The baby boom is being evicted from the penthouse of American politics. And on the way out, it has decided to trash the place.
.. In that way, the bills would intensify the generational inequity in how Washington allocates resources between the country’s increasingly diverse youthful generations and its predominantly white older population, groups I’ve called “the brown and the gray.” At a moment when political influence is inexorably shifting to the brown, the tax bill represents an 11th hour raid by the wealthiest of the gray.
.. The baby-boom generation, which has voted reliably Republican in recent years, has been the largest generation of eligible voters since 1978. But in 2018, for the first time, slightly more Millennials than baby boomers will be eligible to vote
.. Higher turnout rates among baby boomers will preserve their advantage among actual voters for a while. But sometime around 2024, Millennials will likely surpass them.
.. While about 80 percent of the baby boom is white, over two-fifths of Millennials and nearly half of the post-Millennials are not.
.. Washington today is spending nearly the lowest amount ever recorded on the domestic discretionary programs that invest in the productivity of future generations, such as education and advanced scientific research.
.. One of 21st-century America’s central dynamics is that an increasingly non-white workforce will be funding Social Security and Medicare for a rapidly growing number of white seniors as the baby boomers retire.
.. Tellingly, though, the “Better Way” budget blueprint House Republicans released last year proposed delaying changes in Medicare until 2024, when almost all of the baby boom has already retired. That would leave younger generations, starting with Generation X, to bear most of any future cutbacks—even as they shoulder the costs for the boomers’ more generous retirement.
.. Young people will also pay the tax plans’ most direct cost: the interest on that $1.5 trillion in additional federal debt. More debt could benefit younger generations if it’s spent on investments in their futures. But this tax cut will bury younger generations in debt to fund the current consumption of their elders.
.. the irony is that older, white America needs more of younger, diverse America to ascend into the middle class so it can generate the tax revenue to support the baby boom’s retirement. Yet with these tax bills, the old are strapping a boulder onto the backs of the young as they attempt that climb.
Russell Moore’s Job On The Line
More than 100 of the denomination’s 46,000 churches have threatened to cut off financial support for the SBC’s umbrella fund
.. What’s stunning about this is the blow Moore’s firing, if it comes to that, will be to Southern Baptist credibility and witness.
.. If the Southern Baptist Convention removes him from the presidency of the ERLC, it will signal a dramatic win for the old-guard Religious Right within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. It will also spark the biggest war within the Southern Baptist Convention since the 1990s fight between conservatives and liberals.
.. If the Southern Baptist Convention removes him from the presidency of the ERLC, it will signal a dramatic win for the old-guard Religious Right within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. It will also spark the biggest war within the Southern Baptist Convention since the 1990s fight between conservatives and liberals.
.. I saw a cultural Christianity cut off from the deep theology of the Bible and enamored with books and audio and sermon series tying current events to Bible prophecy—supermarket scanners as the mark of the Beast, Gog and Magog as the Soviet Union or, later, Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda or the Islamic State as direct fulfillments of Bible prophecy. When these prophecies were not fulfilled, these teachers never retreated in shame. They waited to claim a new word from God and sold more products, whether books or emergency preparation kits for the Y2K global shutdown and the resulting dark age the Bible clearly told us would happen.
.. I was left with the increasingly cynical feeling—an existential threat to my entire sense of myself and the world—that Christianity was just a means to an end. My faith was being used as a way to shore up Southern honor culture, mobilize voters for political allies, and market products to a gullible audience.
.. So when, in the middle of my spiritual crisis, I saw the name C. S. Lewis on the spine of a book called Mere Christianity, I was willing to give him a chance—and he saved my life.
.. All I needed was for this drinking, smoking, probably dancing and card-playing man on another continent to tell me the truth, to point me to a broad, bustling Church that took serious questions seriously
.. At its best, the religious right reminded all of us that there are realities more important than political or economic success
.. At its best, the religious right kept the focus on a vulnerable minority that easily becomes invisible to those with power: unborn children. Douthat is correct that without some form of religious right, the space left behind can all too easily be filled by European-style ethno-nationalism or Nietzschean social Darwinism.
.. if Moore is fired, that is. There are a lot of younger Southern Baptists who are not willing to return to the Republican Party at Prayer mode of public engagement.
.. This conflict, and its resolution, will have a serious impact beyond the SBC. It will determine the future of Christian conservatism in America.