More importantly, if there is anything we can learn from the history of the last few decades, it is that enabling the government to tax us more and spending it promiscuously is neither the path to justice or a better life for the poor.
As columnist Mona Charen writes in her new book, Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (And the Rest of Us), a policy of defining compassion as a function of federal dollars spent was a colossal failure.
“During the twenty-five years that followed Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of war on poverty, U.S. taxpayers spent $3 trillion providing every conceivable support for the poor, the elderly and the infirm. Private foundations spent scores of billions more, and private and religious charities even more. Nevertheless as Ronald Reagan later quipped, ‘In the war on poverty, poverty won.’ ”
As Charen rightly notes, government programs often perpetuate problems rather than solve them. The bitter truth for the “compassion lobby” was that the landmark Welfare Reform Act passed in 1996, which they predicted would result in catastrophe for the poor, did nothing of the kind. While far from perfect (it was, in my opinion, notably flawed by anti-immigrant measures included in the bill), welfare-to-work measures have been largely successful.
Viewed in that light, opposition to that reform – as well as the whole notion of subjecting social welfare spending to greater scrutiny and accountability – was not a biblically mandated obligation. It was just pure party politics and liberal ideology. The same is true of the 2005 budget and tax war.
It is one thing for some of us to act as if Judaism consists of the Democratic Party platform, with holidays thrown in. It is quite another for us to be told that a different point of view about a budget or the rate of taxation violates the Torah. And it is folly for Jewish leaders to send that message to the rest of the country.
That’s not to say that the Jewish community shouldn’t urge legislators to support funding for worthy, local social-welfare projects. They should. And we, along with the rest of the citizenry of this great nation, are as entitled as anybody else to sit up, beg with the rest of them, and then gobble up the morsels our beneficent legislators toss us.
But fighting the Republican budget or tax cuts is the agenda of the Democratic Party, not that of the Jewish community. Anyone who confuses those two things is doing the Jews, and the country, no favor.