It is not about taxes, it is about trust

Taxes are always a hot button issue. People believe that the money they earn is theirs and they do not want anyone putting their hands into their bank accounts. So every election season people protest when any talk of a tax raise might be needed. And when these talks happen, people sometimes look foolish.

For instance, here is this sign in protest:

You may be thinking - how can a government run program stay out of the government run program?

I don't know. This sort of thinking runs amok when taxes are discussed. All sort of people get irrational.

The bottom line in this post is that paying taxes is not the issue. It is that we have a growing distrust. We just do not trust others to take care of our money. We believe that we are better managers of our money than anyone else and, if given the opportunity, we could do what others do at a lower cost and faster.

It is not about taxes, it is about trust. When we do not trust our fellow persons, then we will rail against anything that forces us to trust them.

So we rail against taxes.
Members (and many times clergy) of the UMC rail against apportionments and the appointment process.
We rail against FOXNews or MSNBC.
We rail against God when things don't go a desired way.
We rail against other drivers while we ourselves are guilty of poor driving habits.
We rail against our bosses who "don't know what they are doing."

It really has very little to do with the issue(s) voiced, it has everything to do with trust. When we trust others then the level of angst goes way down.

The concern from this clergy person's stand point is that the more we are secularized the less trust is promoted between people. The more we rail against the machine of government the less trust there is. The more we think others are idiots and we are immune to irrationality the less trust there is.

Matthew 17 thoughts

Matthew 17 has a little story here that came up in Bible study on Sunday.



I have noted about the symbolism in the Bible of fishing before.  And I think the case can be made for this text as well.  But here is some more to chew on.


Rome forces people to pay the temple tax.  That is Rome makes people they want to pay to pay the temple tax.  If you were the son of the emperor or a really good friend or a political ally, you did not pay this tax (sound like today's situation in many ways?!)  So Jesus pays the tax.  But the thing about it is that Jesus does not use his own money to pay the tax.   He uses a fish.  


Here is the thing.


If Jesus pays the tax, then he is siding with the Roman opposition in that he is giving them money.  This is something that the Zealots do not agree with.  If he refuses to pay the tax, which would be what the Zealots would love, he sides with the Zealots.  Instead Jesus gets Peter to pluck a fish from the pond.  


The Hebrew Bible uses the idea of plucking fish from the sea or pond as a way of describing to others that God will pluck the rich and powerful from their place of comfort if they are not responsive to the needs of the poor.  For Jesus to send Peter to pluck a fish means Jesus told Peter to go and confront a rich unjust person and get them to repent of their unjust ways.  


When the tax is paid by a rich person for a poor person then you have the beginnings of a new social order.  


This new social order is not only just in the Biblical sense (that is a fair distribution of goods and services), but it also becomes the cornerstone of a new Kingdom.  


If the rich and the poor all have access to the temple, if rich and poor have access to education, if the rich and poor have access to the powers that be then we are talking about no more distinctions between the rich and poor.  


Jesus does not side with the Zealots and refuse the tax.  Jesus does not side with Rome and pays the tax.


Jesus gets a rich person who was a "fish" and transforms this person in order to allow a new Kingdom to emerge.  


Can you imagine that?  Someone paying another person's taxes.  


That sounds a bit crazy.  That sounds a bit like something only Jesus would think of.  

Taxes and Morality

I was listening to KERA's "Think" today for about 30 seconds and the guest spoke to an issue which Estee and I have have spoken about many a times (especially around election times): Taxes.

Estee in the past has argued for a simple "flat tax" for all people, regardless of income. It is standard and easy to understand so most people can comprehend the idea we all are paying the same percentage. Whereas I have been a fan of "graduated tax rates" in which the more you make the more you pay in taxes.

The guest on "Think" stated why I think there needs to be graduated tax rates, "There is no wealth without society." He stated there is a moral obligation which the ancient western civilizations understood. (As a side note, he said the debate on taxes is older than the "one man, one woman for marriage" argument according to Scripture in which Jesus is asked what a woman is to do when her husband dies.)

The moral obligation is this: if you gain wealth you gained it as a result of society. You did not earn that money on your own, society gave it to you. Thus you have a moral obligation to give back to the society which gave you so much so that others might have the same opportunities you were given AND for the future viability of the society.

This is a reminder to me that, in the words of Malcolm Galdwell, "No one - not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires and not even geniuses- ever makes it alone."

From Freakanomics - Lotto

Freakonomics: Lotto Is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens
By By Freakonomics
Published: January 21, 2009

The Powerball lottery jackpot, which now stands at $20 million, is tough to win — and sometimes, nobody wins it.

It’s incredibly hard to match all six numbers drawn for the game. To get an idea of just how long the odds are, software engineer Andrew Arrow built a clever little program that randomly generates six lottery numbers (including, naturally, a powerball), and then spits out an infinite set of random guesses, counting how many matches the computer finds.

In the time it took us to write this post, the applet made 5,467 guesses and never matched more than two winning numbers on the same ticket.

Of course, the trick of playing the lottery is that the belief you might win the jackpot can be neurobiologically as satisfying as actually winning. In which case the lottery isn’t a tax on people who are bad at math; it’s cheap entertainment.