I doubt very seriously that anyone has heard that Ben Carson, head of Housing and Urban Development, ran an audit that found 550 billion dollars in accounting errors in that department. You probably haven’t heard that medicare will be broke in ten years. The press is too busy counting the hisses that Evanka Trump gets when she speaks overseas and the never ending Russia hacking story that continues under the interesting claim that because there is no evidence of hacking they have to keep investigating. Of course the biggest story is the jeans being sold at Nordstrom that look like they are covered in mud and sell for $495.
The story that no one wants to talk about is the constant yammering for tax cuts and the constant question of how they are to be “paid for”. Being products of the public school system most people do not understand that the government pays for nothing – you do. The government can print money but the only money they have is the money that you are forced to give them. The other story that most miss, is that the government never cares about how to pay for anything because if they did we would not be trillions in debt. The fact that there are 550 billion dollars in accounting errors in one department and no gets fired should speak volumes. VA can’t care properly for Vets and yet they continue to exist. IRS broke the law and no one in charge was fired or fined, in fact they received bonuses. There seems to be all kinds of ways we could “pay” for a tax cut is we really wanted to.
Oh well, this is a blog about mercy and some would say that I should be barred from talking politics. Mercy work through the church costs something of course, but there is “bang for the buck” and not a lot of waste. I would love to say that there is no politics in the church but that is sadly not true. The church works in housing issues and development issues and it is done quietly and with a certain amount of sanctified dignity. Yet now we hear rumblings about work with immigrants as being difficult and politically significant. We hear rumblings about the cost of care and mercy work that could be spent on churches here at home. Churches know where their funding comes from and that is the folks in the pew and their sanctified stewardship. Folks in the pew care about mercy work and maybe do not care so much about the bureaucracy that has to exist to do the work. The church is very concerned that donors know where their donations go.
Government seems to think that all money is theirs and they get to divvy it up as they see fit.
Back to Nordstrom. When they got into the political action of banning Trump’s daughter Evanka’s line of stuff, (I don’t know what it was but I am sure it wasn’t muddy jeans) they seem to have gotten into some trouble and certainly with all the other department store issues they need to watch out. You have to wonder about the sanity of removing a popular line of whatever while running out a line of muddy jeans. Niemann Marcus took away the Trump line of something as well and quietly brought it back after they watched their stock prices start to tank. It didn’t help that Amazon had the line and was selling it our every other day. It looks like the folks at the top of Nordstrom’s, who are overhead, asked them selves how they were going to pay for a political rather than a business decision. There is a certain amount of hypocrisy here of course, but that is never even considered anymore. If we looked at the hypocrisy of all things political we might get cynical and ask some questions like; How does President Obama intend to “pay” for the life style that he became so wonderfully accustomed to? By charging $440000 for speeches to the horrible big banks and Wall Street leeches that he railed about for 8 years. Like the Clintons he gives the phrase “crony capitalism” a face.
