Just Another Blog in the Wheel

I believe it was the late Senator Everett Dirksen who once quipped about the cost of some proposed legislation, “A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Americans have surely become inured to the staggering amounts of money collected, spent, fabricated and lost by the federal government. We rarely take time to convert the other-worldly dollar figures bandied daily in glib government press releases and reports; we don’t convert the amounts to meaningful measures. When I was a child, a billion was a number we held in awe—positive awe. I remember booklets designed to help folks conceptualize “a billion” by translating it into the length a billion dollar bills would amount to if laid end-to-end and how many times it would wrap around the earth, or reach to the moon, and so on. A trillion brought us near to comedy or science fiction. Filed in a mental folder it shared with “zillion,” it was a number we were certain would never be used in any setting pertaining to real life. Today, however, Americans nonchanantly listen to nonchalant announcements informing them that their national debt has exceeded ten trillion dollars and is growing, growing, (and we are nearly) GONE!

There are moral consequences to the common employment of these “once regarded as astronomical” numbers. Our minds work in such a way—covenantally—that we only calculate, measure and figure within a frame. When the upper or far regions of the frame extend beyond certain conceptual limits, notions of right and wrong are like a police precinct that has had its area of responsibility doubled with no increase in personnel. The same 100 cops who provided protection for the Borough of Brooklyn from 8am to 4pm must now provide protection for Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, every day around the clock. Moreover, the additional area needing coverage has within it large sections that have either poor lights or no lights. What should we expect? An inescapable reduction in quality of coverage. Not to mention a plunging morale. Which leads directly to a “Why bother?”-ism.

You can feel the phenomenon I’ve attempted to describe if you perform the following exercise: Imagine for a moment that our ancestors, Adam and Eve, were created as described in Genesis, and that about 10,000 years ago. Think: THIS IS REAL. Just 10,000 years ago, God formed man from the dust of the ground. Within reasonable race-memory-time, we sinned, were caught, expelled, and became “dogs without a bone, actors out on loan: riders on the storm.” The totality of human history—ALL of it—has happened between then and now. With this scene set, let us bring center stage, the Ten Commandments. Does it seem reasonable to you that God revealed them to Moses and Israel while intending that a millennium and a half later, He’d reveal through the Messiah-King and His people, their normativity for the world, applied to each situation through the accomplished work of Jesus?

But if you jettison this entire framework and put in its stead one which offers nothing but unlit or shadowy origins and sources, no known ultimate cause of all things or anything, no Person under, above and throughout it all, but merely matter and forces, doing whatever it is matter and forces do for at least 14 billion years—if you own that as your framework, consider what happens to your moral frame of reference? If we emerge from “nature red in tooth and claw,” what place remains for any fixed, invariable, transcendent and ever-valid ethic? I’m putting all other issues to the side and asking you to consider the effect of the frame’s vastness on the sense of what may be for us moral imperatives.

Think, also, of the line John Lithgow once uttered when portraying a brilliant, maniacal thug: “Kill five people they call you a serial killer. Kill a million people and they call you a hero. Go figure.” I think we can “go figure.” Morality MUST function within a setting in which proportion can be discerned and appreciated. And the vastness of the frame makes it harder to identify the scale by which acts ought to be measured. Enormity comes with more shadows built in.

Consider working in an office. If you take ten rubber bands home from your insurance-company-employer’s office supplies, you may feel a tinge of conscience. But if you work for a rubber band manufacturer, and there are hundreds of millions of rubber bands all over—rubber bands everywhere you turn: underfoot, overhead, on shelves, stuffed behind couches, on top of the coffee maker, on shelves in the bathrooms, on the grounds, in the grass and in the parking lot, how does your conscience treat you for taking home those same ten? We may SAY it is the same thing, but if we were surrounded by the rubber bands, I propose we’d think (and live it) differently. It is similar to this: Abe Lincoln walked along way to return a couple of pennies owed to a customer. If pebbles from a customer’s land had snuck into his shoe, and if, seeking final relief, he emptied the pebbles onto the sawdusty floor of Lincoln’s shop, would Lincoln have felt himself obliged to walk the pebbles back to him in a snowstorm?

Okay. So we get the point. But now apply it to people’s behavior in the shadow of a government 11 trillion dollars in debt. Would the average citizen feel conscience-plagued to run up personal debt of, say, $8,000? Would others be averse to take on debt, say for a mortgage on a home, that they well know they may not be able to serve? The question, actually, concerns the likelihood of their taking it on with a spending-crazy government before their eyes, which adopts a deficit budget every year, versus the likelihood of assuming that risk when living in a land where the government simply did not take on debt it could not certainly and swiftly repay.

Now let’s shift our focus to the Wall Street bailout. We have descended below the mire from the time when Congressman Davey Crockett was led to repentance by a farmer from his district who cared enough about the Constitution to confront Mr. Crockett for passing legislation with his fellows that granted public moneys to a needy and well-liked widow of a well-liked man. Seeing the principle—that Congress was not permitted to spend that money which was not theirs to spend—Davey (the real one, not Fess Parker or whoever) repented and did deeds (and didn’t do the opposite) in keeping with repentance. But what happens to the immorality of those Congressmen spending money that wasn’t theirs on a needy widow when it is compared to the millions and billions and trillions spent by Congress on infinite programs they had no right to inaugurate or fund? It becomes a non-issue-because the scale is too vast. You are talking about pebbles versus all the gold in all the fortresses in all the world.

So, when our violations of God’s laws of economy present the bill in the form of catastrophic failure of financial institutions and banks, we no longer possess repentance as an option appearing on the screen. A quick fix is what we want—what we demand, without a moment’s thought given to the gasoline we are carrying that we intend to use to douse the flames burning a hole in our financial underpinnings. Surprise! And there’s no room for sanity when the Fed reduces the rate on money to near zero, while the Treasury, fully determined to make it less than zero, announces without shame that they will “print as much money as it takes” to get the economy moving. That is like giving Pepto Bismol to a dead man in the hope of relieving his irregularity. It is difficult to get anything MORE wrong than our leaders are (not) getting the meaning of recent events. The wilfull introduction of more paper dollars into an economy lacking any standard pegging the value of a paper dollar can ONLY result in the devaluation of the dollars already in existence. So what the Treasury is saying is, “We’re going to fix the problems caused by greed on Wall Street by showing you the kind of greed Washington is capable of when determined. We’re going to effectively cut the value of everyone’s wages, everyone’s savings; we’re going to dilute every penny you put away for retirement and guarantee to you that it will be more useless than you ever nightmared; and we’re going to keep doing it until there’s no value left in anything remotely related to us: not our academic degrees, not our currency, not our word, our promises, and most assuredly not our future.”

And the people cheered.

Truth be told, all I started out to say in this piece was this: Madoff, like Crockett, is a concern over petty, petty numbers. $200 for a widow or $50 billion for “investors.” It’s all the same—when you compare it to Social Security: the greatest Ponzi Scheme of all time, hands down.

And that’s where we will put our hands. Until we are told to “Lift ‘em up,” by the same authorities come to arrest us. In their determination to NOT be responsible, while knowing that, in a God-created and ordered universe, responsibility NEVER simply disappears, do you put it past them to put the blame on the people? First in line? All the little boys who yelled, “The emperor has no clothes.” That is, the Christians, along with others who seek to live by a recognizable standard.

Like I said, I had a more modest goal when I first put virtual ink to this virtual page. So please let me sneak in this one last note: Medicare and government-sponsored health insurance in general, is a fraud of like proportion to the Ponzi Social Security system. Built into it are “safeguards” to insure that such unimaginable sums of money actually make it to their intended target. That, we are told, is the reason for the massive, unresponsive, gigantic bureaucracy. “Checks and balances.”

Well, apparently, there weren’t enough. When auditors were sent to look for Medicare overpayments in JUST SIX STATES, look at what they found, according to the following article.

The Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) program, a CMS pilot program, has recovered nearly $700 million in Medicare overpayments in six states. RAC began in 2005 in California, Florida, and New York, expanded to three other states in 2007. The program widely criticized by hospitals, which account for 85% of the recoveries, is required under federal law to expand nationally by January 2010. During the three-year pilot period ending March 2008, auditors reviewed a total of $317 billion in claims and found $1.03 billion in improper billing, $992.7 million in overpayments and $38 million in underpayments. After factoring in $187.2 million paid to the audit firms and $60 million overturned in appeals, $694 million has been returned to Medicare trust funds. Additionally, 14% of overcharges were appealed, and 4.6% were overturned. CMS says it intends to modify the program to require audit firms to use clinically trained personnel, ensure they evaluate medical necessity in a manner consistent with the agency’s operations, and increase their communication with medical providers about their audits. CMS is adding staff to oversee the program and is taking steps to ensure that providers will be able to track the progress of audits. The AHA-backed Medicare Recovery Audit Contractor Program Moratorium Act, introduced by Reps. Lois Capps (D-CA) and Devin Nunes (R-CA), would place a one-year moratorium on the RAC program.

My favorite part? Look at what the auditors got paid! $187,200,000.00. OOOWEEE! Unfortunately, with new Federal policy, their wages will soon be worth 77 dollars and 86 cents.

And it took only 14 billion years to turn out such sophisticated swindlers and thieves. So beside my question of, “Who is going to audit the auditors?,” another one rings: “Can you imagine what deceit and sin we might have come up with if only we had been given some real time to evolve?” Just wait. Right, Bahama? Right.