Go shop and save our economy

The bells are ringing again. First, after 911 the government asked us to show our patriotism by shopping to stimulate the economy.

Now the economy is in trouble again. The government plans to borrow money from China, to send it to all its citizens, in hopes they will go out and shop.... If it even works, it is such a short term gain. It does not fix the situation, but adds more debt for us to worry about.

I struggle with this, because I am not gonna send the money back. We have plans to pay down our own debt on loans or the dreadful credit cards. We have a personal deficit because we decided to be a single family income in order for the kids to have a parent at home and like a lot of people we also have many unexpected medical bills.

Few thoughts:

• We are very luck to be able to have a parent home and stay afloat
• I hate to see so many people with the mortgage crisis, but wonder how many were trying to keep up with the Jones, and buy a house they really could not afford using an adjustable or interest only to pay for it. On the other hand I see how expensive houses are getting and maybe this is a result of the overall inflated housing market, things are never as black and white as they seem.
  
• This stimulus package, does not fix the issues with economy - loss of jobs, gas prices, investments being low, and at the same time corporate profits at all time high. Something else has to change.
• It makes me sad to see so many people struggling and how easy it is for them to become faceless or a statistic
• I was emailed this letter about the tax rebate and found it compelling, thought I would share it:

Open letter to: President George W. Bush

First of all, we want to thank you for your hard work and efficient cooperation in responding to the growing crisis in the U.S. economy. This is a model of bipartisanship that many citizens, of every persuasion, long to see and rightfully expect.

Nevertheless, we also want to voice some deep and abiding questions about the economic stimulus legislation approved by Congress and signed into law by President Bush on February 13.

Individuals in our congregation have varied opinions about the relative effectiveness of this legislation—not unlike many other citizens. What we are in agreement on, however, is the deliberation leading to this federal action appears to have neglected more fundamental questions: Whose economy is in fact being stimulated? What vision is being served? Which arrangements are being strengthened and which are being breached?

Your own statistical research offices continue to document a frightening, and escalating, pattern of economic disparity both in the U.S. and between the U.S. and the larger family of nations. In our judgment, it is politically dangerous, economically unstable and environmentally ruinous.

In the language of our faith, this massive disparity is a sin, the evidence of spiritual distress. Our Scripture, tradition and conscience are insistent at this point: being faithful to God and constructing just relations within the human community (and with the earth itself) are parallel commitments.

We assure you that we are committed to fruitful economic activity. We are thankful for those individuals and groups who labor creatively and intelligently to create wealth. But, again, the questions arise: Wealth for whom? Under what terms? In whose favor?

We claim no privileged expertise in formulating economic policies that would foster more equitable sharing of the earth’s resources. Neither do we believe that our Scripture, tradition and conscience have ready-made answers. That task rightly belongs to a much wider mix of people willing to work hard and negotiate long, with intelligence and passion, for the sake of the common good.

We do believe, though, that there must be more commonness in the good we pursue.

We expressly do not believe that shopping is an appropriate response to our collective trauma—whether it be that of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, or the crumbling lives now caught in our tumbling economic outlook. There is something fundamentally awry in this assumption. Our gluttony, literally and figuratively, is laying waste to our commonweal.

We are not ascetics, at least in the way most people understand that term. Our congregation shares wonderful potluck feasts after our weekly worship service. A frequent invitation at our communion table is “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). We say amen to the teaching from the Jewish Talmud Yerushalmi: “On Judgment Day God will hold us accountable for the permitted pleasures we failed to enjoy.” We celebrate God’s promise of “the fatness of the earth” (Genesis 27:28) and echo the psalmist’s confidence: “I believe that I shall see the goodness of God in the land of the living” (Psalm 27:13).

But the Bible also speaks of “fatness” in a profoundly different and troubling way: The wicked “have no pangs. . . pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out with fatness, their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression” (Psalms 73:4-8).

We fear that our nation has become infatuated with security, with eyes swollen shut to the reality that the only lasting security is mutual security; that terror cannot be overcome with more terror; that clenched fists cannot unravel the legacies of discord and enmity that inflict neighborhoods and nations alike.

Given our convictions about what it means to follow Jesus, and given our dismay over the skewed perceptions and scandalous policies governing current economic arrangements, we pledge that members of our congregation will donate all or part (at minimum, a 10% tithe) of the expected tax rebate to organizations that foster the well-being of people on the economic margins. We also pledge to encourage other communities of faith and conscience to make similar commitments.

To be sure, this is a modest step and—if the harvest of peace is to be sown in justice—must be accompanied by many other personal and public commitments. Our hope is that enough others will make similar pledges and create the political will needed to nudge our nation away from current arrangements and toward new solutions rooted in restored imagination and renewed moral clarity.

All such commitments will come at a cost. We believe the consequence is worth the cost. Which is why we ask you, our nation’s leaders, to go back to your chambers to ponder a different set of questions and formulate a different set of policies.

Respectfully, and with appreciation for the burdens of your duty,


The Circle of Mercy Congregation
Asheville, N.C.