Our rebates can fund a Year of Jubilee

David B. Miller

Any day now — perhaps already for some of you — our economic stimulus checks will be here.

Interesting times in which we live. I am old enough to have parents who remember well the Great Depression and World War II. In those days of crisis, the call was issued to sacrifice for the welfare of all, to conserve, to ration, to reuse, to save and to plant a victory garden.

In our day, the sacrificial summons is to spend, to purchase and to consume.

To stimulate that activity, many (though not all) of us will be sent a check to prime the pump and get us going.

This jolt of cash might have a short-term benefit to the economy. The long-term impact is far less certain or hopeful, particularly when that not-terribly-distant day arrives when our children and grandchildren will have to come up with the taxes that we refuse to pay and confront the national debt we so recklessly incur.

This is an election year, however, and the rare bipartisan cooperation on this decision may be born of hope that even if the checks do not stimulate the economy, at least they will stimulate grateful votes.

It is noteworthy that when the legislative and executive branches of the federal government consulted their own experts — the Congressional Budget Office and a wide spectrum of economists — they were told the same thing. The most effective stimulus package for our economy would be a temporary increase in food-stamp benefits followed closely in positive impact by an extension of unemployment benefits. These forms of stimulus — projected to yield more than $1.50 in economic activity for every $1 in cost — were rejected in the package passed by Congress and signed by the president.

Those who are unemployed and those who are surviving on food stamps are notoriously less likely to show up at polling places.

My training is that of a pastor and a student of the Bible rather than an economist. So perhaps it is an occupational hazard that I shudder more at the violation of divine law than over the application of bad economic principles.

There is a remarkably consistent record of prophets who warned a wavering nation of future collapse if it failed to justly care for “the widow, the orphan and the alien.”

The prophets, those ancient enforcers of God’s covenant and law, turned their attention to such things as living wages, preferential loan terms for the poor, the fair treatment of the poor in the courts, and demanded — on the basis of God’s law — the periodic forgiveness of debts: a Year of Jubilee.

These elements, they declared, were the ingredients of a stable and successful society.

But if the people preferred the primacy of profits to the word spoken through the prophets, they were cautioned that their religious practices would disgust God and their inequities would be their undoing. For the prophets of ancient Israel, justice and equity constituted the bottom line.

So our checks are coming — the buck is being passed to us. What will I, what will you, what will we do with it? Will we heed the prophets or hoard the profits?

Let us have the courage of generosity and the wisdom of justice to do what our elected leaders would not.

Some who receive the rebate check desperately need this money simply to pay for essentials of living. This should be done freely.

But for others, this check will be purely discretionary money.

We have a marvelous opportunity to redirect the power of these rebated dollars toward those local agencies that exist to feed the hungry, to heal the sick and to shelter the homeless.

Recently, I attended a meeting with representatives of many of the local agencies who serve those who live on the economic edge in our community. The reality is, the resources of these agencies are being stretched to the limit.

Maybe it is time for us to return the lessons of sacrifice for the common good that our parents’ generation taught us. Rather than to buy and spend, the rebates offer us a marvelous opportunity to give and to share.

David B. Miller is pastor of the University Mennonite Church in State College. Readers can write to him at dbmiller1@verizon.net.