December 16, 2006
Aaron Asher’s LBJ IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:50 AM EST Bankruptcy: Joshua Zeitz writes, “The Bush administration’s Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which the President signed into law in 2005, limited eligibility for Chapter 7 relief to persons earning less than their state’s median income. The bill also capped the amount of home equity a debtor could exempt from his assets at $125,000 if his home had been purchased within the previous 40 months. Effectively, the bill sharply restricts access to Chapter 7 relief and makes it all but impossible for debtors to make a clean start of things.” Since Mr. Zeitz himself says that the act limits Chapter 7 relief “to persons earning less than their state’s median income,” how one squares the eligibility of half the population for such relief with making it “all but impossible” to obtain such relief, I know not. Plus there is the fact that $125,000 probably exceeds the equity most people in the bottom half of earners who have owned a home less than three and a third years have in that home. I hadn’t realized that Mr. Zeitz had such tender solicitude for the financial assets of the top half of American society. Maybe there’s hope for him yet. He writes, “I’m sure we can all agree that people who recklessly accrue debt should be held accountable for their obligations. Mr. Gordon goes a step further, praising the bankruptcy bill for making ‘it harder for millions of middle-class deadbeats to escape paying their entirely scrupulous creditors what they owe them, . . .’ That’s terrific rhetoric, and as I type these words from a neighborhood Starbucks, where Christmas music is being relentlessly piped through the walls, I can’t help but think of a famous Dickensian character who might have made exactly the same observation.” I don’t see a whole lot of substantive difference between “people who recklessly accrue debt” and “middle-class deadbeats.” A deadbeat, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, is “a cadger or sponger; parasite; one who will not or cannot pay debts.” I really don’t think one has to be Ebenezer Scrooge to have little sympathy for most deadbeats. Speaking of which, I might point out that this bill was not rammed through Congress only on Republican votes. It carried with 69 percent of the votes in the House and 74 percent of the votes in the Senate, including those of such well-known scourges of the poor and downtrodden as Harry Reid, Robert Byrd, Evan Bayh, and Joseph Biden. Hillary Clinton was present but did not vote. So it would seem that it was possible to vote for this bill and not think that cake is the answer to an inadequacy of bread in the diet of the poor. I find Mr. Zeitz’s statistic that more than half of all bankruptcies involve large medical bills very interesting. If that is the case, then obviously that needs to be addressed, but from the other end, with thoroughgoing reform of health insurance and hospital charges. I wrote on my ideas on that subject here. Stem-cell research: Mr. Zeitz writes, “It’s amusing that Mr. Gordon writes, at the top of his post, ‘I remember my grandfather saying, “God save us from those who think they are doing God’s work,”’ while at the bottom of his post he writes favorably of Bush’s ban on fetal stem-cell research. Bush ‘forbade the use of federal funds for research that would involve the killing of embryos,’ he writes.” Perhaps because I am not sitting in a Starbucks listening to Christmas Muzak (presumably while paying five dollars for a cup of coffee—an act that indicates a certain clouding of the rational mind), I don’t see what’s amusing here. My grandfather was talking about Prohibition in particular and, in general, the tendency of some people, bent on improving the world, to run roughshod over everyone else imposing their vision while often ignoring the demands of common decency and honor (God’s work being far too important to be held up by such trivia as the law or truth or other people’s property). I used the quote in reference to a woman who presumed to have the right to nullify a presidential election. That has nothing whatsoever to do with one man following his conscience in making a decision. He writes, “a Fox News survey . . . conducted in September found that 63 percent of respondents supported ‘medical research using tissue from human embryos,’ while only 24 percent opposed such research. To put the matter in sharp relief, the overwhelming majority of Americans, not to mention many main-line Protestant and Jewish religious bodies and leaders, and the vast majority of the scientific community, feel that embryonic stem cell research is ethical and useful. A small minority of religious extremists believe otherwise.” A small minority of religious extremists that amount, apparently, to almost one quarter of the population, not to mention the Catholic Church, an organization exceeding one billion adherents world wide. Since Mr. Zeitz describes 63 percent as an “overwhelming majority,” please note, once again, that the bankruptcy bill he opposes passed the House with 69 percent of the votes, and the Senate with 74 percent. When it comes to bankruptcy, it seems that Mr. Zeitz is an extremist by his own definition. Mr. Bush, to paraphrase Lillian Hellman, does not seem to cut his policy cloth to suit this year’s fashions when there is a moral issue involved. I’m not at all sure I agree with him on this particular issue, but I admire his willingness to decide based on what he feels is the right thing to do. I might also point out that what I was talking about was the fact that Fredric Smoler mischaracterized what Bush did. He did not “stop” stem-cell research.
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