In Context: The End of the Debate

The debate should not end until the moral justice of a policy is the final question and that policy honors and is consistent with God's Will and Word.

Congress doesn't start from scratch on spending. Congress starts with numbers based on what it is already spending. Any changes to that, no matter how reliable the basis, becomes the new baseline for future calculations.

Recent bicameral negotiations between House and Senate tax committee chairmen resulted in a tax bill that has passed the House. In the Senate, early in the public phase of tax bill discussions, Senator Tillis took issue with the accounting related to eliminating one particular policy, the Employee Retention Tax Credit (ERTC), as being a basis of justifying “paying for” spending elsewhere because the tax credit itself was never “paid for” in the first place.

This week, Senator Tillis took to the Senate floor to make the point. Originally, the policy was expected to leave “$55 billion remaining in the private sector.” However, due to fraud the “cost” to Federal revenue ballooned to $86 billion. Now, in repealing the credit, the budget arbiters are giving Congress credit for “saving” $78 billion. Senate tax committee chairman Wyden responded by touting all the policies “paid for” by eliminating a program he himself identified as being overly expensive because “95 percent of the current claims are fraudulent.”

Their debate is not over getting rid of fraud. Their debate is over pretending that eliminating a relatively new source of fraud “pays for” spending elsewhere.

Wyden went on to invoke the Joint Committee on Taxation, “the official nonpartisan experts” saying “we kind of use them as the gospel before everybody starts running around and twisting the politics.” Then, the “gospel” declaration: “The Joint Committee on Taxation tells us that cutting off the ERTC claims pays for nearly the entire tax bill that Chairman Smith and I introduced.”

Wyden later tries to flip the script and said, “if we are unwinding deficit finance tax laws, we ought to go back a little further and repeal the deficit-financed handouts to corporations and the wealthy that Donald Trump and the Republicans passed in 2017”—as if fraudulently claiming a tax credit for doing something and not being overly taxed in the first place are of equal value.

Wyden then finally declares, “If the Joint Committee on Taxation tells the Finance Committee that that is an offset—the one we have that works—that, to me, is always the end of the debate.”

The bottom-line measurement of a policy's value and justice is not its economic impact. The value and justice of a policy is measured in its moral impact.

Just because a price tag can be put on everything doesn't necessarily make money the fundamental issue. The basis of life is moral, and that is why God's fundamental purposes of government are not fiscal or monetary, but moral: punishing those who do evil and praising those who do good.

The debate should not end until the moral justice of a policy is the final question and that policy honors and is consistent with God's Will and Word.