2. Forward those line items to taxing authorities at every level- city, county, state, and federal
3. Allow individual tax payers to fill out an extra-long-form return, with the caveat that by doing so you agree to allocate every penny of your taxes to something that makes a difference in your life or the lives of people you care about.
Doing so would reduce the incentive of the rich to cheat on their taxes (because by paying more taxes, they can regain some small amount of power to fund government programs directly) while enhancing even the common person's ability to influence government (truly voting with dollars for programs that help your family and your friends).
People who choose not to fill out the extra long form, have their taxes applied to the general fund which provides matching grants to those programs that either nobody else will fund (one FTE if your program attracted $0 this year, whose job it will be to promote the program next year; otherwise grants will be some percentage of dollars raised).
An open letter, in this time of synod, On the secular feast day of Martin Luther King Jr, 2022
The Most Reverend Archbishop Alexander King Sample Metropolitan of Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon
Your Excellency:
Upon reading the preparatory documents for the synod, I see the church beginning to make a similar mistake that secular culture over the past 22 years in the United States has made.
In the church, we have a proud tradition of social justice going back to the writings of Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum. Our form of social justice is nearly unique in this world; we see each human being, no matter their station in life or socio-economic class as a Child of God, and thus our solutions to injustice are often open all, regardless of means, ability, or superficial identity judgements.
Our social justice truly mirrors the concept that the Baptist Preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., espoused in his great Dream Speech, that we judge people not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.
In the last 20 years, on the secular side, we've seen the gradual abandonment of that dream; in favor of a much different form of social justice. I call this the social justice of war and revenge; the central concept seeming to consist of the following three steps:
Observe an injustice exists.
Find stereotypical or genetic identity based cause, in either the victim or the oppressor or both, to blame.
Create a greater injustice out of revenge to attack the blamed oppressor group, without doing anything to actually change the injustice for the victim group.
Our own experience with COVID-19 and social injustice in Portland, OR has retreated to competing interest groups based on identity politics: Police vs Minority Communities (with extremists on both sides becoming so violent that more than 90 murders and 600 attempted murders happened in 2021), old vs young (with the extreme aged virtually locked into jails that were once assisted living centers and the young denied an education by the teacher's unions out of a fear of the "vectors of disease" they now see their students as representing), skin color identity groups encouraged to hate rather than help one another, and even a sense that urban Democrats want to exterminate rural Republicans and banish them forever from the public discourse.
One attempt at social justice in particular, critical race theory, seems to have created a culture of violence so deep in the name of anti-racism, that it threatens to erase more than 70 years worth of work of the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr and the people he left behind. In their attempt to defund the police, they have created a secular situation of lawlessness that will take decades, if not centuries, to recover from. The injustice they were trying to correct for (blaming all crime on a single race and reducing crime through quick, visual descriptions of perpetrators) is indeed a real problem; the way they went about fixing it (violent nightly protest for more than 600 nights and the removal of funding for various parts of the police department) was an utter disaster.
The sexual revolution has created identity groups that prey upon each other, and sometimes upon their own identity group, sometimes victimizing others, in anti-life sexual philosophies that seem more based in use and abuse than in the procreative family vision that we know creates the next generation- and the family too, is often attacked in favor of alternative pseudo-marital groupings that have no natural generative capability.
It is the very existence of identity groups that creates marginalization and oppression. When we separate human beings off from the human family, and claim they are not human, such as in the case of the unborn children, that's when the evils of marginalization and extermination begin to appear. It is when we see the other as *other*, and not as ourselves, based on superficial and frankly shallow judgements and stereotypical generalized superstitions, that real marginalization begins.
And so I would respectfully ask, as a part of the contribution of the Archdiocese of Portland In Oregon, that we begin our contribution to the Synodal Path with a statement of rejection of bias, a rejection of judgement, not just of the marginalized but the majority that may well one day become marginalized. That we begin to see people by the content of their character, and not merely in fulfillment of our own lust and greed, judging them by the superficiality of their identity group.
Only then, will we be able to fulfill our own promise in Catholic Social Teaching. Only by rejecting situations of rejection, and building situations of hospitality, encounter, assimilation and welcoming, can we build the universal belonging that is the ultimate promise of Catholicism.
I have the honor to be, Your Excellency, Respectfully yours in Christ, Theodore M. Seeber
5470 SW Erickson Ave, Beaverton, OR 97005
----------------- I am not the only person saying this. Here's an edify video on the subject.
I posted this on Next Door, just to be attacked by the usual suspects. So I'm reposting it here. If the discussion there doesn't go more towards parents and teachers there rather than DINKS and SINKS and people who have neurotypical kids and don't care if they're stuck at home all day playing video games, then I will be deleting the discussion on next door.
Anybody else depressed by the Beaverton School District going back into lockdown?
This disease can't be the disease-that-shall-not-be-named, despite every social media wanting it to be.
I had hoped the vaccines would work- that is, would confer enough immunity to stop further mutations. I had hoped I was wrong. My whole family is vaccinated. We were wrong. Vaccinated people are still spreading this, the vaccines have failed so far, regardless of what the pharmaceutical shills will tell you.
And now my special needs son; who had on his IEP to have work experience, will like his senior year get no work experience.
He only has two years left until he turns 21. He's already had a year and a half of his schooling practically stolen from him, now he's going to have his extended schooling, which is his right be federal law, stolen from him.
Over a virus that we now find out from the CDC, mainly kills people with three or more other co-morbidities- in other words, most of those who died were already ill with three or more conditions that would have killed them eventually.
Guess what, I have NOTHING in commoon with this woman. She claims that class doesn't matter. Well, it sure as heck mattered as I was growing up, and it matters to me today, far more than race ever will.
I would still consider excessive profit to be taken from either your customers or your labor, and perhapbs both. It's a sign you could either lower price or raise wages. Having said that, this economist does have a point- good thing he has the hair to cover it.
