How Child Tax Credit expansion will hurt children

 

Last year, Congress increased the Child Tax Credit from $2,000 per child to $3,600 and eliminated the requirement that a parent be working to receive the credit, turning it into a welfare payment. According to the government, "The American Rescue Plan’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit will reduce child poverty by (1) supplementing the earnings of families receiving the tax credit, and (2) making the credit available to a significant number of new families."

As part of President Biden's $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, who could oppose giving more to poor children? That would be like opposing the rescue of drowning puppies. Some conservatives promoted the program to reduce abortions by paying poor women to have their children. It didn't occur to them that they are paying a form of extortion to keep their children alive, and that doing so will make the problem worse. 

How the Christ child rescued the world from poverty

 

In 1849, Dr. Edmond Sears wrote a Christmas message for his congregation in Wayland, Massachusetts. Set to music, it became the beloved Christmas carol “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” The third stanza expresses his sadness over the poverty in his community:

“And ye, beneath life's crushing load, 
whose forms are bending low, 
who toil along the climbing way 
with painful steps and slow, 
look now!”

As sad as that poverty was to Sears, the poor in the middle of the 19th century were far richer than those in the previous century. Humanity had suffered under the crushing load of poverty since God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden. According to the best economic historians, such as Angus Maddison, the standards of living in 1800 for most of Europe were no different from those of the average person in the days of Abraham and Sarah. Standards of living began to grow, and poverty recede, for the first time in human history in the early 17th century in the Dutch Republic. Why then and there?

How Christianity and capitalism lifted South Korea out of centuries of poverty

 

The movie Devotion tells the story of Jesse Brown, the first Black aviator in U.S. Navy history, and his friendship with Tom Hudner, who became the Navy's most celebrated wingmen. The film makes points about race, friendship, heroism and the Korean War, sometimes referred to as the forgotten war. Those are important, but the movie offers forgotten economic lessons for today as well. 

The two Koreas that emerged from the disaster of war offer a case study in what causes economic development, that is, poverty reduction. The Koreas are an important experiment because, as in all good scientific experiments, only one variable changed - the economic institutions. Before World War I, Korea had been unified for twelve centuries. The culture and language were uniform, and the “Hermit” kingdom was one of the poorest on the planet. 

Railroad strike shows unions violate Biblical principles

 

With their threat to strike, railroad unions are holding a gun to the heads of American consumers to force railroads to pay employees more. Unions asked for fifteen paid sick days, but the railroads have offered one personal day. More than 400 groups recently called on Congress to intervene, fearing a strike would idle shipments of food and fuel while inflicting billions of dollars of economic damage.

According to Reuters, “A rail traffic stoppage could freeze almost 30% of U.S. cargo shipments by weight, stoke inflation and cost the American economy as much as $2 billion per day by unleashing a cascade of transport woes affecting U.S. energy, agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare and retail sectors.” Unions and railroads have until Dec. 9 to resolve differences.

While not all support the strike, most Americans support unions because they hold to the myth that unions caused the increases in standards of living in this country over the past century and a half by forcing businesses to pay workers more than the market wage. However, the actual history of how U.S. workers attained one the highest standards of living in the world credits capitalism. In the Gilded age, before unions became powerful, the wages and standard of living of American workers soared at rates rarely seen since, even as the nation absorbed a tsunami of poor immigrants looking for jobs. How?

FTX’s greed, corruption isn't capitalism's fault

Recently, FTX, a digital coin trading firm founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, declared bankruptcy and shocked some people in the world of investing. The company collapsed from a valuation of $32 billion to nearly zero. George Selgin, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Georgia, has written a good analysis of the fiasco.

To boil down the complexities, FTX used the funds of depositors to make loans to its subsidiary, a venture capital firm called Alameda. Alameda made poor investments and lost so much money that it couldn’t repay FTX, and both tanked. Few depositors will get their money back. Clearly, Bankman-Fried became greedy and cost those who trusted him billions of dollars.

Christian theologian wrongly blames free market for ecological crisis

 The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference was winding down in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, as I write this article. Speaking at the conference, President Joe Biden advertised that the bill he disguised as inflation reduction was really a way to push the Left’s climate agenda, which is unpopular among many Americans, through Congress:

“We are racing forward to do our part to avert the ‘climate hell’ that the U.N. Secretary-General so passionately warned about earlier this week. …  And this summer, the United States Congress passed and I signed into law my proposal for the biggest, most important climate bill in the history of our country — the Inflation Reduction Act.” 

Mike Frost blames capitalism for creating the looming “climate hell” because, he wrote, “In order to exist, capitalism must expand without end.” That unrestrained growth destroys the environment and impoverishes the nations that climate change damages the most. The charge of unlimited growth and environmental destruction is Frost’s fourth indictment. I responded to Frost’s first three misconceptions about capitalism here, here and here.

Capitalism liberated women from the toil and spinning that Jesus talked about

 

Jesus warned his followers not to be consumed with daily cares in Matt 6:28-29, “And why are you anxious concerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

Lilies don’t spin, but women did. Spinning yarn consumed the lives of most women in Jesus’ day. From pre-history until the invention of the spinning wheel, girls were taught from the age of 6 to spin thread using a spindle, usually a wooden dowel jammed into a hole in a clay or rock disc called a whorl. Spindles resembled a crude top. The short end of the dowl sticking out of the whorl had a hook for grabbing and spinning the fibers while the thread was wound on the longer part. 

Until they died or were too old, girls and women spun yarn from the time they got out of bed until they went to bed. They spun while cooking and taking care of children. They spun thread while washing clothes and dishes and talking to friends. Jewish women probably didn’t spin on the Sabbath. Demand for cloth was great and spinning the yarn was the main bottle neck. Navies required large amounts of cloth for sails, according to Virginia Postrel in The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World:

“Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered.” 

Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World

Girls produced the coarse yarn needed for sails and the clothing of the poor. After years of practice, women could spin very fine threads used for the soft clothing of wealthy politicians and earned more for it. 

“Contrary to the impression left by toga party costumes, the toga was closer to the size of a bedroom than a bedsheet, about 20 square meters (24 square yards). Assuming 20 threads to the centimeter (about 130 to the inch), historian Mary Harlow calculates that a toga required about 40 kilometers (25 miles) of wool yarn—enough to reach from Central Park to Greenwich, Connecticut. Spinning that much yarn would take some nine hundred hours, or more than four months of labor, working eight hours a day, six days a week. Ignoring textiles, Harlow cautions, blinds classical scholars to some of the most important economic, political, and organizational challenges that ancient societies faced."

Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World