If You Think Your Taxes Are Unjust, Just Think Again

Sunday, April 13, 2008; Page B02

Then Schelling asked his students to think about things in a different way. Instead of giving families with children a credit, you'd impose a surcharge on couples with no children. Now then: Would it be fair to make the childless rich pay a bigger surcharge than the childless poor? Schelling's students thought so.

But -- hang on a sec -- a bonus for those who have a child amounts to a penalty for those who don't have one. (Saying that those with children should be taxed less than the childless is another way of saying that the childless should be taxed more than those with children.) So when poor parents receive a smaller credit than rich ones, that is, in effect, the same as the childless poor paying a smaller surcharge than the childless rich. To many, the first deal sounds unfair and the second sounds fair -- but they're the very same tax scheme.

That's a little disturbing, isn't it? Especially if your judgments about social justice and taxation are central to your moral and political beliefs. Intuitions about fairness are some of the most basic moral sentiments we have -- arising, developmental psychologists tell us, soon after we're toddlers. Stanford psychologist William Damon has conducted studies in which he asked groups of children to make bracelets. Afterward, the group got a pile of candies as a reward and was told to divvy them up among themselves. From the age of 5 on, the arguments kids had about dividing the loot were all about what was truly "fair" -- equal amounts for everybody or more candy for more productive bracelet-makers?

One thing we know is that our sense of what's fair can be hard to reconcile with a "rational" assessment of costs and benefits. Not least in the realm of taxation, policymakers ignore the workings of moral psychology at their peril.

Consider the first major defeat of the Clinton presidency. In the spring of 1993, the administration proposed, and the House passed, the nation's first comprehensive energy tax, a BTU-based levy on fossil fuel consumption designed to reduce not only the deficit but also greenhouse gas emissions and the country's dependence on foreign oil. Then senators from oil-producing and farm states came out against it, while heavy industry and energy companies mobilized a battle for public opinion on local radio and TV stations.

Surveys showed that most Americans were swiftly convinced that the tax was unfair because some people, such as truck drivers or farmers with their tractors, had no choice but to burn more fuel than others. When the president tried to assuage the noisiest opponents with a host of exemptions, he only made things worse. (What, special breaks for coal, natural gas and jet fuel? No fair!)

How, in the first Bush administration, did the movement to repeal the estate tax prevail? Not just because it was craftily renamed the "death tax." The number of Americans who told pollsters that they opposed the "death tax" was just a few percentage points higher than the number who said they opposed the "estate tax." As Yale scholars Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro have shown, it mattered more that proponents of repeal made a moral argument (however specious): that the tax was unfair because, for one thing, it involved taxing earnings twice.

Defenders of the tax typically countered with an appeal to self-interest: But you're not paying it, because it applies to just 2 percent of households. They didn't quite grasp how powerful appeals to fairness are. In fact, when the barnstorming Teddy Roosevelt proposed the tax a century ago, he made the case for it precisely in terms of fairness: He talked about what the wealthy owe to a nation that made their success possible.

Roosevelt, of course, was one of the great leather-lunged orators. This primary season has seen an ongoing dispute about whether soaring rhetoric of moral uplift has any relevance to the hard work of devising and implementing public policy. But once you start thinking about how powerfully affected we are by our sense of fairness - and about how powerfully that sense can be affected by the way issues are described to us - it's hard to dodge the fact that whiffy moral rhetoric can have practical consequences when April 15 rolls around.

At some level, we're those kids with the candy bars. We may change our minds about what's truly just, but not about how much fairness matters. As faltering as our intuitions about fairness in public policy are, success comes to the politician who can enlist them effectively. It's not enough to craft good policies, you have to convince people that they're wise and just. Some individuals, for reasons we grasp only dimly, are a lot better at that than others, however smart, engaged and sensible. Almost doesn't seem fair, does it?

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a professor of philosophy at Princeton and author of "Experiments in Ethics."

source site: WashingtonPost Online

How to Explain an Unjust Termination

By eHow Legal Editor

When interviewing for a new job, you may be placed in the uncomfortable situation of having to explain an unjust termination in your work history. It's important to stick to the facts and to not become emotional in front of a prospective employer who may be wondering if history will repeat itself.

Step One: Stick to the facts when you explain an unjust termination to a prospective employer. Don't interject feelings, emotions and unnecessary details. If your unjust termination led to legal action on your part, merely discuss the outcome of the case and leave it at that.

Step Two: Avoid becoming emotional when you explain an unjust termination during a job interview. If you start to cry or become angry when discussing the case, the interviewer will become immediately concerned about your overall temperament and whether or not you will be a high-maintenance employee who will always be upset about something in the workplace.

Step Three: Do not speak poorly of your former employer, even if your termination was illegal and unjust. Any negative comments will be interpreted as unprofessional on your part, and your interviewer will only be left to wonder if you will say the same negative things about this company after you leave.

Step Four:  Keep your explanation of your wrongful termination and any legal consequences as simple as possible. Your interviewer probably doesn't want to hear a long, detailed story about the incident. The prospective employer simply wants to know who was at fault, without unnecessary elaboration.

Step Five: Explain as simply as possible what lessons you learned from the experience and how you have grown as a person since the unjust termination. By finding a positive aspect to the experience, you will let your prospective employer know that you can recover, assimilate and adapt into almost any work environment.

Step Six:  Refrain from worrying about the incident and how it will affect your chances of getting hired by the interviewer. Answer each question about the incident and then move on. Try not to appear rattled after going through your explanation, and avoid circling back later in the interview to bring up additional points.

If you have been the victim of an unjust termination, rehearse your response to any questions from interviewers. Always assume that you will be asked about the incident at every interview and be prepared. Appearing surprised or flustered by a question about your wrongful termination will be an automatic red flag for the interviewer.

source site: EHow.com

"I will disobey this unjust law"

On Monday, a dozen women will be ordained Catholic priests in a forbidden ceremony in Pittsburgh. But can the womenpriests movement ever succeed?

By Angela Bonavoglia

July 31, 2006 | On Monday, 12 women in bright white robes will board the Majestic, the flagship of the Gateway Clipper fleet, at the Station Square dock in Pittsburgh. The ship will become a floating church - and the stage for what might be the most central controversy in Catholicism today. The robed women are in the vanguard of the growing womenpriests movement, the most flamboyant and incendiary challenge to the Roman Catholic Church's unrelenting discrimination against women. Declaring herself "present" (in Latin, ad sum), each of the 12 will be ordained priests or deacons by women bishops - themselves secretly ordained to the episcopacy by active Roman Catholic male bishops whose names will remain locked in a vault until they die. This ceremony is totally verboten: Women's ordination or even advocating for it is forbidden by the Catholic Church, under pain of excommunication, which means no sacraments, ever, not even a Catholic burial.

By their visibility and accessibility, a small band of women are forcing a confrontation. They are asking, Is sexism a sin? How does the church reconcile its teaching that women and men are created in God's image, that once baptized, there is "no male or female" and "all are one in Christ Jesus," with its contention that women cannot represent the ultimate sacred or hold ultimate power through ordination because they are, literally, the wrong "substance"? The statement from the Diocese of Pittsburgh condemning the ordinations asserted this argument against women's ordination: that priests must resemble Jesus physically. That belief is based, in part, on the notion of the substance of a sacrament: in the case of the Eucharist, bread and wine; and of holy orders, a man. Comparing people to food, the press release said: "Just as a priest cannot consecrate the Eucharist if he uses something other than unleavened white bread and wine from grapes, so too a bishop cannot confer Holy Orders on anyone other than a baptized man."

The organizer of this event, who will become a priest Monday, is Joan Clark Houk, 66. With a wide smile and cropped salt-and-pepper hair, she is a cradle Catholic who remembers May crownings, daily rosaries and Catholic Daughters. Like many other Catholic women -- myself included -- her love for the faith, the Eucharist and the Mass, the rituals and traditions, is deep and indelible. "From my birth as a Catholic through this day, I have never doubted my Catholicism, never been away from the Church. I am Catholic, and will always be Catholic, " she wrote in her letter to Bishop Donald W. Wuerl, then head of the Pittsburgh Diocese, telling him about her upcoming ordination. She also took aim at Canon 1024, which restricts ordination to baptized men. "It is a sin for the Church to discriminate against women and blame God for it," she declared. "In obedience to the Gospel of Jesus, I will disobey this unjust law."

The Roman Catholic womenpriests movement came into public view on June 29, 2002, when seven women were ordained priests on the river Danube between Austria and Germany, out of any bishops' clear jurisdiction. Presiding was the controversial Argentine Bishop Romulo Antonio Braschi. Though no longer in good standing with Rome, he had been ordained a bishop and could therefore provide the apostolic succession required for ordination. In church speak, the new women priests consider themselves ordained validly but illicitly (because of canon law). Within two months, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, excommunicated all seven women and publicly chastised them for having "wounded" the church.

That action did nothing to quell the movement, which advocates "a new model of priestly ministry," a servant rather than an imperial priesthood, and seeks no break from Rome. In the years since the first ordinations -- as Muslim women have boldly led prayer services and the first female bishop has risen to head the U.S. Episcopal Church -- another 32 women (including today's 12) have been ordained Catholic deacons or priests, and 120 more are in training. These events have taken place on the Saone River near Lyon, France; Lake Constance between Germany and Switzerland; the St. Lawrence, between the United States and Canada; and in Barcelona, Spain. Secret "catacomb" ordinations have been held, too.

Today's ordinands are both longtime activists and more sedate recruits. One of the most notorious in church circles is Janice Sevre- Duszynska, to be ordained a deacon today (the step before priestly ordination for these women). She once presented herself at the ordination of a male seminarian at the Cathedral in Lexington, Ky., asking Bishop Kendrick Williams to ordain her, too. Sevre-Duszynska crashed the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Washington in 2000, taking over the mike to read her "Statement for Justice for Women in the Church" until her power was cut off. An ardent peace activist, she has served time in the federal prison for civil disobedience. She thinks Catholic clerics should be out there doing the same. As she said to me, "Why aren't Catholic bishops out in front of the Senate Office Building or the Pentagon in sackcloth and ashes crying out for an end to the Iraq war?"

Houk's history in the church is lower key. Active in parish ministry for 30 years, she has prepared Catholics to receive the sacraments, conducted Christian education classes, and pastored two parishes without resident priests. Her call blossomed when she got her master of divinity degree at Notre Dame University in Indiana, sitting side by side with male seminarians, learning how to preside at Mass, celebrate Eucharist, hear confessions and anoint the dying.

Like many of the other women being ordained today, Houk is not celibate. She has been married for 30 years and has six children and five grandchildren. One of today's ordinands is divorced. Another describes herself as "lesbian by birth." Bridget Mary Meehan, a petite woman with a tight cap of blond hair, cheerily declares herself a "freelance nun" because her order is out of the pope's jurisdiction. She also heads Women-Church Convergence, a national association of women's worship communities, many of which have been quietly ordaining women priests for 30 years, since the founding of the U.S.-based Women's Ordination Conference.

In fact, the womenpriests movement did not spring out of whole cloth but has its roots in the worldwide movement for women's ordination in the Catholic Church. The women who launched the U.S. movement in the 1970s were energized -- as are women today -- by the legendary "Philadelphia 11," who in 1974 forced open the doors of the priesthood in the U.S. Episcopal Church. They were "irregularly" ordained by retired and resigned Episcopal bishops, an action that resulted in the denomination's approval of women's ordination the following year.

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As I've traveled around the country talking with women about the church, why they stay, what they love, what they're fighting to change, invariably a woman --sometimes young, most of the time older -- will rise and share her great dismay at the thought of women priests. Indeed, the Catholic Church is steeped in a rich sacramental tradition, and some cannot separate that tradition from the men who have claimed to exclusively represent it. But that has been changing. While in the 1970s, 29 percent of Catholics supported women's ordination, today some 60 percent do. In addition, as Peter Steinfels, author of "A People Adrift: The Crisis in the Roman Catholic Church in America," explains, "the burden of proof has shifted." It used to be that advocates had to explain why women should be priests; today, the hierarchy has to explain why not.

Frankly, in attempting to defend the church's ban on women's ordination, Catholic spokespeople sound a little like used-car salesmen. They have a lot full of old models. You don't like this argument? No problem. What about the one over there? The Last Supper used to anchor a central argument. There, the teaching holds, Jesus commissioned the 12 male apostles to be the only leaders of his church, from whom all other leaders, male too, had to proceed. The idea of ordination came much later. The problem is, no one knows who was at that Passover meal. And, as theologian Elizabeth Johnson once said in a lecture, do we really think that Jesus, who was so welcoming to women followers, decided that night to leave all the women, including his mother, out in the cold? To which I would add another question: If women were allowed at the meal (which they had probably prepared), then when Jesus said over the bread and wine, "Do this in remembrance of me," did he also say, "only you guys"?