In recent months, Senator Bernie
Sanders has captured the minds of a growing faction of voters, inspired by his
rhetoric on the environment, special interests, and poverty. With his support for raising the minimum
wage, federally mandating income equality, and raising taxes to pay for ever
larger expenditures on welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing, and Medicaid,
he’s been branded by some as an advocate for the poor.
He brought this message, his
special brand of charity via government, to Liberty University, a conservative
evangelical institution and was met, as one would assume, with a certain level
of skepticism and even confusion.
He proceeded to lecture those in attendance on the need to be charitable
to the downtrodden in the name of justice. But the problem with this venue is
that it was full of the most charitable Americans already according to several studies, namely Christian
Evangelicals--arguably, the one group that least needs convincing on the
matter.
On the flip side, Sanders’
following is made up of voters that have nothing but contempt for evangelicals
and would be delighted to see their efforts diminished. Some on the left have even gone so far
as to demand that religious institutions be stripped of their tax-exempt
status which would ultimately devastate contributions to those in need. To put it another way, Sanders’ backers
do not approve of the most charitable people in the country, but, incredibly,
have nevertheless convinced themselves that they, along with their candidate,
are the greatest moral defenders of the poor.
Of course, Sanders’ dedication to
taxpayer funded social programs, along with government wage mandates, is what
he uses to propagate the misconception that his ideas represent the moral side
of the charity debate, but it only shows how little he understands the
subject. For instance, no one
could say they are charitable to the poor if they simply donated someone else’s
money. On the same token, when
reallocated taxes and business revenue from others, including the famously
vilified one percent, are the basis of what they see as philanthropy, with
little or no personal sacrifice of themselves, it’s easy to conclude that this
definition defies what is considered being truly charitable. And studies show that religious
evangelicals understand true charity, through regular practice, overwhelmingly
more than the anti-religious crowd--the crowd that is the backbone of Sanders’
support. It is clear to see that
their surplus income is more often rooted in esoteric dining, world travel, and
their pets. In their minds a
displaced dog is as great a cause as a struggling human being. All the while, churchgoers, week in and
week out, contribute substantial portions of their income to charitable causes
that make real impact in peoples lives.
Not only does Sanders and his
following misunderstand charity but they also misunderstand what it actually
means to be poor in modern America.
I grew up in a lower income home and I’m sure there was at least a year
or two, with a family of six, that we were technically living at the poverty
level, but we never thought of ourselves as poor. The misconception about poor Americans is that they’re
simply an economic demographic on a chart. What largely goes
unrecognized is that they’re inadvertently encouraged to stay poor by a slew of
social programs that are celebrated by Sanders. These programs not only help to
eliminate proper motivation to achieve more, but can also develop a complacency
that comes from habitual dependence.
In other words, being poor isn’t just a tax bracket; it can also become
a state of mind. And when you’re
reminded month after month by check after check for years and years that you
are hopelessly at the mercy of government support, it goes a long way to confirming
the notion that you’re poor and that’s all you’ll probably ever be--deprived of
the satisfaction that comes from providing on your own and never experiencing
the joys of charitable giving.
Then it becomes easy to get stuck in a mental quagmire that’s
increasingly harder to get out of.
One of the proven ways to lift
people out of poverty is an increase in our national wealth--the gross domestic
product. But Sanders’ advocacy for
enlarging federal social programs and making higher financial demands on business
and taxpayers are associated with economies that limit and even diminish
economic growth. Of course, the
financial policies he’s been campaigning on reflect his well-known flirtations
with communism throughout his career and I can’t help but recall the old adage
about communism--mutually shared poverty. Ironically, the policies he advocates
achieve the very economic debilitation he claims he wants to alleviate. Sanders’ inability to connect the dots
when it comes to social program’s relation to the GDP and it’s connection to
the poor seem to confirm the doubts of the Liberty University audience about
his effectiveness to remedy the plights of the disadvantaged.
In the coming months, Senator Sanders will try hard to
convince America that he’s a man of the people but when he constantly
demonstrates a tremendous misunderstanding of charity, the merit of government
policy on poverty, and what it means to, itself, be poor--while turning a blind
eye to the substantial lack of giving by many of his enthusiasts, then I can
only conclude that the senator from Vermont can’t be labeled a friend of the
poor, but quite clearly the contrary.
