Browsing PBH By Articles

Why We Should Tax Churches

The Article: We Should Be Taxing Churches by Matt Yglesias in Slate.

The Text: Amelia Thomson-Deveaux has a great piece about religious groups that are trying to remove restrictions on church-based electioneering. She suggests that rather than gutting the rules, there’s a simple fix, “Religious leaders who want the liberty to endorse candidates can give up their churches’ tax deduction.”

I would go one further. Let’s tax churches! All of them, in a non-discriminatory way that doesn’t consider faith or creed or level of political engagement. There’s simply no good reason to be giving large tax subsidies to the Church of Scientology or the Diocese of San Diego or Temple Rodef Shalom in Virginia or the John Wesley African Methodist Episcopal Zion church around the corner from me. Whichever faith you think is the one true faith, it’s undeniable that the majority of this church-spending is going to support false doctrines. Under the circumstances, tax subsidies for religion are highly inefficient.

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The Pro-Life Hypocrisy

The Article: Pro-life groups don’t really protect the unborn by Elizabeth Jahr in The Christian Science Monitor.

The Text: Religious and political groups that funnel tremendous resources into a legal war to limit and even ban abortion in America are at best, wasting time, and at worst, damaging efforts to protect the unborn. Texas’s new abortion law – one of the toughest in the country – is only the latest in a string of efforts to limit abortions in numerous states across the US.

Members of the pro-life movement spend countless dollars and hours on rallies and lobbying without providing adequate financial and emotional support for women to actually maintain pregnancies. And the majority of women who have abortions cite not being able to afford a child as one of the main reasons for their decision.

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John Kerry’s Morally And Historically Obscene Case for War In Syria

The Article: John Kerry’s Morally, Linguistically, and Historically Obscene Case for War in Syria by Matt Welch in Reason.

The Text: If we are to take our roles as citizens as “seriously” as members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee claim to take their decision to support the bombing of Syria (“very, very seriously,” said Bob Corker [R-Tennesse]; “seriously and solemnly,” added Dick Durbin [D-Illinois]), then we really ought to give full attention to the testimony yesterday by the war’s principal salesman, Secretary of State John Kerry.

Unfortunately for the politician who made famous the line “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”, Kerry’s case in front of the committee was more a textbook example of how acting as the world’s policeman for decades has warped the country’s values, judgment, and even language.

I counted at least seven moments that qualified in my judgment as obscene, exposing along the way the administration’s empty and contradictory arguments for air-mailing death upon a regime that does not pose a direct threat in the United States:

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How School Is Killing Our Kids

The Article: School is a prison — and damaging our kids by Peter Gray in Salon.

The Text: Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that’s what they need to become productive and happy adults. Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests.

But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.

School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

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Why America Stopped Caring About The Public Good

The Article: Here’s Why America Stopped Caring About The Public Good by Robert Reich in Business Insider.

The Text: Congress is in recess, but you’d hardly know it. This has been the most do-nothing, gridlocked Congress in decades. But the recess at least offers a pause in the ongoing partisan fighting that’s sure to resume in a few weeks.

It also offers an opportunity to step back and ask ourselves what’s really at stake.

A society — any society —- is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.

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