While I can easily come off as a joyless old miser, I am also a person of hope and optimism.
For all my uneasiness with aforementioned squishy things, I also see plenty of times where others are doing just what I’d hoped they’d do, and affirming much of what I hold true, and times when things are evolving positively.
These are those hopeful things.
Political Developments
Universal Basic Income (UBI). I must admit that I’m a bit of a #YangGang guy. There are times when Andrew Yang acts or talks a bit too weird, and times when I think he may just be addicted to founding things. But on the whole, I appreciate a thinker who zooms out to see problems with fresh framing, someone who seeks to solve them with creative ideas rather than just slogging around in tired, ineffective, lukewarm responses and tired incumbency.
I was deeply skeptical of UBI – the concept that every person should receive a regular cash stipend as a baseline income – when Yang started talking about it constantly during his way-too-early campaign launch. The more I listened to him and the more I read about it, the more I was positively surprised. Here’s his pitch – you can disagree, but you won’t wonder what he’s thinking. UBI has been increasingly found to reduce poverty and instability and have an upward effect on quality of life indicators, while apparently not disincentivizing work. (Some summaries from Forbes, Marketplace, and U of Chicago offer some preliminary evidence for this.)
The value-added tax and economic restructuring involved would be immense. Nonetheless, I was heartened by the mainstreaming of this policy by Yang and others. It showed society may be very gradually evolving to reframe what every citizen can and should expect of government to achieve greater equity.
Pilot for a restructured Child Tax Credit. For the final six months of 2021, parents received cash payments for dependent children. Essentially, a pandemic relief bill temporarily restructured the perennial child tax credit. The $2,000 per child that parents can deduct when filing taxes in the following year was increased to $3,000 for kids aged 6-17 and $3,600 for younger kids and broken into monthly payments. So instead of paying fully withheld taxes for twelve months and then receiving a portion of that back through filing in spring of the next year, parents were realizing the credit in real time, without lag, and as cash rather than a credit against owed taxes.
The conversion of this benefit from delayed credit to live cash – along with the adjustments on tax liabilities for the poorest parents – did wonders for children and families. In broad strokes, it lowered the poverty rate among children in the US by 40%!!! In practical terms, it moved money around to benefit parents in the moment instead of deferring it. It was helpful to making-ends-meet, real-time needs by acknowledging that cash is the most impactful benefit to provide families.
Corporate Minimum Tax and Buy-Back Excise Tax. The details of this are a bit more complicated than I fully understand. The basics are that the Inflation Reduction Act makes it so that many corporations will not be able to use loopholes to get under 15% for their tax rate, and if they buy back their own stock from the market, they’ll pay a 1% tax on it. These are two small ways to try to push back against tax dodging and slippery stock trading, an incremental positive against macro-greed.
The Growth of Collective Action
First, I’m not talking specifically of GoFundMe, though I’m not not talking about it either. I often have two big skepticisms of these crowd fundraisers. First, do many of these people really need the help or are they kind of just seeing what attention and money is out there? Second, are we overly glorifying social injustice that causes poverty or instability by celebrating crowd fundraising?
That said, I do acknowledge the place of this approach, and do celebrate limited uses and their successes – especially this one for an 11-year-old boy whose parents both passed in a two-year span, including his dad who was a Chicago Bears beat reporter. And I have wondered if there’s a happy medium, not unlike public broadcasting pledge drives, that might become a more common model for Catholic parishes, schools, and institutions. When it comes to resourcing a broad-based public good like NPR, I don’t get the same discomfort I might get from a middle-class family asking for help with funeral costs, or something.
Additionally, though its purity and definite goodness can be so fickle and difficult to pin down, I do see some promise in the community-organizing possible through social media networks. It’s sort of unknowable whether or not any seemingly good idea will gain traction. But plenty of positive examples exist, from the mass power of K-pop group BTS and their fans to the light-hearted hilarity of things like Boaty McBoatFace.
I also have a deep affection for classic community spaces, highlighted by libraries and park districts. Taxes are so often associated with politically charged debates and deeply polarizing disagreements; I enjoy looking at my property taxes for our family home and seeing the portions of our money that go not just to our public schools but to our forest preserves, our park district, and our library district.
I build my kids’ activities around the park district and library offerings. I love how it's local, a fruit of our community’s contributions, and a place where everyone is welcome and able to be involved. There can be better facilities, better coaching, or tighter ratios in private organizations – and as my kids show clear passions and gifts, we’ll surely splurge here and there – but I love the broad-base, low-barrier path that’s so available to us and all our neighbors here. It’s a positive, impactful fruit of collective action between taxpayers, local civil servants, and even some corporate benevolence, too.
The Greening of Life
The circles I run in lead me to selection bias, but it sure doesn’t seem like environmentalism is quite the fringy topic it once was. I remember the dogged activism of friends in high school who fought just to get dedicated recycling bins in our cafeteria and get people to use them, let alone succeed in convincing people to buy used clothes or incorporate meatless meals. Now, those ideas, and campaigns seeking deeper, wider change, are taking stronger root and becoming increasingly consensus, mainstream issues.
My hope is nurtured not just by this greater attention and awareness but also by being a part of the chain reaction. It’s fun to read others’ tweets, get sent links, and have in-person conversations about changes people are making to be more green. And I am finding opportunities to share the changes I’ve made in a way that allows others to learn and consider them.
I am not particularly timid about doing something abnormal or unpopular, but it is neat when things you think are good and worthwhile catch on more widely. It’s especially (selfishly) edifying when it seems like you were an early adopter, or maybe even an early influencer, to help bring exposure to positive trends. I had the idea to suggest “green-packing” in a reflection during the pandemic, the practice of declining napkins, straws, flatware, and other single-use or otherwise unneeded extras with carryout food. It’s been neat to see apps and ordering services start to incorporate this consideration into their interfaces (even if it’s horribly unlikely that any of them ever read my article).
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| Here's Panera's version- |
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| And this is Chipotle's version- Keep an eye out for these toggle boxes! Decline the extraneous stuff and avoid waste. |
The People Close to Me
The potency of Christian faith comes from its incarnational nature – our belief and our truth isn’t just abstraction or philosophy but rather is incarnated in the person of Christ. So these ideals and principles, these uneasy feelings and these hopes, aren’t just something borne in a vacuum or discussed around a seminar table. They come into play in lives, in actions, in relationships. And I’m grateful for people around me who model whole, integrated ways of putting love in action.
I’m grateful to have friends who not only practice green living, but are able to share what they’re reading and thinking and doing, and do so in a non-judgmental and inviting way. My friends have taught me about bamboo-based (instead of plastic-based) products that are more sustainably sourced, dual-flush/low-flow home toilets (I’d only seen them out and about), the finer points of recycling and sorting, the scope of compostable items and materials, and more. Especially when we’re visiting each others’ homes, I feel like I always learn a new wrinkle of greener living that I can carry forward.
When our group of close friends converges for our annual group vacation, we rotate between staying in each of our family homes, and the hospitality really shines. One year, our hosts gave up their bed and bedroom to my wife and me since my wife was pregnant; they relegated themselves to air mattresses to keep the expectant mother comfortable. Another year, our hosts gave up their bedroom because it was the only way to fit all the guests under one roof, and they stayed at a hotel! And another year, our friend’s parents invited us to their beautiful home out in the countryside. It is a big property and big living space, but it is a great example of how having lots of room isn’t for luxury or status but to be earnest, inclusive hosts.
I’ll never know the extent to which I successfully model or share my ideals. And maybe it’s best that I never know! But I hope with a “be good for goodness’ sake” and “act like someone’s watching” type mindset, I can keep striving to identify goods and follow them with right actions, a metanoia that keeps the BS stripped away and keeps me focused. I think the greatest propulsion toward this is the Christian loving example of those close to me, and the ways their charitable and just living grounds me in Christ.
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