So the president laid some Bible teaching on us, implying at the National Prayer Breakfast last week that the rich should pay more taxes because Jesus said “to whom much has been given, much is required.”
Actually, the verse has nothing to do with the rich being obligated to give more – it is instead Jesus’ metaphorical instruction that those who have been given the treasure of knowing the Lord are expected to be good stewards of His kingdom, more so than those who do not know Him.
But let’s bypass the misinterpretation, and accept the fact that Mr. Obama meant wealthy people should be willing to give more – and in the form of higher taxes.
The problem with this logic is that nowhere in the Bible will you find a verse urging believers to give more to the government. Mr. Obama is equating giving to the government with giving to the needy. If you believe that, by all means give more to Uncle Sam.
But most people give directly to charities or individuals because it is the most effective way. A dollar of federal taxes can and does go just about anywhere, including down the sinkhole in yet another wasteful program.
Indeed millions of people in the U.S. already give substantial sums to charitable causes, and if the president is saying we need to do more of that, I’m all for it. But he’s not.
Worse, he has several times proposed reducing the tax deduction for charitable donations, most recently in his “jobs bill” introduced last September. Why? Because, he says, the wealthy benefit disproportionally from the charitable deduction, since higher income brackets yield a higher percentage of income shielded from taxation.
This thinking demonstrates one of Mr. Obama’s biggest weaknesses: he can’t stand to see financially well-off people benefit from any aspect of government policy, even if that same policy benefits millions of others who aren’t well off, including those who benefit from charitable contributions.
Our president is bright; he knows it is much more effective to give directly to those in need or to organizations who are just one step away from the needy. Yet Mr. Obama's ideology leads him to drum up a weak and faulty parallel plucked from holy scripture that only demonstrates his own misunderstanding of the Bible as well as his craven willingness to use it for political ends.
Speaking of the Bible, scripture does say many things about envy, which Mr. Obama has been stoking in great quantities wherever possible. Envy, that is, of what the president refers to as the “millionaires and billionaires getting richer and richer while the middle class gets squeezed..”
Famously, the Bible speaks out against envy (covetousness) in Exodus 20:17: "You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's.”
But it seems the president wants us to begrudge the success of others, and to support taxing them more so as to narrow ‘the gap between rich and poor.’
The soak the rich theme Obama is peddling is an emotion-driven, hollow and fruitless dogma that seeks to bring the successful down rather than lift everyone else up.
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