Today, without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest issue on the minds in America is the economy. Forget civil rights for gays, lesbians, Latinos, and Muslim-Americans. Forget education and the environment, with only 59% of Americans even acknowledging that the Earth is warming. Forget those who don’t have health care; they are just cheap bums anyway right? And forget science- we all know that creationism is the only ‘fact’ we should be teaching our kids, right? The point I’m trying to make is that according to every CNN poll I see, Americans care strongly about Christian values and the economy but yet Americans seem to always vote against their own Christian values and against any way of restoring a good economy. Let’s look at Voodoo economics, or Reaganomics, a system that says greed is good, the few over the many, a system implemented by Ronald Reagan-a proud actor who would likely have represented the 1% instead of the 99%.

 Reaganomics destroyed the Great Society era, a time when as a society we felt that some need assistance, and not just on an occasion or two, but in some cases a whole lifetime of care. This was accepted and embraced by society, even by people like the warmonger Lyndon Johnson and even Richard Milhous Nixon. It was a time where people lived by the philosophy, “Live together, die alone.” This seems to be a much more Christ-like way of living than Reaganomics, yet today we call those on food stamps or welfare lazy, and protect the rich with tax codes in the hope that one day we will have a seat at that table. How is this an understandable thought process for a Christian nation? Could anyone see Christ cutting 100,000 jobs so he could fund his own Christmas bonus? How does it make sense that we love Reaganomics and yet we are still a Christian nation? Maybe I have it all wrong. Maybe our Christ is something like football; we will protect a child-molesting assistant coach as long as he has a winning record. Or like the celebrities on TMZ, who we want to be bad if only for entertainment purposes.  But to be honest, I don’t think it’s any of those. I think it’s the factor that they all have in common. It seems like the true god to America is greed.

I would be lying if I said that having wealth is bad, but the question is how much is too much? Is it really ok to take another slice of the economic pie if its costs someone their livelihood?  It’s not, and anyone who argues otherwise should be forced to walk down the street of any inner city ghetto so that they can see the truth. To see what happens when you take too much, take more than your fair share.

Let’s now oppose Reaganomics from another angle, the economic angle. When Reaganomics was enforced, our debt skyrocketed and we spent our social security money and replaced it with an IOU. It was a time when we shifted from having factories that make everything for everyone across the globe and putting jobs in American hands, from being producers and consumers, to just becoming consumers and we saw factories being shut down left and right. We saw the tax burden shift from the rich to the poor in hopes that if the rich had more money they would use it to put back in the economy, producing jobs and we would call it the trickledown effect.  The problem with this was that we were very laissez-faire about it, so the rich just went ahead and ran with their newfound freedom. They started to stuff their financial faces and they started to become too big to fail. We didn’t want to see what would happen in the future, that it would all come crashing down in the 2008 financial meltdown with the super version of Reaganomics, the Bush tax cuts. And we all know how that worked out. So with everything said, why would we continue to go down this path? Why not shift back to being the great society? We don’t want to be a true Christian nation in thought alone, so America: let’s tear down this economic system.

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