State of the Union Address

Part II: Domestic Policy

We also implemented new policies on the domestic front. One had to do with the welfare system and our Christian responsibility to care for widows, orphans, and the poor.

It became popular in the 1990s to blame swelling welfare rolls on the laziness of recipients, especially if the recipients were immigrants or ethnic minorities. The truth is that people got trapped in the welfare system because the rules and incentives were all wrong. If a person on welfare started earning money, they lost welfare benefits, lost their eligibility for food stamps, and lost their Medicaid coverage. The effective tax rates on the working poor were staggering, in many cases over 100%!! Working your way out of welfare was next to impossible.

To fix this, we did away with the myriad of overlapping and conflicting welfare programs and instituted a revised Income Tax and Earned-Income Credit system which provides a safety net or income floor, yet which provides financial incentives for work. No longer will the poor be penalized for working and earning money. More importantly, no longer will they be penalized for keeping their families together.

In providing a basic level of sustenance to our people, the government is not competing with the churches. Rather, we are working in cooperation with them, relieving them of dealing with what had been a back-breaking degree of physical need, and freeing them to deal with spiritual needs.

We also changed our health care system. It was intolerable to maintain a system in which forty million Americans were not poor enough for Medicaid and not affluent enough to afford health insurance.

The naysayers said we couldn’t afford universal coverage. And it is true that to provide it through the existing insurance companies would have meant raising taxes. Fortunately, another option was available. We looked at private health, auto, and life insurance and discovered that insurance companies only paid out about 49% of what they collected in premiums. More than half of what people paid in was eaten up with administrative expenses and profit. Then we looked at the Social Security system and found that over 99% of what is paid in is paid out in benefits. The total cost of administering the system is less than one percent!

The solution was obvious: provide a basic level of health services insured by the federal government, and do away with Medicare, Medicaid, VA health benefits and other piecemeal programs. It would be administered just like Medicare, but would include everybody. There would be no limitations on one’s choice of doctors, and no one would be forced into an HMO. If anyone wishes to purchase private supplemental insurance to cover expanded services, they may do so. The taxes required to pay for this program are considerably less than people pay now for private insurance.

An important side benefit of this program has been to relieve employers of the cost of paying for health insurance for their employees. At the same time, we also did away with all other payroll taxes, thus significantly reducing the cost of providing jobs. Companies are now taxed only on their profits. This has caused a sharp drop in unemployment and a substantial drop in the failure rate of small businesses.

As a Christian nation, we attempt to follow the Golden Rule. We are therefore dedicated to religious liberty, treating those who do not share our faith in the manner we would wish to be treated were we the minority. There will be no religious qualification for public office, and no religious discrimination in employment. We cannot help but be influenced by our faith. Yet we must be careful not to impose Christian morality on an unwilling minority without good reason.

For example, we are clearly justified in imposing our Christian morality against murder on all our citizens. If some religious sect believes in murder, they will just have to move elsewhere. Laws against murder are generally accepted, and are necessary in order to protect our people and their human rights.

On the other hand, imposing on others our moral conviction on the sanctity of marriage would be unjust. Even in Ireland, where the vast majority do not believe in divorce, they decided against continuing to make it illegal.

Between these examples are many grey areas where policy must be carefully considered and administered with love and compassion. Some, for example, will call for strict laws against homosexual activity. Others will wish to condone all forms of sexual expression. The government must give in to neither extreme. The government must impose morality only when necessary to protect the rights of the people. Accordingly, laws against sexual exploitation of children are proper, and should be vigorously enforced, whatever the sexual orientation of the offender. Laws against private sexual practices of consenting adults, however, would be improper, especially in a pluralistic society. It goes without saying that as a government we must protect homosexuals against all forms of discrimination. The example of Jesus is crystal clear: morality is something we impose on ourselves, not on others.

Of all these grey areas, the most difficult for government is abortion. If morality were the only issue, then clearly the governmment would have no business getting involved at all. But more than morality is involved. At issue are competing rights of individual citizens — the mother and the child.

It has long puzzled me why Christians (who believe in everlasting life) are leading the opposition to abortion. One would think that atheists and humanists who believe that human life is all there is would see abortion as a greater evil than we do. From their perspective, taking the life of the child in the womb is robbing it of everything there is! From our perspective, it is merely shortcutting the child’s journey through this vale of tears to its heavenly home.

Yet a third perspective exists, that the developing child is not a child at all, but merely a lump of tissue, an appendage of the mother’s body that has no value until it emerges and takes its first breath. This view (religious convictions aside) has absolutely no basis in truth. Medical science proves that the fetus is a separate person, with its own DNA and (at least for the last two trimesters) its own beating heart and thinking brain.

Nevertheless, these differences in opinion exist, and the nation has been deeply divided over abortion. From the point of view of government, both mother and child have rights which need protecting.

Where the life of the mother is at risk (as well as that of the child), the government has no basis for choosing one over the other. The decision must be left to the mother and her physician.

In the first trimester, where there is no conclusive scientific evidence of the personhood of the fetus, and where methods of abortion are available which are not detectable by government without invasion of privacy, the government should probably also remain out of the picture.

But in most second and third trimester abortions, the government has a legitimate interest in protecting the right of the developing child to life. This interest must be balanced against the rights of the mother and must be administered with compassion. On the other hand, most abortions come about because of desperation or pressure from relatives and abortion providers. Women must be protected from these situations and given alternatives to abortion, along with sufficient information so that they can make informed decisions.

The balanced policies we have adopted please neither those who view abortion as an absolute right nor those who wish to have it criminalized under all circumstances. Yet, in combination with our support for families and the virtual elimination of poverty, these policies have drastically reduced the number of abortions performed. The role of a Christian government, after all, is not to be rigid or legalistic (Jesus made his views on that abundantly clear), but to serve God’s people with love and compassion.

The State of the Union is good; but our task is far from over. Our objective is an America at peace with the world and with itself. It is an America in which the people do not have to fight each other for jobs, health care, and the necessities of life. It is an America that leads the world — not by dominating and manipulating other nations, but by earning their respect and admiration. It is an America that leads the world - not with military might, but with its vision, its compassion, its democracy, its productivity, its treatment of its people, its standard of living, and its goodness. It is an America which has abandoned the idolatry of the bomb and the dollar and has put its trust in the Lord. It is an America in which we constantly give thanks to Almighty God for the bounteous blessings He has bestowed upon us. And it is an America in which God’s love flows through His people in the way we care for each other.

Thank you, God bless you, and goodnight.

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