Our Nations Budget
July 19, 2011
Last week, this office posted
an entry on the Brethren Blog about why government spending matters. The
basic summation of that post is that there are lots of reforms needed to do to
government spending. It is certainly true that we need to contain the deficit,
and not allow it to spiral out of control. But the voice of the church says
that what we spend our money on – where we put our wealth - is a foundational
statement about who we are as a people. And right now, we are choosing to
invest in wars and things that make for wars and in tax breaks so that
individuals can keep more of what they have – rather than extending the table,
as we talked about at Annual Conference - and meeting the needs of the broader
community around us.
Yet this is not the conversation we are hearing from our nation’s
leaders.
Brother Stan Noffsinger, General Secretary, added his voice
to more than 25 heads of communion and national religious organizations that are
spearheading an 18-month faith-based public policy campaign to urge Congress and
the Administration to exempt programs that assist at-risk families and children
in the U.S. and abroad from budget cuts.
But the reality is that what Brother Stan says, and the messages that come
from this office, don’t matter nearly as much as your voice. Only the
collective voice of all of us can move the national conversation to more
reflect the values we believe in. And now it is your turn.
The National Council of Churches Poverty
Initiative is coordinating an effort to make the faith voice heard. As
debates over the federal budget continue the most vulnerable and poor members
of our society are being forgotten. Will you sign a letter to the Obama
administration and Congress to re-direct their priorities to care for the
"least of these?" We will personally hand deliver this letter
to Congress and send it to the President. Read the text of the letter and sign the letter here.
Our 1977 Annual
Conference Statement: "Justice
and Nonviolence" reads, “Economic
institutions should promote the capacity, willingness, and likelihood of
peoples to embrace economic equity at the expense of material
self-aggrandizement; to substitute for selfish competition, cooperation to meet
the needs of one another; to implement justice toward other classes,
nationalities, and "enemies" by sharing wealth and power in practical
ways; and to build community, nurtured by local roots and encompassing all
humanity”. It is time for us to call our nation to live into that statement.
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Church of the Brethren Policy: The 1977
Annual Conference statement “Justice
and Nonviolence”, reads:
Economic
institutions should promote the capacity, willingness, and likelihood of
peoples to embrace economic equity at the expense of material
self-aggrandizement; to substitute for selfish competition, cooperation to meet
the needs of one another; to implement justice toward other classes,
nationalities, and "enemies" by sharing wealth and power in practical
ways; and to build community, nurtured by local roots and encompassing all
humanity
We
call upon all Christians and other persons of good will to join with the Church
of the Brethren to reverse the widening of the gap between rich and poor. In
order to conserve energy, food, and other resources needed by the poor, we must
reexamine our patterns of consumption. We urge our people to contribute from
their material resources, beyond a tithe, for global redistribution of wealth.
We encourage one another to dissociate, as far as possible, from, or change the
policies of, economic institutions that but- tress elitist systems abroad or
seek to take unreasonable profits out of less developed countries.
The
Church of the Brethren seeks to shape its own programs and to influence other
institutions in order to encourage the United States to:
- acknowledge that
food is a human right and to make this right a guiding principle in deciding
economic policies
- lead in creating
a world food reserve system under international control and to contribute
significant resources, as the world's largest producer of food for export
- relieve the
economic insecurity which creates pressures for population growth and to
encourage family planning aimed at stabilizing population through increased
education
- contribute a
fixed portion of savings from arms reductions to programs for emergency relief
food reserves, and the development of knowledge needed to increase agricultural
production worldwide, through the United Nations
- channel its
foreign economic aid through multilateral agencies in which the poor nations
enjoy equitable representation
- contribute at
least one percent of its GNP annually to world development programs
- participate in
the movement for a new international economic order for promoting economic
well-being for all.
A 1973 General Board Resolution on Welfare Reform reads, “We recommend enactment of legislation which would provide a
basic floor of economic support for all Americans (U. S.
residents), be it by a guaranteed annual income, negative
income tax, or family allotment, as may be found best after thorough study. We
recommend a shift in priorities in the use of existing government income in
order to provide the resources needed for such programs. We pledge our
willingness to help pay the taxes needed to make these possible.”
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For more information about the witness ministries of
the Church of the Brethren, contact Jordan Blevins, Advocacy Officer for the
Church of the Brethren:
Jordan Blevins
C/O National Council of Churches
110 Maryland Ave. NE
Suite 108
Washington, DC 20002
jblevins@brethren.org
202-481-6943
