Critical Thinking

It amazes me how many situations where I see the proposed solution to raise taxes. The most recent was in my History of Healthcare class. The professors was going through the creation of Medicare and she described it as a successful program. I noted to myself that I visually grimaced when she said that. So, when I got home, I sent her an email explaining my concern with the upcoming financial crisis that Medicare will experience (in case you don’t know, it is projected that the Medicare Part A trust fund will be deleted by 2028 and current law would require an approximate 20% reduction in benefits to balance to taxes coming in). The professor’s response ended with the phrase that we can just raise taxes to cover the expenditures.

While true, I thought of all the other trends occurring in our country - $32 trillion dollars of debt, the interest we must pay on that debt, Social Security just a few years better than Medicare in their expected exhaustion of its trust fund, projected annual deficits of over $1 trillion dollars over the next 20 years and more.

I suspect that at some point, like the person with the credit card problem, the world will strongly require us, as a country, to stop spending so much more than we bring in each year. At that point, as a country, we will have to make hard choices to lower spending and raise taxes to get our act together. For a financially astute person, it can be overwhelming thinking about this.

“Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.” - 2 Corinthians 1:9-11 ESV

“Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.”-

Isaiah 26:4

And probably the most important thing to keep in mind…

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” - Matthew 6:25-34

I truly believe God does not want us to be a passive bystander in what goes on around us but, Thank God, we don’t have to worry about it either.