December 15, 2006
Aaron Asher’s LBJ III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s heartfelt defense of George Bush is very much in keeping with the holiday spirit—charitable, forgiving, and full of tremendous goodwill. It also glosses over some important and (for Mr. Gordon) inconvenient points.
Bankruptcy: Prior to the passage of the Bush administration’s bankruptcy legislation, most individuals generally filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 7 or Chapter 13. Under Chapter 7, most of a filer’s assets and property were liquidated to pay off his debts; once this process was complete, the debtor was excused from paying most of his remaining debt. Under Chapter 13, a debtor was permitted to retain his property and agreed to enter into a repayment schedule to make good on most or all of his obligations. In effect, Chapter 7 allowed debtors to make a clean start, though at the cost of losing their worldly assets, while Chapter 13 bound them to a long repayment schedule.
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.
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, which lowers (or should lower: interest rates on unsecured loans tend to be very sticky downward) the cost of credit for everyone else.” 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. The problem, however, is that the rhetoric doesn’t hold up.
While Congressional Quarterly reported that the number of personal bankruptcy filings rose by over 400 percent over the past two decades, and while the Federal Reserve reported in March 2004 that consumer debt stood at a record $2.12 trillion, most people filing for debt relief are not “middle-class deadbeats.” According to a Harvard study cited by the journal Health Affairs in February 2005, over half of all personal bankruptcies resulted from excessive medical bills relating to an illness in the family. Fully 90 percent of all personal bankruptcies resulted either from illness or from another catastrophic blow to family income, like divorce or job loss. In other words, what the bankruptcy bill does is place in permanent economic dependency a large number of people who did nothing wrong but get sick or lose their jobs or health care coverage.
Mr. Gordon thinks that Fred Smoler’s comparison of George Bush and Lyndon Johnson was “unfair,” but at the heart of the matter, Lyndon Johnson sought to expand the New Deal state in ways that shielded working Americans from the vicissitudes of the economy, while George Bush has tried to erode many of those protections.
Stem-cell research: 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.”
Not exactly. The Democratic-sponsored bill that Bush and the GOP Congress opposed would allow research only on stem cells derived from the approximately 400,000 frozen, fertilized embryos at American in-vitro-fertilization clinics that would have been destroyed in any event, as a matter of course. The Democrats propose putting these stem cell lines to good use, but they do not propose destroying—or, as Mr. Gordon writes, “killing”—stem cells that would otherwise have remained viable.
More to the point, a Fox News survey (that’s a nod to Mr. Gordon, who instinctively mistrusts any news outlet whose editorial position he generally dislikes) 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. These persons are certainly entitled to their beliefs, and many of them have made intellectually defensible arguments against stem cell research. But it is they who lie on the outskirts of general consensus, and it is they who presume to invert Abraham Lincoln’s famous formula for faith-based politics. I have never heard a medical researcher argue that he or she is doing God’s work. And I’ve met a lot of researchers in my time in academia.
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