Supporting
a Family
How hard should life be for the average person? How hard should it be for
the person at, say, the 25th percentile of the income distribution? How hard
for a family at the 10th, or 5th or 1st percentile? If something in our structure,
our customs or our traditions is making life unnecessarily difficult for
what the Bible calls "the least of these," isn't it incumbent on us — whatever
our religious beliefs — to discover and eradicate those structures,
customs or traditions?
Henry George: The
Crime of Poverty (1885 speech)
Why,
in the rudest state of
society in the most primitive state of the arts the labour of the
natural bread-winner will suffice to provide a living for himself and
for those who are dependent upon him. Amid all our inventions
there
are large bodies of men who cannot do this. What is the most
astonishing thing in our civilisation? Why, the most astonishing
thing to those Sioux chiefs who were recently brought from the Far
West and taken through our manufacturing cities in the East, was not
the marvellous inventions that enabled machinery to act almost as if
it had intellect; it was not the growth of our cities; it was not the
speed with which the railway car whirled along; it was not the
telegraph or the telephone that most astonished them; but the fact
that amid this marvellous development of productive power they found
little children at work. And astonishing that ought to be to
us; a
most astounding thing!
Talk about improvement in the
condition of the working classes,
when the facts are that a larger and larger proportion of women and
children are forced to toil. Why, I am told that, even here in
your
own city, there are children of thirteen and fourteen working in
factories. In Detroit, according to the report of the Michigan Bureau
of Labour Statistics, one half of the children of school age do not
go to school. In New Jersey, the report made to the legislature
discloses an amount of misery and ignorance that is appalling.
Children are growing up there, compelled to monotonous toil when they
ought to be at play, children who do not know how to play; children
who have been so long accustomed to work that they have become used
to it; children growing up in such ignorance that they do not know
what country New Jersey is in, that they never heard of George
Washington, that some of them think Europe is in New York. Such facts
are appalling; they mean that the very foundations of the Republic
are being sapped. The dangerous man
is not the man who tries to
excite discontent; the dangerous man is the man who says that all is
as it ought to be. Such a state of things cannot continue; such
tendencies as we see at work here cannot go on without bringing at
last an overwhelming crash. ... read the whole speech
Alanna Hartzok: Who Would Jesus Tax?
The Saga of Susan Pace Hamill's Alabama Tax Crusade
A University of Alabama School of Law Professor has asked God's forgiveness
for the years she lived in the sin of ignorance about tax injustice. Susan
Pace Hamill, a tax expert, business consultant, and dedicated United Methodist
church goer, thought there was a misprint when she first read that personal
incomes as low as $4,600 for a family of four were being taxed by the state,
while timber owners holding 71% of the land of Alabama were paying less than
$1 per acre in property taxes. Two hours later she found out there had been
no mistake and that Alabama has the most regressive tax code in the country.
Her righteous rage spawned a tax crusade that has reverberated onto the national
scene.
"As somebody who knows a lot about taxes, I could not have imagined a design
of a tax structure this bad," she said in a Tuscaloosa Newsstory last
February. "The state's tax code is really horribly unjust and has no moral,
ethical leg to stand on. Period."
Alabamians with incomes under $13,000 pay 10.9 percent of their incomes in
state and local taxes while those who make over $229,000 pay just 4.1 percent.
Commercial property owners pay more than 50 percent of property taxes, with
homes approaching one-third. Alabama's sales taxes are among the highest in
the nation, up to 10 percent in some areas, and do not exempt even the most
basic necessities such as food. The state's 1901 constitution was written primarily
by large landholders to secure their economic interests, consequently property
taxes are extremely light on their holdings. ...
While resoundingly condemning the current system (she uses words like "horrific" and "monstrous
injustice") Hamill clearly articulates a tax reform approach which shifts
taxes off of low wage earners and onto large land owners. Through a combination
of her own reasoning, caring heart, and inherent sense of justice and a
thorough investigation of Judeo-Christian ethics, Hamill arrived at a tax
policy approach
which bears remarkable similarities to the economic justice crusades of
19th century reformer, Henry George. ... read
the whole article
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about Henry George
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