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Households barely hold their own

17 Jun 2012 - Preaching the News for Sunday

“The just one shall flourish like the palm tree,” promises the psalmist this Sunday, growing “like a cedar of Lebanon.” Hardworking U.S. families wish the economy would flourish and their household income would grow, but new data suggests otherwise. The recent economic downturn has erased nearly two decades of accumulated prosperity and has left the typical family with no more wealth in 2010.The U.S. Federal Reserve this week released a report that sheds light on the precarious financial state of the American family and may help explain why the economic recovery has been slow to take hold. The Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) for 2010 shows that the median value of income between 2007 and 2010 fell 7.7 percent, while median net worth plunged more than 38 percent.While the numbers are already 18 months old, the survey illuminates problems that continue to slow the pace of the economic recovery. The Fed found that middle-class families had sustained the largest percentage losses in both wealth and income during the crisis, limiting their ability and willingness to spend.“It fills in details to a picture that we already knew was quite ugly, and these details very much underscore that,” said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It makes clear how devastating this has been for the middle class.” Sources: Articles by Mark Huffman for Consumer Affairs and Binyamin Appelbaum for the New York Times

federal reserve economic recovery economic downturn income net worth middle class jared bernstein
Candidates trade barbs on campaign trail

23 Sep 2012 - Preaching the News for Sunday

While Jesus was encouraging his disciples to approach power with humility in Sunday’s gospel, they were busy arguing over which one “was the greatest.” The presidential candidates are back on the campaign trail this week, each one arguing that he would do greater things for the American people.In an unsettling development for Romney, a clandestine video recording was made public of a talk he gave to wealthy Florida donors at a private gathering in May in which he dismissed almost half of Americans as government-dependent “victims” who will support Obama in the November election. He characterized 47 percent of the electorate as people who "pay no income tax" and who can't be convinced to "take personal responsibility and care for their lives." He added, "My job is not to worry about those people."Two weeks before he faces Obama in the first of three debates, Romney and his team have decided to embrace the substance, if not the tone, of the comments and go on the offensive. "The question in this campaign is not who cares about the poor and the middle class. I do, he does. The question is who can help the poor and the middle class. I can, he can't and he's proven it in four years," Romney said Wednesday.For his part, the president rejected the idea that Americans oppose government assistance. There’s “nothing wrong” with giving “a helping hand,” he said, adding that Americans don’t want a president who is “writing off a big chunk of the country.” Sources: Articles by Lisa Lerer and Julie Hirschfeld Davis for Bloomberg,Alexandra Jaffe for The Hill, and Michael Hiltzik for the Los Angeles Times

Poor barack obama mitt romney middle class presidential campaign government assistance
Exploring the word

11 Nov 2018 - Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B

Most people I talk to in the course of a day are pretty good folks. They take care of their families, work their jobs, pay their bills, and are responsible, law-abiding citizens. Some of them go to church or synagogue. In this small town, we have our smattering of incredibly wealthy families and not a few desperately poor ones. Both of those populations are fairly out of sight: one behind its gates and walled-off grounds, the other on the wrong side of the tracks where the average person doesn’t have reason to wander. Which is to say, most of the people I meet and interact with fall somewhere within the wide-ranging group we call the middle class. I’m a member of the middle class myself, so I think I know this group pretty well. And the one thing I hear often from folks like myself is that they’d love to be more generous with their time, their skills, and their resources, but they just can’t. We all know there’s an AIDS crisis in Africa; women being raped and murdered to preserve the dubious honor of men in the Middle East; families starving in refugee camps in war-torn lands; communities suffering from the destruction of whole towns after natural disasters. We even know there are young girls facing crisis pregnancies across town, teenage boys being seduced by the brotherhood of gangs in a nearby parking lot, and underemployed families who can’t afford to pay the rent or heat their apartments just down the street. And most of us good folks of average means also know that few of these situations are entirely hopeless. Organizations already exist to serve many of these populations but are underfunded, understaffed, and under-supported. More could be done in our own communities with the will and the resources to improve schools, provide for the greater availability of health care, public support for a living wage for workers, and the presence of adults in the lives of many of our young people. Still, many of us feel we can’t get involved in these concerns because we already have our responsibilities cut out for us. We have our children to think of, college and retirement to plan for, house and car payments to meet. We’d like to help, but we just can’t. Maybe we need more widows The problem with that argument—which makes perfect sense around the dinner table or at a parish gathering—is a certain widow who puts in her two cents. Jesus watches this woman with great interest, calls the attention of his disciples to her most deliberately, and praises her action with his emphatic “Amen I say to you,” normally reserved for declarations of great importance. Admittedly, the offering this woman makes to the temple treasury is hardly worth mentioning. The sum is so small that if you or I dropped it on the street we wouldn’t bother to retrieve it. But Jesus notices it and praises her, and when you stop to think how seldom Jesus finds anything praiseworthy in his own disciples or in the religious society around him, we realize we better pay attention to this event. Context, as usual, is significant. Jesus has just been warning the crowds to beware of the scribes. We are used to Jesus being annoyed with the Pharisees, so this distinction garners our attention. These scribes were a subset of the religious hierarchy, functioning more or less as rabbis do today. In the ancient world, literacy was a valued skill, and scribes were trained at the centers of learning. To be in charge of the information of an age is a very powerful position: think of the tech geeks, media moguls, and government spin doctors who currently control our generation. Religious scribes were essential to the business of the temple, just as secular ones were in the court. When governments fell, scribes were among the officers most likely to be lined up and killed by the victorious army. Because scribes held such authority, they were honored and fussed over. But they could be arrogant about their station, and Jesus pointed out that all their learning did not necessarily make them wise or just. They could just as easily take advantage of their legal knowledge to swindle the helpless, such as the widows who had no lawful recourse. As one scholar notes, an independent woman in the ancient world did not technically exist. With no father or husband or son to represent her, she was as good as dead. This juxtaposition of the lofty scribe devouring the homes of widows and the woman contributing her last pennies is all the more astonishing. To give up those coins would be to place her fate utterly in God’s hands, and how simply she does this! Can't, redefined When we say we can’t be more generous, more engaged in the work of justice, more mindful of our neighbors around the globe, what we are often saying is that we have other priorities. None of us would fault the widow if she had held onto those two coins—after all, what will become of her now? She made her religious observance her greatest and only priority, as if her allegiance to God was the generative force of her existence, not the money she clutched in her fingers. It’s a radical worldview she is possessed of, and Jesus approves. Most of us are scared to death of the implications of this story. It’s as challenging as that other teaching we try not to think about, the one where Jesus tells the thoroughly obedient man to sell all he has and join the disciples. It’s a tad too Franciscan for most of us. Perhaps we could seek a second opinion: Is there a scribe in the house who might advise us? If we start giving a dollar for the sake of the present generation for every dollar we squirrel away for our own futures, what will our children think of us? On the other hand, what lessons are we teaching them, and what sort of future are we fashioning for them, if we don’t? More I’m first to admit, I’m not about to “go and sell everything”—at least not yet. But to put one out of every two extra pennies at the service of my neighbor seems the greatest good I might do. Why not buy a pair of shoes—and write a check to CRS for the same amount? It’s a far cry from what the widow did, but it’s moving in the right direction. I’m reminded of Saint Vincent de Paul, at the close of his virtuous life, being admonished by one of his patrons to slow down. “You’ve done so much good, what else can you expect to do?” she demanded. “More,” he replied. We can always do more. Related scripture links Scribes: 2 Kings 25:19-21; Jer. 8:8-9; 52:25-27; Neh. 8:1-12; Matt. 2:4-6; 5:20;7:28-29; 23:1-36 Widows: Deut. 10:17-19; 14:28-29; 16:11; 24:17; 25:5-10; 27:19; Job 31:16-23; Isa. 10:1-2; Mal. 3:5; Acts 6:1; 1 Tim. 5:3-16 Story of the rich man: Mark 10:17-23

Authors Alice Camille

middle class widow's mite scribes Generosity

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