That today’s culture wars lack a convenient place to pigeonhole Tom Cornell, whose seven decades of activism in the Catholic Worker movement continued until his passing on August 1, shows their limitations rather than his.

In a 2002 profile, Andrew Blackman noted that Cornell “shares common beliefs with liberals and neo-conservatives, communists and cardinals, and he harshly criticizes all of them.” Cornell was the sort of radical for social justice who told liberals that radicalism didn’t mean being “liberal but more so,” since his analysis of the ills of war and poverty traced them to fundamentally “different premises.” He wasn’t any more accommodating to those who professed his anti-abortion position but who seemed to be only  “concerned about people … until they’re born.”

Cornell’s means were just as distinct from partisan politics on either side. In a 2014 interview with Commonweal, he explained: “In the Bible we read, ‘I was hungry and you fed me.’ It does not say, ‘I was hungry and you formed a committee!’ Our thing is just getting down and doing it.”

Cornell’s opposition to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq drew and built on a tradition of Catholic Worker pacifism going back to Ammon Hennacy’s noncompliance with the draft during World War I (Hennacy was the sort of labor comrade Dorothy Day could dub “a pacifist even in the class war”). Cornell was instrumental in legitimizing pacifism as an alternative to just war theology and ensuring, as Karl Hess observed at the American bicentennial, “that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty.”

If, as Hess added, “there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing” (since “the state takes money more seriously than life”), that was not for Cornell’s lack of trying. A 1967 petition cosigned by Cornell vouched that living below the minimum income tax threshold was morally preferable to funding the “poisoning of food crops, blasting of villages, napalming and killing of thousands upon thousands of people.”

Raising that income tax threshold would allow more workers of all belief systems to follow Cornell’s example. Meanwhile, the sort of voluntary community organizing pioneered by Cornell and other Catholic Workers to deal directly with social problems could make up for any ensuing budget shortfalls for the functions of the state that aren’t deadly.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “A Pacifist Even in the Tax War” by Joel Schlosberg, Antiwar.com, August 8, 2022
2. “A Pacifist Even in the Tax War” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, August 10, 2022

On August 2, voters in Kansas rejected an amendment to the state constitution which would have increased the legislature’s power to regulate (or ban) abortion.

Pro-choice groups hailed the outcome as evidence that abortion rights are a “winning issue” this year; partisan Democrats have reason to look more hopefully toward their chances of holding on to majorities in the US Senate, and maybe even the House of Representatives, this November.

More interesting, I think, is what the result tells us about where the “moderate center” is in American politics. Letting people vote on one specific issue often produces very different outcomes from letting people vote on “representatives” based on the candidates’ baskets of multiple issues.

In order to understand where Kansas is going after the referendum, it’s useful to consider where it started prior to the referendum and what passage would have changed.

Per existing Kansas law, abortion is already banned after 22 weeks. Parental consent is required for minors seeking the procedure. There’s a 24-hour waiting period for the procedure.  Government funding for abortion is only available if the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life.

In other words, Kansas without the amendment was neither paradise for the “ban it from conception” crowd nor Utopia for the “it’s an absolute right up to the moment of birth” crowd.

Had the amendment passed, the constitution would have explicitly stated that abortion is not a “right” and that the state legislature could impose additional restrictions on it.

By defeating the amendment, Kansans chose to keep things just as they already were.

Had this been a legislative election, the voters would have likely faced a binary choice between Republicans who wanted more government regulation of abortion, and Democrats who wanted less government restriction of abortion.

The voters comprising the big “center” — those who may or may not be comfortable with abortion, but resemble neither of the polar “ban it” or “don’t touch it” ends of the issue — wouldn’t have had an option there. They’d likely have gone with one of the two parties based not on (or at least not JUST on) abortion, but on a whole raft of issues and personalized identity affiliations.

In a close election, the “extremist” voters on either side might  provide the margin of victory to one side or the other, and would certainly claim that victory as indicating support for their positions, but that claim would ring hollow.

In this single-issue referendum, “extremist” voters were swamped by “moderate” voters who might or might not support the existing restrictions, but see no reason to expand those restrictions — or at least no reason to trust legislators with that power.

As someone who doesn’t always trust the collective judgments of “the people,” but who trusts the judgments of politicians even less, I find that result quite pleasing.

Unfortunately, this outcome highlights why a “centrist” party can’t win in “representative” elections. Our system is designed to divvy up the “center” into large, roughly equal partisan blocs so that “extremists” control the balance of power.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

With inflation rampaging across the US Economy, USA Today reports, Social Security recipients can expect a 2022 cost of living adjustment (“COLA”) of up to 10.5%.

For victims of the New-Deal-Era Ponzi scheme, which offers a measly return on “investment” (paid for, like all Ponzi payouts, from new revenues), and which mostly functions as a way of subsidizing the retirements of longer-lifespan white middle-class women at the expense of shorter-lifespan black low-income men, a raise is always good news.

Well, almost always.

Other things will likely be going up as well, including those same seniors’ Medicare Part B and Part D payments, (Part D increased by 14.5% this year, while the Social Security COLA was only 5.9%).

And other things won’t go up. For example, the amount of income seniors can have before that income starts getting taxed, or the amount below which they receive adjusted Medicare and prescription drug benefits for “low-income” retirees.

In at least some cases, the COLA may end up costing seniors more than they get. As Martin Luther observed of certain people in his Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, government’s “giving is of such a character, that the right hand gives, but the left hand takes.”

The best solution to this problem, of course, would be to get America off government “giving” merry-go-round, including but not limited to the Social Security scam.

But until we can figure out how to get there (or, more likely, the system collapses), there’s another worthwhile solution — not just for Social Security recipients, but for everyone.

That solution is “indexing” tax rates and benefit thresholds to inflation.

With “indexing,” every year, the personal exemption and/or standard deduction for the federal income tax would increase by the same percentage as the previous year’s inflation (or, better yet, a little more, so that we can get real tax cuts). Maximum income levels to qualify for government benefits would likewise increase.

“Indexing” only seems fair. After all, inflation is itself a tax, and a highly regressive one that hurts the poor far more than the rich. It occurs when the government creates new money out of thin air faster than the productive economy produces goods and services to buy with that money, making your existing dollars worth less, so that it can have more to spend on its priorities rather than yours.

Not “indexing” taxes and benefits for inflation is, essentially, taxing you … on your taxes!

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY