slacktivist

Our trespasses

Today's paper has a good piece from reporters Hiran Ratnayake and Ginger Gibson -- "Immigrants on fringes in debate's foreground" -- on the desperate situation faced by illegal immigrants in need of health care here in America.

The article starts with one story:

When Miriam was 15, her parents trespassed into the United States from Mexico.

Now in her mid 20s, the Wilmington resident still doesn't have citizenship but has become familiar with the health care system.

In the spring, she and her husband -- who both work as custodians -- were admitted to St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington for two days with pneumonia.

When they were released, they faced bills amounting to more than $4,000 and were put on a payment plan that eats up about one-fourth of their combined paychecks.

"I'd rarely go to a hospital because I can't afford to pay for it again," said Miriam, who is not being identified due to her immigration status, through an interpreter. "If I get sick again, I won't go to the hospital unless it's really serious."

What I want to draw your attention to here is the legally accurate verb in that first sentence: "trespassed."

That's not Lou Dobbs' preferred word for illegal immigration, since we don't tend to think of trespassing as a particularly menacing form of crime and people like Dobbs -- the CNN anchor fearfully obsessed with illegal immigration from Mexico -- want to portray these aliens as more of a threat than the word "trespasser" seems to convey.

But there's another reason you won't hear that word from Dobbs or from his role models on Fox News or the other members of the frantically xenophobic anti-immigrant mob, like the birthers, deathers and tea-baggers or the demagogues who stoke their cowardly anger, like drop-out Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin or South Carolina's Rep. Addison Graves Hansen Huntington Wegener Ricketts Parkinson "Joe" Wilson* -- the congressman who said he was overwhelmed by his emotions when he heard the president excluding illegal immigrants with what he regarded as insufficient viciousness. ("You lie!" Wilson shouted, after Obama said illegal immigrants would not receive federally funded health insurance under his health care reform plan. Obama's statement was true, but Wilson fears such immigrants might not also be aggressively prohibited from purchasing private health insurance, and the idea of them doing so keeps him tossing and turning all night.)

The main reason that none of these Very Angry, Very Scared people wants to use the word "trespass" is that it reminds them of church.

There's this prayer we Christians say in church, at every service, whenever we get together. We recite it in unison, usually, and we've all got it memorized. We call it "The Lord's Prayer," because Jesus himself taught it to us and told us to pray it. Sometimes we call it the "Our Father," since that's how it starts.

Most of this prayer is comforting and reassuring, like the 23rd Psalm. "Give us this day our daily bread," we pray. "And deliver us from evil." Daily bread and deliverance, that's nice.

But then there's this other phrase which, when we listen to ourselves saying it, is the scariest part of any given Sunday. "Forgive us our trespasses," we pray, "as we forgive those who trespass against us."**

That's disturbingly conditional. It's almost contractual. The conditions laid out there are crystal clear and explicit, but we tend to recoil from them. We pray this one prayer more than any other, but every other prayer omits this quid pro quo. "Forgive us according to thy infinite mercy," we pray, or "according to your boundless grace," or "for Jesus' sake," or "in Jesus' name." Straight-up, unconditional, one-way forgiveness is what we ask for in every other prayer. Apart from our recitation of that one prayer, you'll rarely ever hear us ask that this be conditional -- "Forgive us as we forgive others."

Rep. Wilson attends the First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, S.C., and every time he goes there with his family he has to recite those words: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." How can he possibly reconcile that with his rabid anti-immigrant views? Having those views, how does he even manage to speak the very first word of this prayer?

Think of Wilson and the rest of the "take back America" crowd praying this prayer in tens of thousands of nominally Christian churches across the country. Think of them praying this prayer on behalf of "their" country: "Forgive America its trespasses as America forgives those who trespass against it."

If those are the conditions -- and they are -- then we're screwed. Our own words, our own prayers, condemn us.

Wilson and the tea-baggers have to realize this. They have to hear this every week, to listen to themselves saying it, listen to their own voices inviting and invoking their own damnation. Praying this prayer must be for them like those monks in Monty Python's Holy Grail who carry wooden planks and smack themselves in the face after every phrase of every chanted prayer.

Maybe that explains why these people are so miserably unhappy, why they're so disproportionately angry, so wrong-headedly certain that they deserve to be jealous of those luck-ducky illegal immigrants like Miriam in the story above. Those desperately poor immigrants may have no access to care they can hope to afford, but at least they can hope to be forgiven. Wilson and the tea-baggers know that they, due to their own prayers, never can be.

The heroes in all of this, to me, are those health care providers like the ones in the story above who insist on being exactly that -- providers of care, regardless of a patient's ability to pay or to produce identification papers for the ICE or the polizei:

If law enforcement is alerted by a health care worker that a patient is undocumented, more patients with the same status would shy away from seeking care when they need it, added Rosa Rivera, executive director of Henrietta Johnson Medical Center.

"All you're doing then is a disservice to the community," she said. "Our goal is to treat as many people who come here that need our services and take care of them and make them well. It's not to determine who is a citizen and who isn't."

That obligation to care for those in need, without regard for their trespasses, clearly applies to anyone with the temerity to pray the Lord's Prayer. But I don't think it's an exclusively sectarian obligation.

In a country like America, where the democratic conversation is often dominated by the voices of demagogues and the shrieking of Very Angry Cowards like Dobbs, Wilson, Palin and the tea-baggers, it's tempting to focus on the politically expedient -- tempting to agree even in the long-term to exclude those whom this vehement faction lives to exclude. But lead us not into temptation.

And deliver us from evil.

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* Julia noted in comments to the previous post that Rep. Addison Graves Wilson "is named after three diseases." And that's just too good to leave it at that. This deserves to be a runner, much like the endlessly fun "Nicky Appalachians" game.

** There's a bit of awkwardness when ad hoc groups of Christians find themselves praying this prayer outside of their usual congregations -- do we say "trespasses" or do we say "forgive us our debts and we forgive our debtors"? On this contentious question, I tend to prefer the debtor side, for economic reasons. Jesus' disciples, like most Christians throughout the history of the church, were more likely to be wage-earning debtors than to be propertied creditors. And while I personally am in the process of converting debt into property, its a 30-year mortgage and at this point I'm still almost entirely on the "debtor" side. Either way, though, please note that neither trespasses nor debts is quite the same as sins.

Same to you, buddy

Wal-mart is now advertising a new "low" rate for cashing checks of only $3.

Any such rate seems like it's too much, since the check is your money, and paying $3 for your own money is a rip-off. But, as Wal-mart points out, $3 is a lot less than many of their competitors charge for this same dubious service. Those check-cashing competitors, Wal-mart says, can charge as much as $8 per check.

Wal-mart's TV ad for this check-cashing service actually underestimates the savings this could mean for their marks customers.  A fresh-faced young couple tells us how happy they are to be using Wal-mart's $3-a-check service instead of the $8 alternative. The husband holds up a calculator and tells us this saves them about $200 a year. With both of them earning a paycheck every two weeks, that's actually more like $250 a year -- and that $50 difference would be substantial for the annual budget of a working-class couple outside the fringes of the banking system.

The same quick and dirty arithmetic also lets us easily calculate the annual cost of check-cashing for this couple even at Wal-mart prices: $150 a year.

That $150 is a poverty tax -- a fee paid by the poor because they are poor.

But then calling it a poverty tax isn't accurate. It's a poverty surcharge, not a tax. If it were a tax, then the couple in Wal-mart's ad would eventually see some kind of indirect benefit from that $150. Taxes go toward civilization -- national defense, highways, sewer systems, health care, police, food safety, clean water, fighting wildfires, developing flu vaccines, etc. And taxes are part of the social contract assented to by everyone who participates in that civilization. But this $150 poverty surcharge doesn't help to fund any of those things and it isn't part of any social contract. It simply lines the pockets of the Walton family and the rest of Wal-mart's shareholders. The poor families paying this surcharge receive no benefit -- direct or indirect. All they get in exchange is access to their own money. This $150-a-year surcharge is simply a transfer of wealth from them to much richer people, a direct, you-have-no-say transfer of at least $3 subtracted from every paycheck.

So as nice as it is that this couple is "saving" $250 a year by cashing their checks at Wal-mart instead of the even-more-exploitative competition, it'd be nicer still if they could save an additional $150 a year by not having to pay to cash their paychecks at all.

There's the rub. To cash your paycheck without paying a fee, you need a bank account, and for working-class people, a bank account costs a great deal more than $150 a year.

People who don't realize that -- who don't appreciate the enormous, steady cost of a marginal bank account -- tend to think that those who rely on check-cashing agencies are just being stupid and wasteful. The couple in the Wal-mart ad, for example, who are paying $150 a year to cash their paychecks could instead open a $100 no-fee savings account that would allow them to cash their paychecks for free. That account would only "cost" them $100 -- but even that money would still be theirs, sitting in their savings account and even earning a modest rate of interest.

The problem, though, is that such no-fee accounts are money-losers for the banks themselves. A $100 account with no fees costs the bank more in paperwork and tellers' time than it's worth. In the long-run, such accounts can help depositors develop savings habits and savings balances, developing into the sort of customers banks can and do make money from. But neither the executives nor the shareholders of the bank are interested in that kind of long-run -- particularly not when, in the short run, they're losing money on these tiny accounts.

So seeing no incentive to provide such low-balance, no-fee accounts that would allow our young couple to cash their checks without a fee, the bank will instead try to push them into something more lucrative -- into the kind of account that generates a steady stream of nickel-and-dime revenue from ATM fees, minimum-balance charges, late fees and, above all, "overdraft protection" charges.

Last year, U.S. banks collected about $36 billion in overdraft protection fees. This year, they expect to transfer about $38.5 billion out of customers' accounts in the form of such fees.

$38.5 billion. $105 million every day. $4.4 million every hour. $73,250 every minute. More than $1,200 a second. Transferred directly from the poor to the rich.

$38.5 billion.

I keep repeating that figure because I can't quite manage to grasp it. The public, obviously, can't grasp it either. Open your window and inhale -- smell any torches or smoke from the barricades? Turn on CNBC, Are bankers using fake names and requiring their faces to be distorted? are the bankers still using their real names and allowing their faces to appear onscreen without electronic distortion? No? Then the public still doesn't yet appreciate the meaning of this figure.*

$38.5 billion taken directly out of people's bank accounts.

$38,500,000,000.

I'm not suggesting that everyone who works at a bank that extracts these billions from customers through an overdraft protection scheme is, necessarily, a Bad Person due to working there. And I'm perfectly willing to allow them the chance to defend themselves. I am, in fact, eager to hear their explanation -- to hear them describe the actions they've taken to protest this policy and the reasons why such actions have, thus far, not succeeded. My point here is only that such a defense, such an explanation, is required of them if they want to continue interacting on polite terms with the rest of us -- if they want to drink in our bars or attend our churches or walk down our streets without parents clutching small children by the hand and dragging them aside and saying, "Come over here, honey, we don't want to go near the banker."

That, at a minimum, is what $38.5 billion a year means.

Yesverywellbut, say those comfortably removed from the economic margins, such fees can be avoided through responsible account management. And the supercilious and dim yesbuts raising this objection will go on to point out that they, personally, have never had to pay such a fee. And they will take this as evidence of their own superior responsibility and their oh-so-superior superiority too all of those stupid working class people stuck at the margins for whom one flat tire or one sick child or one unanticipated $10 expense can incur a cascading series of late fees and overdraft charges and other forms of emergency short-term credit that can easily exceed the $150 that Wal-mart graciously offers to extract from their paychecks each year.

And so ...

Crud. Now I've gotten all worked up and forgotten where I'd intended to go with this whole discussion.

The point here, I suppose, is that check-cashing fees may be an exploitative scam run by sleazeballs, but that they may turn out to be a more prudent option for the working poor than the even-more exploitative scam run by the more mainstream, but sleazier sleazeballs of the banking industry.

I should probably wrap up with some practical sort of action steps or something, so OK then:

1. We need a viable community banking option for the working poor, a place where they can cash their paychecks and maybe even someday build their savings without being subject to fees and overdraft protection rackets. We needn't get into the details here of the policies the FDIC and Fed could put in place to protect and encourage such banking options, only to mention that such policies are a Good Thing.

2. $38.5 billion. Seriously. The executives and shareholders of those banks ought to be flipped off, constantly, by everyone they encounter, all day long, from the moment they leave the house in the morning until the moment they return home. Even in church. Especially in church. From the pulpit, in fact. Nonviolent social change doesn't need to be genteel.

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* (Clearer wording courtesy of David S. Thank you.)

Health care reform

The last few moments of Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs present an astonishing twist and an unexpectedly joyful conclusion.

Only later, after the euphoria of that surprise has worn off, do you realize that the happiness of this happy ending doesn't really make sense. It doesn't add up.

Or, rather, this happy ending adds up, but only because the story presumes and requires that what happens next will be a bona fide miracle. In retrospect that seems like cheating, but at the time, in the closing moments of the play, neither the characters in the story nor the real, live people in the audience seem to view that miracle as at all strange or unlikely.

What happens, briefly, is this (what follows, I suppose, is something of a spoiler, but I don't think it will actually spoil the story for you even if you've never seen it):

The Jeromes, an extended Jewish family, are struggling to get by in 1937 in a Brooklyn home that's far too small for comfort or privacy. They have been surviving -- just barely or perhaps not quite -- on the too-small incomes of the sickly father and older brother, but the father has now lost his job.

This is where the play is about to end. The family is destitute and they seem to be on the verge of losing their home.

And then a letter arrives:

JACK: It's a letter from London. My cousin Sholem got out. They got out of Poland. They're free ... His wife, his mother, all four children. They're sailing for New York tomorrow. They'll be here in a week. ... They had to sell everything. They took only what they could carry. ... They got out. That's all that's important. They got out.

They got out. They have nothing -- no jobs, no money, no prospects -- but they got out and they will be safe in Brooklyn in a week.

At this joyous news the despair evaporates and they all live happily ever after. Curtain. The End.

But again this doesn't add up. The too-small house is about to get even more crowded. The penniless and desperate cousins will just be seven more mouths that the family can't afford to feed living in a house that they can't afford to keep. Why is everyone acting as though this letter means that suddenly everything is going to be just fine?

The arithmetic of this happy ending can't be made to work. The problem of too many people with not enough can't be corrected by adding even more people with even less.

So what's going on here?

What's going on, I think, is a different kind of math -- one that isn't easily reconciled with the laws of arithmetic or, for that matter, with any other laws of the physical universe.

The Jeromes are acting on the mathematics of miracle, the laws of manna and the calculus of loaves and fishes. This preposterous logic denies the reality of anything we might think of as a zero-sum equation. When it seems there isn't enough to go around, this illogical logic says, find others with even less and cut them in too. It's response to any apparent scarcity is always the same: Share. Share more and share more widely and there will be enough. Scarcity + sharing = sufficiency.

This is, arithmetically speaking, crazy. And the more you grasp what it's really suggesting, the crazier it seems.

Take for example that story of the loaves and fishes. At first glance, this might not seem as flashy or impressive as some of the more marquee miracles in the Bible -- the parting of the Red Sea or that bit with Lazarus, for instance -- but it's far more troublesome when you really consider what's being described in that story. The story tells us that something is being made out of next to nothing. Not wine from water, but food from nothing.

This is a fundamental violation of the laws of physics -- a shrieking impossibility. The story flies past the conservation of mass without a second glance, like a texting driver through a red light.

Crazy. Mad. Impossible.

And that's exactly the crazy logic we encounter at the end of Brighton Beach. That's the insanity according to which the Jeromes and the audience delude themselves into believing that they've reached some kind of resolution, some kind of happy ending.

But before we dismiss this madness completely, consider this: What else would you have the Jeromes do?

The laws of arithmetic only allow for one option here, only one way to make the numbers tally. There is already not nearly enough to go around for the Jeromes, so therefore there can not possibly be enough to go around for the Jeromes + 7.

The zero-sum equation is inflexible and unambiguous. The scarcity is quantifiable and undeniable. The addition of these impoverished cousins who have escaped hell on earth and will be arriving in desperate need cannot be made to add up. So it cannot be allowed. Thus the arithmetic requires that Sholem, his wife, his mother and all four children be turned away.

Which equation seems crazier to you?

I don't actually believe that this mathematics of miracle -- the idea of sufficiency -- really conflicts with the laws of arithmetic or the laws of the physical universe. Because here's the thing about that physical universe: It includes Sholem and his family. Any purported laws of the universe that are unable to account for them -- or for the billions of others like them -- aren't really laws at all. We can't pretend the numbers add up just by conveniently excluding them from our balance sheet.

The arithmetical problem ultimately turns out to be fairly simple. We can add these people to the equation or we can subtract them from it.

Stimulus plan

The family in this story bought a house.

They saved up and paid for it. No sub-prime loans or exotic balloon-payment ARMs. No granite countertops or vaulted foyers. Just a nice, modest $89,000 piece of the American dream with an affordable, $926-a-month mortgage.

Then his job disappeared and now they're going to lose the home. But this family isn't facing foreclosure, they're facing repossession.

A few days before last Christmas, Tim Hall lost his truck-driving job. Brenda Hall wasn't working because she had to care for a sick child.

As they plunged into debt, they couldn't make their home payments. So they looked to refinance, or maybe take out a loan.

After all, they figured, they had that new home -- only two years old -- as equity.

Their nest egg turned into a nightmare.

They joined a growing number of the 5,000 mobile home owners in the mid-Hudson -- and some 70,000 across the state -- who are learning that their mobile home in their mobile home community isn't really considered a house. It's more like a car. ...

As for that $926 mortgage the Halls were paying — plus $426 lot rent?

That wasn't a mortgage; it was really a car loan.

And the home they figured would only increase in value?

"It simply depreciates, like a car," says Lewis Creekmore, deputy director of Legal Services of the Hudson Valley, who adds that "even without the mortgage crisis, we're seeing quite a number" of situations like the Halls. ...

Unable to pay off their loan and without equity for a new one, the Halls lost their home. Brenda Hall still can't fully understand it.

"I bought a manufactured home," she says. "You have to have insurance. You're making monthly payments. And all of a sudden you find out it's not a home?"

The needlepoint samplers are all wrong. It turns out it isn't love that "makes a house a home," it's the deed to the land the house sits on.

So, OK then, let's make these houses homes. Let's convert these cars into homes by converting all of these feudal mobile home "communities" and trailer parks into resident-owned communities -- into neighborhoods with houses that are homes, places where homeowners don't have to pay rent on or worry about eviction from the land on which their house sits.

When I say "let's" I mean "us" as in "We the people." As in the federal government. With taxpayer dollars.

Feel free to call this "stimulus spending" or "a massive new government program," but don't pretend it's going to add to deficits or wind up costing taxpayers anything in the long run. In the long run, we would all benefit.

What we're talking about here are hundreds of thousands of mortgages. Safe, boring, long-term loans that produce a safe, boring, long-term profit. These loans would all be fully collateralized by the land itself, and the people receiving these loans are all, by definition, A) responsible homeowners, who B) already have a track-record of making monthly rent payments on the same land. If the folks at FHA or FDIC or Fannie or Freddie can't figure out a way to turn those rent payments into loan payments while also turning a no-risk modest profit, then those folks need to quit their jobs and let someone competent take over for them.

It might not be dramatic, but this would have a stimulus effect by providing hundreds of thousands of working-class households with a small increase in their monthly disposable incomes. And being working-class families, they'll notice that difference, and they'll spend it.

The impact on the financial security of these families will be dramatic. They will no longer have to fear sudden displacement. A nice side-effect of that is another economy-boosting bit of stimulus. It will suddenly begin to make sense for these families to invest in their homes. And they will begin to do so.

But the story above illustrates the most significant economic implication of converting all of these landless "car"-dwellers into property-owning homeowners. A house that sits on someone else's land depreciates just like a car. It loses value over time. A house that sits on land owned by the homeowner appreciates. That builds equity for the homeowners themselves, improving their security and their lives, but it also builds equity for the economy as a whole. It creates wealth, which is the very definition of stimulus or economic growth.

Look at the Halls in the story above. They spent $89,000 for their home. It's now worth less than that. What happened to that money? It's just gone. Poof. The economy shrank by that amount.

Multiply that contraction by the total number of manufactured homes sitting on landlord-controlled properties and you can begin to get an idea of how these feudal communities and parks are acting as massive machines for the destruction of wealth. Sure, some landlords may be able to enrich themselves by operating these colonies, but no matter how much they're able to skim for their own bank accounts, it can't begin to offset the economy-shriveling effect of the cumulative depreciation of all of those houses.

Reversing that effect -- turning these communities into equity-building engines for economic growth while simultaneously improving the financial health and security of hundreds of thousands of Americans -- would be a large undertaking, but it would not be a complicated one, or a risky one, and it would save taxpayers money in the long run.

So OK, I've written about this a bunch of times and I am, obviously, quite taken with the idea. But what am I missing? I'm too much of a fan of this idea to step back and poke holes in it myself, so please help me out here. Play Oligarchy's Advocate and try to talk me out of this. Tear the idea apart. Highlight its weaknesses. Explain why it couldn't and shouldn't ever happen.

Hell and the Credit-Card Lobby

I've mentioned before that I don't believe in the idea of "Hell" as a place of infinite, eternal torment for those beyond or outside of the grace of God.

And neither, apparently, does Edward L. Yingling.

Yingling is the head of the credit-card lobby. He's spent the past several months vigorously fighting against any limits on the predatory usury and capricious, fine-print larceny that his industry regularly employs to transfer billions of dollars -- yes, billions -- from the poor to the wealthy. This is an industry that routinely lends hundreds of dollars to the desperate or the unwise and then demands and collects thousands of dollars in repayment.

Edward L. Yingling is, in other words, a Very Bad Man. His actions produce actual, human victims -- people with names who are suffering because of the professional work of Edward L. Yingling, people whose suffering has been very lucrative for Yingling and those he works for. The two-word biography of this man: Human fail.

In yesterday's New York Times, Yingling argued that if banks aren't allowed to continue their practices of arbitrary fees, undisclosed charges on those fees, and usurious interest rates invoked under the cover of the failure to promptly pay the undisclosed charges on the fees on the rate hikes -- if any of that is to be subjected to regulation, then good, responsible, hard-working white people will suffer in order to subsidize lazy, irresponsible crack addicted welfare queens. As a professional apologist for unchecked corporate power, of course, Yingling know he can't state it quite that baldly, so he euphemizes. In the wake of regulation of the debt market, Yingling says:

“It will be a different business,” said Edward L. Yingling, the chief executive of the American Bankers Association, which has been lobbying Congress for more lenient legislation on behalf of the nation’s biggest banks. “Those that manage their credit well will in some degree subsidize those that have credit problems.”

That last sentence is a marvel. We could unpack that for weeks -- the bald-faced threat, the dishonesty, the mythologies reasserted and reinforced. Divide and conquer? Check. Assertion that the poor are morally inferior and therefore deserving of their lower caste? Check. Warning that justice is a zero-sum game and that you will suffer if others are not preyed upon? Check. And let's not even bother lifting the rock of "those that have credit problems" to see what's wriggling and squirming under there.

So, again, Edward L. Yingling is not a good human being. He's not good at being human. It's clear from his behavior that he does not believe there is such a place as Hell because he must surely know that if there were such a place, there'd be a very special room in it reserved just for people like him.

Yingling is guilty, after all, of sodomy. "This was the sin of your sister Sodom," the prophet Ezekiel wrote, "She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and the needy." That's Edward L. Yingling and his employers in a nutshell. The credit-card magnates are arrogant, overfed and unconcerned. They sodomize the poor, every day, for money.

Perhaps, then, the world might be a better place if usurers and their lobbyists were convinced in the reality of an eternal, sulfurous torment awaiting the unjust. The idea of Hell might provide some value as a deterrent.

Something like this notion of the deterrent value of Hell is frequently suggested as an objection to my initial statement in this post, that I don't believe in Hell as a place of infinite and eternal torment. "But without Hell," this objection goes, "why should anyone be good?"

To their credit, almost none of the devout people raising this objection really means it. They are not, themselves, shaped and driven primarily by the fear of punishment. Such a fear is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain their own belief in the obligation to be and to do good, to love, to do justice or to correct injustice. The fear of Hell is, for them personally, scarcely a motivating factor at all. Their motivation is more like what 1 John says, "We love God because God first loved us," and not the terrorized and traumatized mutilation of that scripture, "We love God because God will burn us forever and ever if we don't."

So it's telling that the main advocates of the idea of Hell as a deterrent are not themselves influenced by that deterrent at all.

Nor, unfortunately, are those who really need to be -- the usurers, the torturers, the tyrants, abusers, enslavers, despoilers or predators.

I don't know of any attempt to measure this precisely, but it is a measurable thing. We could look across or within societies to gauge the pervasiveness and intensity of a belief in Hell and then, in turn, we could measure the corresponding presence and frequency of behaviors that members of that society associate with those who are bound for Hell and ...

You get the idea. It'd be soft science, but science nonetheless. It would also be an awful lot of work -- particularly since what I strongly suspect it would uncover would be little or no evidence to support the idea that belief in Hell influences hellish behavior one way or another.

The example of Edward L. Yingling provides a good illustration for why that is -- why the idea of Hell doesn't actually work very well as a deterrent. To be a usurer -- or, in Yingling's case, a professional advocate for usurers -- one must remain undeterred by dozens of things more tangible and certain than the abstract fear of a potential future torment. To do what he does, Yingling has to pretend that other people are unreal -- that they do not matter. Compared to that, disregarding the fear of Hell is a piece of cake.

I suspect that when people raise the objection that Hell is necessary for people to be good what they're really getting at is something deeper -- something that indicates their moral development actually has progressed a bit since they went through the terrible twos. What they're saying, really, echoes the cry of the Psalmist: "Why do the wicked prosper?"

Belief that life is meaningful, they are saying, seems to require a belief in something like justice. But, well, look around. For this idea of justice to matter in any meaningful sense then there must be more to it than what we see here in this world -- there must be some kind of transcendent justice in the long run, some kind of ultimate balancing of the scales for those wretched who suffered more than they deserved as well as for those wicked who may have inflicted or ignored that suffering.

They're not suggesting that the threat of Hell is necessary to frighten people into virtue, but rather that some kind of ultimate justice is necessary to make sense of this life in this world. I'm quite sympathetic to this idea, but I don't think Hell is what it requires.

This is where I came in, actually. I read that NYT article yesterday and hit that quote from Mr. Yingling and said, out loud, "Go to Hell, Edward L. Yingling." But that's just a saying, of course. It's not really something I would want or wish for. I do want to see Yingling and people like him get their comeuppance, their just deserts, but that wouldn't require infinite suffering for eternity.

What I'd like to see -- by which I mean what it seems to me ought to happen, the thing that would seem just -- would be for Yingling to experience a bit of instant karma. I want him to get a bill in the mail that, unexpectedly, requires a payment 50 percent higher than it reasonably should be, and 30 percent higher than he can manage to pay without defaulting on something else. Then I want to see him hit with penalties for missing this payment, and penalty rates on top of that and fees and charges on those in turn. And as he protests that this isn't fair, that they're changing the rules, I want his protests to be met with disdainful disapproval of his reckless irresponsibility and with the bland, bureaucratic reassurance that everything that is happening to him -- as he loses his home, his car, his job, his ability to sleep -- is perfectly legal and appropriate. I want him to experience and to absorb the powerlessness of that situation, his utter impotence to escape the vortex of rapidly and massively compounding interest and ever shifting rules and penalties. And then, at his lowest point in all of this, I want him to experience the full weight of society's condemnation -- the full force of the idea that his sudden, relentless and inescapable poverty can only mean he deserves it.

"The punishment should fit the crime," we say, expressing another aspect of that seemingly innate human longing and need for a just universe. "Fit" there entails both proportionality and apt-ness.

We discussed proportionality a few months ago the last time we were raising the subject of Hell. Disproportionate punishment doesn't serve up a double-dose of justice, but rather it answers one injustice with another. Hell is, by definition, disproportionate -- meting out infinite punishments for finite evils and eternal punishments for temporal wrongs.

But when we say "the punishment should fit the crime" we don't only mean in degree, but also in kind. This isn't due to a longing for retribution or retaliation. It's pedagogical. This is also clear from the language we use when we talk about justice and injustice: "See how you like it ..." We want the perpetrator of injustice to experience, to feel, what his victims felt, and thereby to understand the wrong that was done and why it was wrong. In other words, we want the punishment to teach so that the wrongdoer can learn.

What we have in mind there is just as corny and as glorious as Scrooge on Christmas morning or Zaccheus scampering home on his wee little legs to give everything away before dinner. What we have in mind is repentance and restoration. That is the purpose of punishment. That is ultimately what justice requires -- what justice means.

Here in this fallen, broken world, such ultimate justice is elusive and rare. The wicked often prosper, and repentance and restoration are exceptional.

But if we're reaching for some notion of transcendent, eschatological justice that can give meaning to the injustice of our lives in this vale of tears, then that idea or ideal of justice can't be one that settles for cheap counterfeits like mere retaliation or retribution. It must teach and restore and make whole.

Hell cannot teach. It cannot restore. In fact, it makes restoration impossible. Hell would therefore seem to be a transcendent injustice -- an idea that makes our lives here in this world less meaningful.

So, in summary, since I cannot tell Mr. Yingling to go to Hell, which is all I really set out to do here, let me conclude, instead, by saying this:

Screw you, Edward L. Yingling. And the horse you rode in on.

George Bailey & The Bailout

Long-time readers of this blog know that my favorite text on America and the American economy is Frank Capra's classic Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life.

That movie tells you just about everything you need to know about the U.S. economy and it's potential for good or for ill. Almost every economic dispute, issue, policy or crisis can be clarified by looking at it through the lens of Capra's basic contrast between the wonderful, interdependent, human-scaled home economics of George Bailey and the rapacious, predatory, too-big economics of Old Man Potter.

Hence my general, all-purpose prescription for America and the American economy: More George Bailey, less Old Man Potter.

The current financial crisis is Potter's work and Potter's fault. And it's the fault of those who allowed the Old Man Potters of this world to operate unchecked. (This being a democracy, that would be all of us.) By contrast, the George Baileys of this world didn't go chasing after the speculative bubble or any of the exotic, bubble-backed securities at the heart of this mess. They simply plodded along as they always have making their modest housing and business loans.

But here's the rub: Thanks to the banking crisis, the meltdown, the credit crunch -- whatever we call this thing that Potter hath wrought -- the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan is suffering too. 

Remember that great scene from It's a Wonderful Life where George Bailey lectures Potter about treating people as humans instead of cattle? It's a terrific rant -- one that deserves to be repeated verbatim, Stewart stammer and all, to every lying bastard who wants to blame the current crisis on "subprime borrowers":

But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter, and what's wrong with that? Why -- here, you're all businessmen here. Doesn't it make them better citizens? Doesn't it make them better customers? You -- you said -- what'd you say a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken down that they -- Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about -- they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. People were human beings to him. But to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they're cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you'll ever be.

Great scene. It takes place during a Bailey Bros. Building & Loan board meeting. Old Man Potter is a member of that board.

Or how about the movie's key crisis point, when Uncle Billy loses $8,000 of the thrift's depositors' money? Do you remember where that happens? It's in Old Man Potter's bank. That bank is where the Bailey Bros.' deposits are kept. In other words, the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan is, itself, dependent on Potter for its own banking needs.

Hence the current situation: Potter screwed up and now he's failing. Bailey didn't screw up, but he's failing too because he depends on the larger bank to keep running himself.

We thus have the choice of either letting Potter fail, taking Bailey and the rest of Bedford Falls with him, or of rescuing the town and the building & loan by bailing out the old buzzard and saving him from the karmic justice of sinking under the weight of his own greed.

That seems unfair and wrong because it is unfair and wrong. And yet here we are.

Brad DeLong sums up the dilemma nicely. "By and large," he writes, "we know what to do and how to do it to keep the world economy out of a depression." Yet this necessary course of action seems distasteful and some object, DeLong suggests, out of a sense of justice:

Avoiding depression requires supporting asset prices -- which means that for many financiers the wages of overspeculation will be not bankruptcy but fortunes. People rebel against the fact that in a financial crisis the banking sector has got the rest of us by the plums, and that there is no effective way to make sure they get their justice without creating prolonged mass unemployment for the rest of us.

We have a choice, in other words, between ensuring that Old Man Potter suffers the calamity he richly deserves and ensuring that the rest of the community doesn't suffer the calamity it does not deserve.

That's more or less the same situation we find in the ending of It's a Wonderful Life.

That $8,000 that Uncle Billy "lost" was pocketed by Old Man Potter himself. He stole from his depositor. And he got away with it. The missing money was replaced, but not by Potter -- it was cobbled together out of the pockets of the working people of Bedford Falls. ("Do you know how long it takes a working community to save $8,000?")

Potter was never punished and the deficit for the money he stole, and kept, was paid for by a communal bailout.

SNL's apocryphal "lost ending" may offer certain satisfactions that the original -- and real life -- seem to be lacking. But we're probably better off worrying less about vengeance at this point and more about how to build a future less dependent on Old Man Potter and his too-big-to-succeed institution.

Post-apocalyptic anarchy day

The anti-tax Tax Foundation gets a lot of attention each year when it announces its annual calculation for what it calls "Tax Freedom Day."

I don't understand why we're supposed to take this seriously. What they do, more or less, is divide total tax collections by total income to arrive at a rough estimate of the difference between gross pay and after-tax net income. They calculate what percentage of the total that difference is, then pretend the calendar is a pie chart. The difference between gross income and net take-home pay this year is about 28.2 percent, so "Tax Freedom Day" falls 28.2 percent of the way through the year, or April 13.

Ooookay. Um. So what?

This certainly doesn't mean what dozens of reports yesterday and today said it means -- that everything you earn this year up until April 13 goes to taxes, but that everything you earn from April 14 on is yours to keep. That's silly and obviously not the case. That's not how taxes, or paychecks, or rent/mortgage and utility bills work. That's not how the economy or the world works. Most of us aren't paid in a single, annual paycheck. We get paid every two weeks, or every month, and something like 28.2 percent of our gross income from each paycheck goes to taxes while we keep the other 71.8 or-so percent.

The foundation's larger point is even sillier and more obviously not the case. They're suggesting that in a world without taxes, you'd get to take home 100 percent of your current gross pay, and that this larger income would have exactly the same purchasing power as it would have here in this world -- the real world that you really live in.

The Tax Foundation's Bad Economics thus parallels something we've discussed here quite a bit regarding Bad Writing. One of the many failures of the Left Behind series is that they don't explore, appreciate or allow for the implications or repercussions of their own premise. The World's Worst Books begin with the disappearance of 2 billion people, including every child on earth, and yet the story from then on proceeds as though daily life, politics, culture and the economy were wholly unaffected by such a cataclysm.

The pseudo-economists of the Tax Foundation, likewise, propose a radical alteration of the world as we know it, but fail to explore, appreciate or allow for the implications of that alteration. They propose a world without taxes, which is to say a world without government. Yet in their very next breath they suggest that this alternate reality -- this world without any taxes, without any government -- would be so utterly similar to our current reality that easy comparisons can be made.

That's insane.

What they want to argue is something like this: Here in reality, the median hourly wage is roughly $15. Due to the burdensome and onerously oppressive existence of government and taxes, that means the median hourly take-home pay is something more like $10.75. Therefore, the Tax Foundation says, if we were liberated from the existence of government and taxes, someone now making $15 in gross pay would make $15 in net pay.

I don't know which half of that assumption is crazier -- the idea that equivalent jobs would exist with equivalent wages in life Beyond Thunderdome, or the idea that $15 here would have exactly the same purchasing power as 15 units of whatever barter-currency the regional warlords would be accepting in the Hobbesian jungle of the Tax Foundation's idea of utopia.

Spend just five minutes thinking about all of the things that would not exist in anything like their present form in the post-apocalyptic anarchy of TF's alternate reality and you'll start to think that 28.2 percent might be something of a bargain for all that it yields in return.

Yet for all the crazy magical thinking underlying their annual press release on "Tax Freedom Day," the Tax Foundation always manages to garner lots of attention because journalists seem to find the gimmick irresistible. Ooh, look! Someone's using a calendar as a pie chart! Isn't that clever?

Not really. For example, the poverty line here in the United States is determined by the percentage of income a household spends on food. Households that spend more than 1/3 of their income on food are considered below the poverty line. So we could say, I suppose, that for poor families right on the poverty line, May 1 is Food Freedom Day.

I'm just not sure why we'd want to say that, though, since I'm not sure that "Food Freedom Day" is any more meaningful a bit of nonsense than "Tax Freedom Day" is.

More to the point, no matter what form of pie chart they use to express their data, I'm not sure the Tax Foundation can be trusted. In 2009, they say, "Americans will pay more in taxes than they will spend on food, clothing and housing combined." Really? They also tell us that, "This year ... taxes will amount to 28.2 percent of our income."

Forget clothing -- do your food and housing expenses combined add up to less than 28.2 percent of your household budget?

Probably not. According to the Center for Housing Policy, American homeowners in 2006 spent an average of 26.2 percent of their income on housing expenses, while renters spent an average of 29.4 percent. So do you think the average homeowner spends only 2 percent of their income on food and clothing? Do you really believe the average renter spends negative 1.2 percent of their income on food and clothing? Me neither.

None of your business (cont'd.)

Imagine a newspaper with no "Business" section. Where the Business section is now, there is, instead, a "Work" section.

It would make sense for the paper from a, you know, business standpoint. Higher circulation means more revenue for the paper, so it makes sense to focus on the needs, concerns and interests the largest number of potential readers. The current model of a Business section is designed for only the tiniest slice of potential readers -- those who think of themselves primarily as investors. Why not aim, instead, for the vastly larger, overwhelming majority of potential readers, those who think of themselves primarily as people who work for a living?

The arithmetic here is so elementary that, when one stops to think about it, it's bewildering that newspapers haven't been doing this for decades.

Work, after all, is where most of a newspaper's readers spend most of their waking hours. People get up in the morning, pour the coffee, and head to work. This is what we call it. This is how we think of it. Do you have off tomorrow? No, I have to work. Stay for one more? No, I've got to be at work early.

Nobody ever says they have to be at business early.

Think how differently that section of the paper would have evolved if it had been the Work section instead of the Business section. It wouldn't have two pages of dense, inscrutable columns of stock prices tailored to people who think of themselves as "investors." (They're not, of course -- if you're checking the stock price every day, you're not so much investing in the company as betting on it.) Instead there might be columns listing the hourly wages for various employers and industries and their competing benefit plans.

If that last suggestion strikes you as shocking because information about wages and benefits is a private matter, that's because you've been reading newspapers with Business sections and not Work sections all these years and you've learned to think about these things from that perspective. If you'd been reading a newspaper with a Work section, instead, then you'd have spent all those years developing a better BS detector for that kind of thing. Thus if someone suggested that wages and benefits ought to be intensely private and secretive, you'd have learned to ask what it was they were trying to hide and why they're insisting on a labor market in which workers operate with imperfect and incomplete information.

The larger point there being that if we, the readers, had been reading a different kind of newspaper, we might be different too. We might have learned to ask different questions and therefore we might have learned to insist on different answers.

Take any Business story from the past year and think how it might have been reported on differently if it had appeared instead in the Work section. Housing bubble, time-bomb mortgage lending, bubble-backed securities, bailouts, Too Big To Fail, tax-funded bonuses, etc. They would all have been reported on very differently if the reporters had been operating in a framework of the needs, concerns and interests of workers rather than of investors.

Now think of how that kind of different reporting would inform and empower readers. And about how readers so informed and empowered might have different expectations and standards of accountability for elected and corporate leaders.

If we had a different kind of "business" press, not only would all these stories have been reported differently, but it's possible some of them might not have happened at all.

The undeserving poor

Following up on Rick Santelli's concern that any effort to aide aid families facing foreclosure will wind up "rewarding bad behavior," here are some recent pics from the Associated Press.

This is Mary Ann Herrera, photographed in front of her San Antonio home Monday by AP photographer Eric Gay. She asked her brother to paint this plea for help on the side of her house, which she's about to lose to foreclosure.

<sarcasm> As you can see, she's been living the high life in her swanky McMansion. If you peek through the windows in that picture, you can just make out the granite countertops in the state-of-the-art kitchen. And now she wants the government to compel taxpayers to subsidize her life of luxury. The nerve.

This Oakland, Calif., house, photographed by the AP's Paul Sakuma, is so huge that it doesn't even fit in the frame of the picture. Clearly, these homeowners were looking for a shortcut and irresponsibly agreed to a mortgage they couldn't afford for what anyone can see is Too Much House.

Just look at the expansive and expensive Xanadu next door and you can see all you need to know about this jet-setting neighborhood. I can just imagine the former homeowners kicking back on their leather sofas, lighting their imported cigars using $100 bills and laughing at all the hard-working taxpayers who are being asked to subsidize their extravagance. </sarcasm>

I don't really understand why Santelli thinks that allowing judges to restructure these homeowners' mortgages would actually cost me or the government any money. Replacing a write-off with a smaller, but sustainably profitable mortgage would actually save the banks -- and thus taxpayers too -- a ton of money. And reducing the number of foreclosures in any given neighborhood helps keep everybody's home values there from plummeting.

So quite seriously I can't fathom the prefab outrage that Santelli and his ilk have decided to pretend to feel over the possibility that some families who might otherwise lose their homes might be helped to keep them after all.

Santelli just seems like the kind of guy who would watch Smile Pinki and walk away complaining that the kid was just a freeloader taking advantage of the redistributionist fools who run Smile Train. I don't care for that kind of guy.

The workers in the vineyard

For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, "You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right." So they went.

He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, "Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?"

"Because no one has hired us," they answered.

He said to them, "You also go and work in my vineyard."

When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, "Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first."

The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. Especially that douchebag Rick Santelli from CNBC. But each one of them also received a denarius. When he received it, the overpaid, whining, miserable prick began to grumble against the landowner. "These men who were hired last worked only one hour," he said, "and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day."

But he answered him, "Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn't you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?"

I changed a word or two in there, but that word "envious" in the final question is holy writ. The perverse irony, of course, is that you're most likely to hear that word tossed about nowadays by exactly the sort of greedy, grumbling sorts described in the parable above. These are warped, stunted, soulless creatures who lie awake at night worrying that somehow, somewhere, some poor person might be catching a break that they didn't 100-percent deserve. Some poor family might be getting extra food stamps. Some poor mother might be using WIC to get the good cheese. Some family might not get kicked out of their home and onto the street when really they should have been responsible enough not to trust the professional realtors and bankers who assured them they could afford that house.

And these awful people -- Santelli and his fans who are consumed by this fevered jealousy of hypothetically "irresponsible" and "undeserving" poor people receiving help, relief or mercy -- then have the chutzpah to accuse those in favor of helping those in need of "the politics of envy."