. How would you know whether I have lived with and served the poor? Answer: you don’t. And with your false assumptions go the false “conclusions” based on those erroneous assumptions. You have no superior “inside knowledge,” let alone authority, than anyone else on this thread has.

I never mentioned ideology. You did. And your language corresponds in fact to the ideology of the extreme Left.

What you read in my posts is not a dissertation, ma’am, on poverty, let alone on capitalism. Thus, my statements are not “complete” because this is not an online seminar class in poverty and capitalism. However, if one could infer anything from my posts it is that I understand that the issue is complex and that this thread does not “completely” explore these relationships.

Most glaring is your refusal to acknowledge that I have addressed opportunity in this thread.

It has become fashionable on this thread for **you **to ascribe to others statements they neither said nor implied. Not once have I blamed the poor for being poor. Quite the opposite So one of three things is operative:

(1) you have a problem understanding what I wrote
(2) you are deliberately mischaracterizing my positions because you want a target
(3) you are confusing my positions with those of other posters here.

Naturally, none of which I did. Possibility #3, above, is most glaringly apparent here, where you somehow, without rational connections, ascribe to me attitudes others have (perhaps some on this thread, most likely posters not even on this thread). None of what I have discussed relates even remotely to the quote of yours below. It’s the same old extreme Left tactics: categorize those who disagree with the Left Party Line: Big Government Good, Individual Effort Insuffcient, and Government is responsible for addressing comprehensively, on its own, every single minute component of poverty possible. When others disagree with this Party Line, accuse them of language and positions they never used or asserted, such as here:

Get your posters straight, and stop demonizing me. You’ve done this to others, on other threads. All it does is affect your credibility. Whenever I hear the group condemnations and artificial name-calling on MSNBC, I immediately tune out. (And why I almost never listen to their shows; it’s just polemics after polemics, categorizing people in extreme camps as Friend or Foe, based on nuanced positions others have, and them proceeding to engage in character assassination, shadow-boxing. Like here, it’s just an exercise in gross caricature in order to justify contempt for positions that are not radical enough for the “news” station.)

Who’s demonizing who? I started with facts…somewhere along the road I got called liberal and leftist and now…MSNBC (I’m guessing Rachel Maddow ). Too funny, but considering the flak the Pope is taking in the blogosphere, that’s small matters in the grand scheme of things. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Is it possible to dissect the Pope’s words without categorizing or being categorized? Just discussing the issues?

 

[Crossbones]

So you suggest we raise taxes on corporations, whose income is already double taxed?. But taxing income does nothing to redistribute wealth. wealth and income are different things,

“Corporations are people, my friend.” Great quote from a great candidate.

If there wasn’t significant benefits to being a corporation,then there wouldn’t be corporations. So taxing them seems appropriate, as there is a societal cost to these benefits.

 

[MarcoPolo]

Has anyone shared this quote yet in this long thread?*As we witness the abuse of economic power, as we witness the cruelties of a capitalism that degrades man to the level of merchandise, we have also realized the perils of wealth, and we have gained a new appreciation of what Jesus meant when he warned of riches, of the man-destroying divinity Mammon, which grips large parts of the world in a cruel stranglehold. (Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Baptism-Transfiguration, p. 98)*Now we know Pope Benedict has explicitly condemned Marxism elsewhere (e.g. Spe Salvi). So is it not possible that both Popes are merely condemning the greedy attributes extant in capitalist markets and not capitalism at large? Might they not offer that nuance? I stand open to consider counterpoints.

 

[KSU]

I was talking to an Irish missionary priest who now resides in Detroit. He spend 30+ in South American, including Argentina.

He noted that the Spanish term ( derrame ) that Pope Francis used is the one that Argentines used to refer to the economic polices resulted in the 1999-2003 Argentine economic collapse

The primary factors were

1. The tying of the Agentine Austural to the US dollar, which lost value in the .com bubble burst
2. Extensive governmental borrowing resulting in massive debt
3. A reliance on imports that became radically expensive.

Given that this term relates directly to an Argentine economic incident that more directly relates to potential negative effects of globalization, this priest felt that it was HIGHLY unlikely that the Pope was referring to 'Reganomics".

The Argentinian term has nothing to do all with the concept of lowering taxes as a way of promoting economic growth. Rather is has much more to do with the dangers of tying a countries economy to other economies, and the accumulation of national debt

Thank you, Brendan. Finally, someone has provided common sense evidence of what most of us on this thread suspected/knew from the start, i.e., the mistranslated English version of the pope’s Exhortation does not, of course, contradict the Church social teaching as expressed in the Compendium.

Your post undercuts the boring attempts to use the pope’s Exhortation to attack American-style Capitalism and, predictably, to blame Conservatives for the Left’s economic exacerbation of poverty.

Francis could not denounce Conservative American political policy without departing from Church TEACHING contained in the Compendium, such as in paragraphs 347 and 424:

1. The free market is an institution of social importance because of its capacity to guarantee effective results in the production of goods and services. Historically, it has shown itself able to initiate and sustain economic development over long periods. There are good reasons to hold that, in many circumstances, “the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs”.[726] The Church’s social doctrine appreciates the secure advantages that the mechanisms of the free market offer, making it possible as they do to utilize resources better and facilitating the exchange of products. These mechanisms “above all … give central place to the person’s desires and preferences, which, in a contract, meet the desires and preferences of another person”.[727]
2. Although the Church and the political community both manifest themselves in visible organizational structures, they are by nature different because of their configuration and because of the ends they pursue. The Second Vatican Council solemnly reaffirmed that, “in their proper spheres, the political community and the Church are mutually independent and self-governing”.[867]…
   The duty to respect religious freedom requires that the political community guarantee the Church the space needed to carry out her mission. For her part, the Church has no particular area of competence concerning the structures of the political community: “The Church respects the legitimate autonomy of the democratic order and is not entitled to express preferences for this or that institutional or constitutional solution”,[868] nor does it belong to her to enter into questions of the merit of political programmes, except as concerns their religious or moral implications.

 

[Elizabeth502]

Today, on Catholic Answers Live, Jimmy Aiken spoke for an hour on the Pope’s statement, putting it in the context that CNN, the other secular news outlets, and many on this thread refuse to acknowledge, but which many of us already knew:. Very little of the Exhortation was concerned with the system of capitalism per se, but with evangelization, and poverty/inequality within that context.

And as to the news outlets, it’s the usual hypocrisy. Not only, as corporations, are they archetypal examples of both unbridled and ‘trickle-down’ capitalism, but they have a highly paid staff of “journalists” with lucrative investment portfolios to match their overpaid salaries. Possibly some of those broadcast personalities even profit from hedge funds.

Unlike Pope Francis, they embody the traditional distance of the liberal monied class between their personal lifestyle and their political message. Nauseating.

 

[KSU]

Elizabeth, did Jimmy Aiken mention the mistranslation of the Pope’s statement?

 

[seekerz]

Has anyone shared this quote yet in this long thread?As we witness the abuse of economic power, as we witness the cruelties of a capitalism that degrades man to the level of merchandise, we have also realized the perils of wealth, and we have gained a new appreciation of what Jesus meant when he warned of riches, of the man-destroying divinity Mammon, which grips large parts of the world in a cruel stranglehold. (Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Baptism-Transfiguration, p. 98)Now we know Pope Benedict has explicitly condemned Marxism elsewhere (e.g. Spe Salvi). So is it not possible that both Popes are merely condemning the greedy attributes extant in capitalist markets and not capitalism at large? Might they not offer that nuance? I stand open to consider counterpoints.

I think you are exactly correct - it is a condemnation of excess/extremes and an exhortation to remember that a system is supposed to serve us and not the other way around. It really has been interesting to see the uproar these comments (or their misinterpretations) have caused. The Pope isn’t, to my knowledge, saying anything new. Anything, even a good thing, taken to extreme or given free reign - can be bad for us.

Additionally, I might add that to seek to place any worldly system above criticism could lead to grave error, and to be frank, I see the Church criticized everyday without the degree of reaction these comments seem to have generated.

 

[ProVobis]

I was talking to an Irish missionary priest who now resides in Detroit. He spend 30+ in South American, including Argentina.

He noted that the Spanish term ( derrame ) that Pope Francis used is the one that Argentines used to refer to the economic polices resulted in the 1999-2003 Argentine economic collapse

The primary factors were

1. The tying of the Agentine Austural to the US dollar, which lost value in the .com bubble burst
2. Extensive governmental borrowing resulting in massive debt
3. A reliance on imports that became radically expensive.

Given that this term relates directly to an Argentine economic incident that more directly relates to potential negative effects of globalization, this priest felt that it was HIGHLY unlikely that the Pope was referring to 'Reganomics".

The Argentinian term has nothing to do all with the concept of lowering taxes as a way of promoting economic growth. Rather is has much more to do with the dangers of tying a countries economy to other economies, and the accumulation of national debt

Excellent research, Brendan.

It would serve them well if American Catholics were to learn more than English IMO.

BTW, the Italian economy isn’t doing that well, either.

 

[Brendan]

I think one thing that both liberals and conservatives could agree on is to get rid of corporate welfare.

object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/PA703.pdf

I think that, when implemented, you will find a lot of objections from both sides. Cut backs in ‘Green Energy’ subsidies and Ethanol subsidies will be opposed by the Left (and farmers) and other, like Defense research, will be opposed by the Right.

You will have people on the left decrying that wind and solar should be subsidized to reduce green house gasses and our dependence on foreign oil

On the right, cuts in defense R&D will be decried as reducing our military’s ability to remain powerful.

Central states will object to the elimination of farm subsidies

Everybody has their favorite issue and like to see it subsidized.

 

[seekerz]

I think that, when implemented, you will find a lot of objections from both sides. Cut backs in ‘Green Energy’ subsidies and Ethanol subsidies will be opposed by the Left (and farmers) and other, like Defense research, will be opposed by the Right.

You will have people on the left decrying that wind and solar should be subsidized to reduce green house gasses and our dependence on foreign oil

On the right, cuts in defense R&D will be decried as reducing our military’s ability to remain powerful.

Central states will object to the elimination of farm subsidies

Everybody has their favorite issue and like to see it subsidized.

That is certainly true - each side has a favorite issue which supposedly is* the answer *to some larger problem. This could potentially be resolved by requiring real evidence of efficacy but that itself would be fraught with problems because studies/statistics are often framed to support or oppose these hot button issues rather than to seek the facts.