Too tight to split

Are you a fiscal or a social conservative? It’s a critical question, at least in the minds of some, as folks are sizing up various candidates for the presidency, and especially the 17 campaigning under the Republican banner.

But whichever you picked, if indeed you chose one or the other, I suggest that you were wrong. The distinction is superficial at best. At worst, it’s phony and terribly misleading.

For in God’s order of things, everything fiscal is also moral, and every social policy has fiscal implications. In God’s scheme, everything hangs together. You might say that He was the original holistic thinker.

So, yes, I’d argue loud and long that Hillary Clinton, although wrongheaded in her policies on most fiscal and social issues, is at least consistent in holding them together and side by side. And the same should be said about the other Democratic candidates—socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Gov. Martin O’Malley, former Sen. Jim Webb, and so forth. Let’s give them credit for being consistent—even if almost always consistently wrong.

Meanwhile, Republicans seem to live happily, if quite naïvely, with a logical disconnect. They commonly assume that a candidate should be free to think whatever he wants about abortion or homosexual marriage so long as he or she is appropriately conservative on financial and tax issues. Or vice versa. By leaving space on the Republican slate for someone as crude and careless as Donald Trump, the Grand Old Party suggests that even an explicit profession of atheism is no disqualifier for public office.

For anyone to pretend that he or she has discovered a neat way to cordon off the money issues from the moral ones is wishful thinking.

People who try to peel off the moral layers of the onion so they can get down to the “real stuff” of fiscal and economic issues will always discover that the whole onion—all the way to the core—is in fact made up of interrelated layers.

For example—and it’s a massive example whose lesson the U.S. electorate should have but has not yet absorbed—the relationship of abortion and Social Security provides a vivid illustration. Everyone has long known that the great threat to the integrity of Social Security was that there were relatively fewer and fewer wage earners in the overall system and relatively more and more benefit claimers. That was true in any case in a pyramid scheme that was apparently flawed from the beginning. But now, in our lifetimes, those badly constructed assumptions were exacerbated beyond repair by society’s decision in the 1970s that it would be all right regularly to snuff out a third of all its pregnancies.

That may be the biggest example available—but we’re already seeing it repeatedly mirrored now in Obamacare’s habit of bad statistics. In a society where every tiny statistical nuance of every cause and effect known to humanity has been studied and restudied, why is there so little public discussion about the statistical validity of the myriad of programs embedded in the overall measure? Why have the media not ballyhooed how costs are higher and benefits are lower?

It works both ways, as we have noted here before. Fiscal policies always have moral and social implications. We humans are not just economic beings, as Marx suggested we are. But we rarely make decisions in life apart from economic influences. So when a combination of governments at different levels takes 40 or even 50 percent of its citizens’ earnings every year, that taxation policy—all by itself—has a profound effect on how much those same citizens have left to give to their churches, to pass on to relief agencies, or to invest in education. Indeed, it is not too much to say that tax policy helps determine whether those same citizens develop generous or stingy outlooks on life.

The close interface between fiscal and moral thinking has other dimensions as well. Ethical issues in spending the wealth of future generations are deep and long-lasting, even apart from what the money may be presently spent for.

So for anyone to pretend that he or she has discovered a neat way to cordon off the money issues from the moral ones is wishful thinking. It denies the very manner in which God has put us and our society together.

Email jbelz@wng.org