One of my favorite thanksgiving prayers concludes, "Deliver us from taking for granted what we should take for gratitude." The Sunday before Thanksgiving is a good time for reflection on the concept of desert (one "s" to deserve) - not dessert (two "s's" to eat). What are our just deserts? To what are we entitled? And what does that mean for our celebration of the great American holiday?
Let me tell you about four people. Think with me about their entitlements - what one gets just by virtue of being human. To what is each of them entitled? I'll identify them by first names, then tell you who they are when I have finished describing them.
Donald wrote, "Class in America may be a joke but it is not funny. When I was seventeen I decided I was a socialist; at prep school I subscribed to a weekly edition of The Worker and read it as publicly as I was able, a classic reactive pinko. . . . at home I was a boss's son: I remember crossing the dairy's parking lot walking with my father, who wore a brown suit and brown shoes and brown fedora, past young men my age in ratty clothes washing the mud from trucks. I lowered my gaze, unable to look them in the eyes."[1] To what is Donald entitled?
Robert made headlines after announcing layoffs of 40,000 employees even as his compensation package was revealed. In a year when his company barely broke even, he pocketed $5.2 million in cash, plus stock options of $11 million (a value that soared when the layoffs were announced). Even The Wall Street Journal questioned whether he was overpaid, pointing out that in the last decade he "blew upward of $12 billion on losses and acquisitions" in an ill-fated attempt to enter the computer industry.[2] To what is Robert entitled?
"After coming from Central Mexico only five years ago, Mario has worked for just about every big-name high-tech company in Silicon Valley: Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices and Oracles Systems. Windows is his expertise. He washes them. Sometimes for ten or twelve hours a day, but never more than forty hours a week - lest his boss be forced to pay him overtime. His wage is $6.20 an hour, before taxes. Every morning he calls his middleman employer to find out where he will be working that day and when. 'Sometimes I start at 2 in the afternoon,' Mario says. 'Sometimes at 4 or 6.'
"An average family income in the Palo Alto area - across the freeway from Mario - now hovers at $60,000, about twice the national average. But at last count, almost a third of Silicon Valley's work force earned less than $15,000 a year. . . . "'The rich get richer, we get poorer,' says Mario. 'How can any one man's work be worth 800 times more than mine?' Mario's math is off, but only by a smidgen. He's referring to his C.E.O. whose salary last year was 717 times that of an entry level janitor."[3] To what is Mario entitled?
"Shamal died in New York City. He was eight months old. The cause of death was poverty complicated by low birthweight, poor nutrition, homelessness, and a viral infection. During his short life he had never slept in an apartment or house; his family was always homeless - he had been in shelters, hospitals, hotels and the welfare office. He and his mother sometimes rode the subway late at night. (Someone said) Shamal died because he didn't have the strength to resist the 'system's abuse.'"[4] To what was Shamal entitled?
Four people, by accidents of fate living in four totally different worlds. Four people different in many ways, but most strikingly in the economic resources each possesses.
Beacon Press author Donald Hall recounts his embarrassment at being born into a family of means. He was unable to face those less well-born, experiencing a society divided by class despite all claims of a "classless society."
Robert Allen, AT&T CEO, lives in a superfluity of riches in the wealthiest nation the world has ever known, prospering even as he lays off thousands of workers.
Mario (I don't know his last name) moved to this country for economic opportunity, yet experiences America's economic apartheid and cannot see how he will ever be able to get his fair share.
Shamal, a child who began life without even the minimum requirements for entering the resource race, never had a chance. He simply had made a poor choice of parents.
Did they get their "just deserts"? Does anyone? To what are they entitled? Morally, is it possible to determine how much we deserve, or must we submit to the "value-free" invisible hand of the market place?
In his "...Attack on Distributive Justice," philosopher Walter Kaufmann says, "Desert is incalculable[5]. . . . It is quite impossible to say how much income surgeons, lawyers, executives, or miners deserve, or what kind of housing each deserves, or how much free time per day, per week, or per year. It makes no sense to call any particular distribution of goods among them, "just."[6]
He goes on to cite seven categories customarily used in the calculation of desert: what one is, what one has, what one does, what one needs, what one desires, what one has contracted and what one has done. Kaufmann argues it is impossible in each case to determine deserts, stating that "instead of seeking an ever elusive justice, an autonomous ethic should minimize brutality and dishonesty."[7]
But can we leave it at that - creating a society that simply minimizes brutality and dishonesty? That may be a necessary, but surely not a sufficient condition for justice. In the Middle Ages Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote about a "just wage," not determined by what he called the "higgling of the market," but by "a considered judgment that looked to the good of the worker and of society as a whole," a wage that would be sufficient for the worker to maintain self and family. We might call that the living wage. It is an entitlement worth considering.
Entitlements are commonly understood as public-sector payments to people that do not represent "contractual compensation for goods or services." Usually that includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment compensation, veterans benefits, farm aid, federal pension systems, and what is pejoratively known as welfare.
We probably also ought to include as entitlements tax expenditures which are unearned in the normal meaning of that word, going to a specified group of people.[8] People receive these entitlements because of their age, their income or other condition that can be categorized.
There are some interesting contradictions as entitlements are debated at the highest levels of government, business, labor and religion. For example, Washington Post columnist David Broder finds Senator Phil Gramm's opposition to entitlements interesting. Some time ago Gramm told "Meet the Press" that "we have gone too far in creating an entitlement society." Broder notes that if government checks had stopped, the Senator would have been out of luck. He was born in a base hospital in Fort Benning, Georgia, where his father was living on a veterans' disability pension - an early entitlement program. He went to the University of Georgia, where his tuition and expenses were paid by the War Orphans Act, another entitlement sponsored by the very senator Gramm replaced. His graduate work in economics was paid for by the National Defense Education Act. Gramm then taught at Texas A&M, a state supported school, until he became a member of Congress. Broder concluded, "Maybe he'll go all the way to the White House. A presidential pension would certainly round out his life of warning against government handouts."[9]
Representative Rick Lazio once suggested that all Americans who receive housing subsidies be required to perform eight hours of community service a month to "remind people to give of themselves." One wonders why he would limit this noble opportunity to the poor who live in public housing, when by far the greatest beneficiaries of federal housing are the middle class and wealthy taxpayers who deduct interest on their mortgage payments from their income tax.
I am one of them. About half of this $162 billion entitlement goes to the richest 5% of the population. One political scientist proposes that "the public service requirement be made directly proportional to the public benefits received. It would be inspiring to see phalanxes of CEOs cleaning up parks or counseling troubled young people."[10]
Meanwhile presidential candidate George W. Bush chides the GOP for stressing wealth at the expense of tackling social ills. In a recent speech, he accused House Republicans of trying to "balance the budget on the backs of the poor" by delaying payments to the working poor under the earned-income tax credit. ". . . there are human problems that persist in the shadow of affluence. . . . Prosperity alone is simply materialism. . . .
"Too often, on social issues, my party has painted an image of America slouching toward Gomorrah. . . . Too often, my party has confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself."[11]
There have been other surprising voices weighing in on the entitlement controversy - usually couched in terms of ending welfare as we know it. The conservative English journal The Economist reminds us that "more than 85% of (US) social welfare programs go to middle and upper classes, both young and old. Food stamps and housing vouchers did lift some 27 million out of poverty in 1995. "In a society as rich as America's it is no wonder that a welfare state that spends almost 9 out of every 10 dollars on the prosperous does not find enough for the needy. . . .[12]
And then, of course, there is "The Donald," presidential aspirant and billionaire Donald Trump. Putting aside his motivation, he has made the interesting proposal that the federal government levy a 14.25% tax on wealth to raise $5.7 trillion, thereby erasing the national debt, rescuing Social Security and slashing taxes for the middle class. This would increase his tax bill by at least $725 million - out of net worth of $5 billion.[13] Some may call it confiscatory and economically dangerous, but I find it just as intriguing as Ralph Nader's call for Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and other wealthy people "to sponsor, plan and lead a conference of billionaires and multibillionaires on the subject of National and Global Wealth Disparities and What to Do About It."[14]
I expect that will happen only when our nation's people and their leaders have a revelation more powerful than that of Moses before the burning bush or Paul on the road to Damascus, more enlightening that Buddha beneath the Bo Tree or Mohammed receiving the Koran from the angel Gabriel.
As my late colleague Clinton Lee Scott summarized the basic American attitude toward getting and giving,
"Said the commerce tycoon Micheljohn
Earthly goods will be used up anon.
All life is a gamble
So I'm in the scramble
To get mine before they're all gone."[15]
To what are we entitled - in terms of the material blessings of this life? It is far from an abstract philosophical question. It is not only a moral, but a spiritual issue. For example, Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles worries that affluent American children are permeated by a feeling of entitlement - that the world and its bounties belong to them by right. They may be among those who, being born on third base, think they have hit a triple.
Pete Peterson, former Reagan administration Secretary of Commerce, a self-described Republican fat-cat, points out that most entitlements flow to the affluent. He worries that "the worst aspect of entitlement addiction is how it subtly fixes our attention on how much we are going to get - and how it obscures any thought of what we have received from others and what we wish to pass on in our turn."[16] He proposes an "endowment ethic" with an "affluence test" on all government entitlement expenditures.[17]
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith writes about us, the contented majority. "Where the impoverished are concerned, government support and subsidy is seriously suspect because of its adverse effect on morals and working morale. This, however, is not true of government support to those of comparative well-being. No one is thought to be damaged by Social Security payments or their prospect. Nor is a depositor, by being rescued from a failed bank. Nor if one is employed in the defense industry. The comparatively affluent can withstand the adverse moral effect of being subsidized and supported by the government; not so the poor. . . . The first and most general expression of the contented majority is its affirmation that those who compose it are receiving their just deserts. . . . [18] Good fortune being earned and rewarded, there is no equitable justification for any action that impairs it, such as new taxes of subsidies to the poor."[19]
John D. Rockefeller once said, in a bit of hyperbole, "The good Lord gave me my money." Ours has become the IDI - I deserve it - generation. According to one recent study 70% of Americans believe their financial situation is "at least somewhat" reflective of "God's regard" for them.[20] We need to break up an entitlement ethic that equates one's prosperity with virtue and another's poverty with vice.
I think of a cartoon comment which stands this whole matter of entitlements on its head: Two men are on coffee break, talking: One says, "We've got to stop the handouts, the something-for-nothing attitude the dependency that passes from one generation to the next!" The other asks: "So you're for cuts in welfare checks?" The first replies, "I'm for hikes in the inheritance tax."[21]
To bring this entitlement debate down to earth I have only to note the Living Wage Campaign here in Rochester - part of a nation-wide effort to get government to pay a living wage to their employees and to require that contractors pay a living wage. This goes beyond the minimum wage which leaves a family of three or more still wallowing in poverty despite having a year-round, full-time worker. This is a modern adaptation of Saint Thomas Aquinas's moral imperative for a just wage - one enough to support a family.
In this Thanksgiving season we do well to be reminded that one in 10 US households is going hungry; about 10 million people go without food because they cannot afford it and another 26 million suffer from a lower level of hunger." It is sobering to note that hunger has been decreasing everywhere in the world -- except in Africa and the United States.[22]
I am proud to say that in 1917 the Universalist Church of America recognized that economic rights are human rights. A person has a right to a living wage and such additional income as one might generate. Recent denominational resolutions on economic justice compel us to bring considerations of justice into the marketplace.
That tradition continues in the work of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Believing that all people are entitled to a decent living and a humane existence, UUSC has launched a study of welfare reform at home and sponsors a rich variety of self-help projects abroad to bring the Unitarian Universalist quest for compassion, equity and justice to the wider world.
To what are we entitled? I hope in this Thanksgiving season we will be reminded that each of us enjoys blessings we do not deserve, neither by the sweat of our brow or the work of our brain;
that we have been blessed by a living tradition from which we draw material comfort and spiritual blessings,;
that we have been fortunate to have a government which from time to time at least takes seriously its responsibility for the public welfare;
that when we come to make judgments about entitlements for ourselves and for others we think on these things.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "We are not born free; we are born with a mortgage. That mortgage is a debt - a debt that we owe to the past and to the future. While we live we pay interest and then pass it on to the next generation. That's how churches, communities and nations survive; by accepting what has been bequeathed and passing it on to those that come after them. This ritual of receiving and giving is an act of Thanksgiving."
"Deliver us from taking for granted what we should take for gratitude." Thanksgiving is a deeply spiritual time in which we recognize all those blessings that are ours - so many of them not earned by our efforts - blessings which come upon us as the grace bestowed by creation.
But Thanksgiving is also a deeply ethical time in which we realize that those blessings should overflow into deeds of love and justice.
Until we transform thanksgiving into thanksliving, we will have missed the deeper meaning of this holy day.
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