This new poll has some interesting data on how different religious groups are viewing the presidential election.  Here’s the summary (HT TPM):

White evangelical voters strongly support Romney over Obama (68%vs. 19%). Catholic voters overall say that they would be more likely to vote for Obama than Romney (46% to 39%), although white Catholic voters favor Romney over Obama by a significant margin (48% to 37%). Obama has an advantage over Romney among white mainline Protestant voters (50% vs. 37%) and religiously unaffiliated voters (57% vs. 22%).

I assume that the Obama lean among Catholics is largely due to the turn away from the Republican party by Latino voters.

The Spring issue of Notre Dame’s new online journal, “Church Life: A Journal for the New Evangelization” is now available here. Aside from regular contributors like John Cavadini, Larry Cunningham, and Virgilio Elizondo, it has some fine articles on the place of art and film in Christian discernment and formation.

One article that I found particularly suggestive and apt in this Easter Season is by Michael Heintz, who is the Rector of Saint Matthew’s Cathedral in South Bend and teaches in Notre Dame’s Department of Theology. In his article “Jesus: Sage or Sacrifice,” Heintz writes:

Jesus does not come to tell us “about” God. He comes to show us God, God-in-action, as it were, the life-giving and dynamic relationship which the Incarnate Son shares with his Father; an eternal relationship whose Love has been termed in the Tradition their Holy Spirit; a life of self-emptying love into which he invites those who follow him to share, but to do so only by losing or forgetting themselves.

And this share, of course, has a significant cost. “Are you not aware,” Paul had rather sternly to remind the Romans, “that you who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” The life of Christians is not fundamentally a morality (though, of course, it is indeed this too), but a personal and corporate configuration into a real, living Person: Jesus, the Crucified and Risen One. This configuration to Jesus, begun in baptism, is expressed fully in Eucharistic communion, where our share in his dying and rising, which Paul tells us we somehow carry about in our own bodies, is made both tangible and personal.

Legatus, a Group of Catholic business people, have decided to sue HHS over the contraception mandate. Most troublingly, they have chosen the public-interest law firm of the Thomas More Center to do so.

As their website clearly indicates, the Thomas More Center favors religious liberty — for Christians. But not for Muslims. (More here.) Their key issues include defending the religious freedom of Christians and confronting the threat of Islam.

Here’s what they say about religious liberty for Christians:

The Christian values upon which this Nation was founded are under attack. The ACLU and like-minded organizations are using sympathetic courts to destroy the religious and moral foundations of our great nation. Using the metaphor, “a wall of separation between church and state,” which is found nowhere in our Constitution, they attack crosses, Ten Commandment monuments, Nativity displays, Christmas celebrations in public schools, the Pledge of Allegiance, our national motto, “In God We Trust” and prayers at public meetings. The main battleground in this culture war is the courtroom and that is where the Thomas More Law Center is defending the religious freedom of Christians.

And here’s what they say about Muslims:

Radical Muslims and Islamic organizations in America take advantage of our legal system and are waging a “Stealth Jihad” within our borders. Their aim is to transform America into an Islamic nation. They have already infiltrated the highest levels of our government, the media, our military, both major political parties, public schools, universities, financial institutions and the cultural elite. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, political leaders still claim “Islam is a religion of peace.” Our national leaders refuse to identify Radical Islam as the enemy. Political correctness has paralyzed our government’s ability to deal with these threats. That is why the Thomas More Law Center has been at the forefront of legal battle against this internal threat.

In my view, they’re not advocating religious liberty — they’re advocating re-establishment of their favored religion.  And talk of Muslims “infiltrating” our public life cannot be interpreted as anything other than rank prejudice. Much the same thing was said about Catholics at one point in this nation’s history.

Are the nation’s top Catholic business men and women so religiously prejudiced? I don’t believe so.  But then who made the decision to go with this firm? Tom Monaghan founded both Legatus and the Thomas More Center.

Cardinal Dolan’s picture is prrominently featured on their website. If I were he, I’d ask them to take it down.

What’s free:

* Our editorial “Rome & Women Religious”

* E. J. Dionne’s column “Mommy Wars & Money Worries”

* As previously noted, Jerry Ryan’s article on the life and death of René Page

* Kaya Oakes’s “A Crush on God: How a Young Priest Helped Me Hear Jesus”

What’s not:

* Alan Wolfe on the GOP’s aversion to reality

* David Golemboski on the flip side of subsidiarity

* Kevin Spicer’s review of Justus George Lawler’s new book Were the Popes Against the Jews?

* And more

What are you doing without a Commonweal subscription? It’s good for you. And cheap. If you’d rather subscribe to our Kindle edition, click here.

“Little Gidding,” the fourth of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets,  has as its fourth movement Eliot’s  famous Pentecostal invocation:

The dove descending breaks the air/ With flame of incandescent terror.

This verse sprang to mind when I read Jerry Ryan’s riveting reflection in the current Commonweal: “Broken: The Life and Death of René Page.”

Page was the successor of the legendary René Voillaume as prior of the Little Brothers of Jesus. He emerges from Ryan’s account as a man of singular gifts, holiness, and terrible affliction. The article is, I believe, remarkable for its compassion and depth. Here is a passage I found particularly moving and evocative:

Modern medicine might explain René’s deterioration as the result of damaged or diminished neurons; a psychologist might explain it as a manifestation of repressed instincts; a psychopathologist might understand the hostility observed in some mentally ill patients as the regression to a childhood state where one acts out uncontrollable emotional impulses. At one level, all these insights are valuable. But I believe such experiences can include other dimensions. The dynamics of grace and of evil can give “ordinary” experience another significance. While we cannot pretend to fully understand the dynamics, at times we sense there may be a deeper meaning than what science can tell us or we can initially grasp. The destruction of someone’s unique personality, for example, strikes me as a manifestation of the mystery of evil. Sometimes the effects of evil or of grace in a person’s life have nothing to do with the particular goodness or badness of the individual involved. And beyond that, even recognizing the reality of the powers of darkness does not mean we can clearly name or define them.

The Gospels attribute certain infirmities to the “devils.” We must not take this lightly, for we confront a mystery here: evil in all its crudity and depth. In his final state, René Page seemed to be at the mercy of the Evil One, who mocked and destroyed him. In some sense, this is apparently where the Holy Spirit was leading him. I don’t want to propose or accept an easy answer to this; a real scandal is involved here. Jesus likewise was led into the desert by the Spirit. After his baptism and forty-day fast, he was tempted by the Devil who, according to Luke, had a physical power over him, transporting him to a high mountain and even the pinnacle of the Temple, mocking him for his pretensions to be the Son of God, and then leaving him, only to return at a more opportune time. On the evening of his betrayal, Jesus foresaw that Peter would be at the mercy of the Evil One and prayed that Peter’s faith would hold up. After the Resurrection, Jesus told Peter that in old age he would be led where he did not wish to go. In this, Peter would be following his master, the Wisdom and Word of God, the Giver of Life, who on the Cross was also taunted and physically destroyed. Through Jesus, God himself would become vulnerable.

Be sure to read the rest here.

Last year I wrote a short piece for Commonweal that combined sociological data with personal observations in order to address the question of the lack of conservatives in academia.  While some took issue with my observations, none of the dissenters bothered to address the data about what conservatives self-report about their lack of inclination toward academia (published by the American Enterprise Institute, 2007).

I bring this up because Mary Ann Mason, the country’s leading expert on the status quaestionis of women’s path through graduate school and academia, has written a new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It treats some well-known themes — the unrelenting length of Ph.D. degrees, the distinct difficulties faced by women in the process, and the awful academic job market due to the casualization of academic labor — and offers a few remedies that can help “for starters”:

Envied, and now emulated by countries worldwide—many of whom have sent their best and brightest to us—our model of graduate education is durable but in need of serious revision. We need doctoral programs that take fewer years to complete, and ones that enroll fewer students if the jobs in that field are scarce. At the same time, we need an academic environment in which young adults with family responsibilities can thrive. We invest a great deal of money and hope in these young colleagues and we can’t afford to lose so many of them.

Her first and second recommendations will be difficult to satisfy without significant changes in academic staffing: many Ph.D. students are increasingly the ones doing the teaching, so universities benefit from larger-than-necessary Ph.D. programs; thus the students’ time-to-degree increases due to their workloads as teachers.  Her third recommendation, about a family-friendly career path, is more feasible, and brought to mind one of the popular “Ph.D. Comics” from a couple years ago (see below and their website). While it’s true that work-family balance is a challenge in many careers, I still think that academia is almost unique in the coupling of (1) extreme length of apprenticeship years and (2) very little money relative to educational level and age bracket.  Many other careers have one or the other, but not both. It’s the combination that makes it a difficult path to choose for a single person, much less one desiring to have or adopt children.

Joe Biden came out in favor of equal civil rights for gay and straight unions/marriages on “Meet the Press yesterday. HuffPo has the story.

On one hand, Biden’s remarks, strictly parsed, do not move beyond the current stance of the Obama administration. And it seems clear that Biden had no intention of doing so. But he did say:

I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction — beyond that.

Back in ’03, Paul J. Griffiths made the case on Catholic grounds in Commonweal. Without challenging the magisterium’s stance on marriage in the Church, he showed how Catholics might support civil same-sex marriage. His wrap-up:

I conclude that Catholics may support the legalization of same-sex marriages, together with the progressive disentanglement of sacramental marriage from state-sponsored contractual marriage. It is likely that such support, together with the argument and clarification that would accompany it, would clarify Catholic teaching about marriage, help Catholics to live in accord with it, make it more attractive to non-Catholics, and so, in the end, conform the body politic more closely to Christ by making the church more seductively beautiful. This is a prudential judgment, of course, correctible and fallible like all such.

Two points:

1. Terminology: Can we call it “marriage” for straights and “unions” for same-sex couples in the civil realm and not fall afoul of the Caetchism’s insistence that unjust discrimination against LGBT people is wrong? And don’t reply that civil marriage is for having children: civil marriage is open to straights regardless of their intentions regarding children. Since increasingly civil unions grant all the same rights and duties as marriage, why shouldn’t the same word be used? As the ornithologists say, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…Biden’s “I don’t see much of a distinction” can be read either to say OK to the union/marriage duality we have now, or as invoking that same venerable apothegm of avian biology in favor of just calling it “marriage” in the civil realm for gays and straights alike.

2. Catholic opinion is now currently narrowly in favor of civil same-sex marriage: about 52% say yes. And overwhelmingly (69%) Catholics favor civil same-sex unions. In 2009, the USCCB called civil same-sex unions “a multifaceted threat to the very fabric of society.” In the same document, they warn that contraception “has the potential to damage or destroy the
marriage. Also, it results in many other negative consequences, both personal and social.” I’m beginning to wonder whether magisterial teaching on same-sex marriage will go the way of magisterial teaching on contraception: widely known and widely ignored by the faithful in their daily lives, in their relationships with people close to them and in their prudential choices in the voting booth.

And, of course, I’m bracing for magisterial push-back to Biden.

Frank Brennan, SJ, is an Australian and a distinguished human rights activist and scholar who spends a lot of time in the United States.  Here is his reflection on the current tussles of the American bishops with the  Obama administration.

…Was born today, in 1812. Great poets these days seem useful chiefly as fodder for tear-off daily calendars and coffee mugs. But this one from Robert Browning is a good insight into the modern, or perhaps eternal, predicament:

There are those who believe something, and therefore will tolerate nothing; and on the other hand, those who tolerate everything, because they believe nothing.

I liked this bit from the American Academy of Poets online bio:

Elizabeth inspired Robert’s collection of poems Men and Women (1855), which he dedicated to her. Now regarded as one of Browning’s best works, the book was received with little notice at the time; its author was then primarily known as Elizabeth Barrett’s husband.

In desperate need of a respite from term-paper reading (bleakness broken by the occasional flash of sunlight) I’ve been turning to the mainstream media — which plumped me right into the lap of Bill Keller. In today’s Times Keller skewers “Fox News:”

My gripe against Fox is not that it is conservative. The channel’s pulpit-pounding pundits, with the exception of the avuncular Mike Huckabee, are too shrill for my taste, but they are not masquerading as impartial newsmen. Nor am I indignant that Fox News is the cultural home of the Republican Party and a nonstop Obama roast. Partisan journalism, while not my thing, has a long tradition. Though I do wonder if the folks at Fox appreciate that this genre is more European than American.

My complaint is that Fox pretends very hard to be something it is not, and in the process contributes to the corrosive cynicism that has polarized our public discourse.

Thus far Bill and I are on the same page (metaphorically speaking). He then goes on to make a point, once made, if memory serves, by a lamented, departed Public Editor:

I would never suggest that what is now called “the mainstream media” — the news organizations that most Americans depended on over the past century — achieved a golden mean. We have too often been condescending to those who don’t share our secular urban vantage point. We are too easily seduced by access. We can be credulous.

A welcome confession, though somewhat diluted by a self-absolving spin:

Traditional news organizations, for all their shortcomings, see it as their mission to provide — and test — the information you need to form intelligent opinions. We aim to challenge lazy assumptions. Fox panders to them.

“Challenge lazy assumptions?” As Jack Benny would say: “hmmm.”

In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein has a high-octane review of Paul Ingrassia’s Engines of Change. Ingrassia’s point, among others, is how our car-buying reflects our persona. Herewith some of Mister Epstein’s musings:

I am not sure how it came about, but in 1969 I owned another of the cars featured in “Engines of Change,” a forest-green Pontiac GTO. Mr. Ingrassia refers, accurately, to the GTO’s “throaty roar” and “guttural exhaust pipes”—it was widely known as “a muscle car,” if not so chez Epstein. I remember that roar and those guttural pipes well, but what I recall most is that the Pontiac GTO required roughly two gallons of gas to parallel park. I drove mine mainly from gas station to gas station. Mr. Ingrassia describes owners of the GTO as “rebels without a clue,” a phrase I view as a most painful gotcha

An older and wiser Epstein can now sagely (or is it cagily?)  respond to his young granddaughter’s innocent query:

The naming of car models is another outlet for Mr. Ingrassia’s wit. He reminds us of the various hype-infused and outright silly names that have been called into service: the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, the Pontiac LeMans, the Dodge Swinger, the Porsche Cayenne (driven by Mrs. Tony Soprano), the Toyota Prius (which, for its environmental correctness, has come to be known as “The Pious”). One day I was driving with my 6-year-old granddaughter, who asked why the car in front of us, a Hyundai, was called a Sonata. “I don’t know, kiddo,” I answered. “Maybe because it’s sonata Jaguar.” Perhaps this is the place to mention that I currently drive a black Jaguar S-Type. I’m relieved to say that Mr. Ingrassia neglects to mention what this says about me.

If the book is as entertaining as the review, it’s worth a read while waiting in line at the pump.

In a moving column, George Will celebrates the life of his 40-year-old son, who happens to have Down Syndrome.  The column, in my view, points to the necessary integration of the pro-life and pro-social justice (and yes, pro-universal health care) message.

Children with Down Syndrome can live longer thanks to many medical advances. But middle age for them brings a very difficult set of challenges.  Between 90 and 100 percent of people with Down syndrome will suffer from early onset Alzheimer’s Disease.  Parents of children with Down syndrome need to plan for their children’s futures, contemplating that their children will need even more care just as they begin to need care themselves. Few families have the resources to provide for patients suffering from Alzheimer’s (which cost Americans an estimated 200 billion last year, much of it covered by Medicare and Medicaid) . Families who have children or siblings suffering from the combination problems of Down syndrome and Alzheimer’s will need even more help

The negative prohibition–do not kill — is a necessary floor in moral thinking. But for the very vulnerable, including the physically and mentally impaired, it is by no means sufficient. The vulnerable, young and old, need positive assistance if they are to thrive.  And no average family can meet the challenges of Alzheimer’s Disease –with or without Down syndrome– on its own.

It doesn’t just take a village.  It takes a nation.  It takes the common good.

Robert Mickens of the Tablet and Sandro Magister of Chiesa are reporting the names of the men behind the investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. You’re going to recognize a few. First, Magister:

The inspection [of LCWR] had been urged above all by some cardinals of the United States, both of the curia and residential [i.e., those who live in Rome], with direct knowledge of the “problematic” orientations of the LCWR.

Cardinal Franc Rodé, prefect of the congregation for religious until the end of 2010, had given the go-ahead to a rather hostile apostolic visitation of the LCWR. But after, on January 4, 2011, he was replaced by Brazilian cardinal João Braz de Aviz, a focolarino [member of the Focolare movement], and even before that, when the American Redemptorist Joseph W. Tobin became secretary of the same congregation, the apostolic visitation continued and concluded in a much more conciliatory manner.

This changing of the guard at the top of the congregation for religious was not at all to the liking of the cardinals from the United States residing in Rome at the time – Levada, Raymond L. Burke, James F. Stafford, Bernard F. Law, John P. Foley – so much so that none of them attended Tobin’s episcopal ordination at Saint Peter’s Basilica on October 9, 2010.

That’s extraordinary. On Magister’s telling, those American cardinals were so disappointed with the decision to appoint Tobin — an outsider who didn’t want the job and freely admits to “ranting about the curia” — that they couldn’t be bothered to attend his ordination to the episcopacy. (I wonder who attended Cardinal Law’s 2004 appointment as archpriest of St. Mary Major. His retirement ran silent.) Imagine their surprise when soon after a nun was appointed undersecretary for the congregation — and one who doesn’t usually wear a habit, just like those troublesome LCWR nuns. Those American cardinals must have seen the writing on the wall. Under new management, the apostolic visitation of the LCWR seems to have gone precisely nowhere.

Unlike the doctrinal investigation, which was run by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Levada. As Mickens explains, the CDF had been looking into the LCWR for quite some time:

Read the rest of this entry »

.@NewtGingrich has brought creativity and intellectual vitality to American political life. Proud to call him a friend.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) May 2, 2012

Four months earlier…

… in a inspiring display of free speech and division of opinion. If only in America….

Former PM Olmert’s presentation cited here is given context and detail in this account of Sunday’s meeting in New York sponsored by the Jerusalem Post.   J.J. Goldberg has the story at the Forward.

From the Editors:

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s recent censure of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious for “serious doctrinal problems” raises a number of familiar, if troubling, questions. The LCWR, which represents most American nuns, exists to provide support for the work sisters do for the poor, the imprisoned, the ill, and the marginalized, and to give the various religious communities a corporate voice. As part of the CDF’s action, the LCWR will be put into a kind of receivership under Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain—essentially suppressing what little autonomy the group has had. Its statutes will be rewritten and speakers for LCWR meetings will now be vetted. The sisters were specifically reprimanded for speaking out in opposition to positions taken by the U.S. bishops but also for keeping “silent” about church teachings on ordination and same-sex marriage. Is silence now considered a form of dissent? Are women religious not even allowed to determine the priorities of their own ministries?

Read the whole thing here.

For the record, the Gospel of Thomas covers Pell Grants in great detail.

A couple weeks ago, Fr. Imbelli linked to a story about the AP style guide finally giving in to the way most people use the word “hopefully.”  It got me thinking about all the grammar I correct in the course of an academic year.  Specifically, during this “grading season” — sort of like “tax season” for accountants — when teachers across the land blearily mark stacks of final papers and exams, to eventually uncover the coffee-stained surfaces of their desks or, more likely, kitchen tables, I have been thinking about the linguistic errors that most intrigue me. I’m talking about the errors that become so pervasive that they cease to be “errors” at all. Grading papers year after year is one good way to watch language change.

One error that I’ve now stopped correcting is the use of the word “disconnect” as a noun. How can I correct it, when we read it virtually everyday from professional writers?  This from Peter Bergen’s NYT article last Sunday:

From both the right and left, there has been a continuing, dramatic cognitive disconnect between Mr. Obama’s record and the public perception of his leadership: despite his demonstrated willingness to use force, neither side regards him as the warrior president he is. Read the rest of this entry »

In the latest Commonweal, the Spring Books issue, Dennis O’Brien has an appreciative review of Andrew Delbanco’s book, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be. He particularly likes the emphasis placed on grace in shaping higher education and quotes a paragraph on the need for it in daily instruction:

Every true teacher…understands [that] a mysterious third force is present in every classroom…. One never knows how the teacher’s voice will be received by the student…. Sometimes the spoken word is just noise…. Sometimes it can have surprising and powerful effects–yet it is impossible to say why and when this will happen.

This reminded me of St. Augustine’s doctrine of the “inner Teacher,” as in the following (which I sent during this last Lent): Read the rest of this entry »

A new online journal out of Washington University in St. Louis and the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics. Check it out!

Senator John Danforth is someone I admire greatly. I first learned about him through Paul Ramsey when I was an undergraduate at Princeton; he had combined the study of religion with the study of law in a way that I hoped to emulate.  He is pro-life; his name is attached as the defendant to one of the most famous abortion cases to reach the Supreme Court: Planned Parenthood v. Danforth, in which the Supreme Court struck down a number of restrictions on abortion proposed by the State of Missouri. (Danforth was attorney general at the time.) At the same time, he has been a strong advocate of civility rather than the culture wars in proposing religiously animated moral values in the public square.

The new center is something that might interest Commonweal’s readership–and they will find a familiar face or voice or two, as this link suggests.

Marc A. Thiessen, a Washington Post columnist and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, has complained bitterly at Bishop Stephen Blaire’s “attack” on Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Thiessen defends Ryan as a “a faithful Catholic who says his budget work is informed and guided by the social teaching of the Church.” And yet, in a letter to the House Agriculture Committee, Bishop Blaire had the effrontery to write that just solutions to the nation’s fiscal problems “require shared sacrifice by all” — and to suggest that Ryan’s budget plan was not a just solution by this measure. Not much of an attack by Washington standards, but some conservatives may have forgotten how it feels to be criticized by a Catholic bishop, and so Thiessen has responded to this pastoral nudge as if it were a below-the-belt punch.

Thiessen notes that you will not find the phrase “shared sacrifice” in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and concludes that it is nothing more than “a reelection slogan for the Democratic Party.” One might as well point out that you will not find the word “pro-life” in the Cathechism and conclude that its use by a Catholic bishop is therefore nothing more than Republican Party boilerplate. The Church’s teaching about the importance of “shared sacrifice,” otherwise known as solidarity, is no more in doubt than its condemnation of abortion. But Thiessen has a bad habit of dodging and redacting Catholic teachings that don’t fit GOP dogma. Two years ago he wrote a book arguing that, while the Church may now oppose torture, nowhere does it say anything about “enhanced interrogation,” which he went on to justify by abusing the principle of double effect.

If Thiessen had bothered to look into the matter, he would have found that the Catechism has some rather provocative things to say about the responsibilities of the state. “Certainly, it is the proper function of authority to arbitrate, in the name of the common good, between various particular interests; but it should make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on” (§1908). Perhaps Thiessen would argue that here the phrase “make accessible” means no more than “allow people to sell,” or that the term “authority” doesn’t have to mean the state. But he would have to expand the scope of his imaginative re-interpretations to include other official church documents that make Catholic social teaching more explicit and harder to fudge. Some of the faculty at Georgetown University recently sent Paul Ryan the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church; maybe they still have a spare copy they could send to Thiessen.

But enough with Thiessen’s argument-by-search-term. And let’s pass over his stray remark that Bishop Blaire “has near-zero competence to judge what military spending is necessary or unnecessary.” (If you want competence like that, you’d better talk to one of those nameless government bureaucrats Republicans are always complaining about, or at least to a former White House speechwriter.) And let’s not worry about whether Ryan is, in Thiessen’s words, “a good Catholic layman.” I have no doubt Ryan goes to Mass every week, loves his wife and children, and is truly contrite about his recent enthusiasm for the works of Ayn Rand.

The problem isn’t Ryan’s personal piety; it’s his policy priorities. Make that “priority.” For all his grim talk about our national-debt emergency, Ryan’s new budget, like his old budget, is really organized around the single imperative of reducing taxes, especially for the rich. It is very specific about this: it would bring down the top personal income-tax rate from 35 to 25 percent and reduce corporate taxes to the same rate. True, it promises to offset the effect of these lower rates by closing loopholes, but these loopholes are left unspecified (as loopholes almost always are). Ryan has specifically promised not to close one of the most egregious loopholes, the one that allows income on capital to be taxed at 15 percent. To make up for the revenue lost because of the tax cuts, Congress would have to find $700 billion worth of other loopholes to close. But don’t worry: Ryan and the rest of the GOP congressional caucus will figure that out later.

Read the rest of this entry »