On Paying Tithes, part 2: The Huffington Post weighs in

Here's Bill Gunderson's opinion, from the Huffington Post. First, the link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-gunderson/romney-taxes-and-tithing_b_1234205.html .

Now, just in case that link stops working, here's the text of the article. (It's better if you go read it over there, though. Besides, SOPA/PIPA might end up deleting my cut-and-paste job some day.)

Much has been made lately of Mitt Romney's tax returns and his effective tax rate. Is it fair that Mitt pays an effective tax rate of 13.9%, while Warren Buffett's secretary pays double that rate (we still have not seen her return, however)?

We currently have a capital gains tax here in America. Many countries like Argentina, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, etc. do not have any capital gains tax. Our top tax rate is 15% on capital gains here at home.

By all accounts, Mitt Romney has paid the legal taxes due on the money he has earned. He has not broken any laws. He has not been dishonest. He has paid the taxes due on the money he has earned under the current tax code. It's hard to question his honesty and integrity.

Now, if you want to change the tax code, then that is a whole other debate. It is not fair to resent Mr. Romney for paying what was legal and honest under the current code. I have many clients that have invested their money into municipal bonds, so that they can derive income from their investments. They pay NO federal or state taxes on this income. Many of them have an effective tax rate of zero. Is this fair? Is investing in sewers and roads somehow nobler than investing in businesses? Why should we give them such a tax advantage?

Should we resent Mr. Romney for how much money he makes? I don't resent how much Albert Pujols makes when he steps into the batter's box against my favorite team. I don't resent Tim Lincicum's take home pay, when he takes the mound against my San Diego Padres. Nor do I resent how much Johnny Depp gets paid for one of his movies. These folks have become the best at what they do, and there should be no limit as to how much they can make.

How about Mitt Romney's charitable contributions? Should we resent the fact that he pays a ten-percent tithe to his church? Last time I looked Malachi was the last chapter in the Old Testament. It seems to me that Jews, Christians, and Mormons alike, recognize the Old Testament as a canon of scripture.

Was it not Malachi who said, "Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse...and prove me now herewith...if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it." I have found this to be a true principle in my own life. I think that you have seen this principle manifest itself in the life of Mitt Romney.

Furthermore, I submit to you that Mr. Romney counts his real blessings in life as the great family that stands behind him at many of his appearances, and not the monetary treasures that he will have to leave behind some day.

What about the organization that Mitt gives most of his charitable contributions to, the LDS church? Do its leaders live lavish lifestyles and use the money recklessly. The LDS church has no paid ministry, everyone is a volunteer. The church maintains warehouses full of basic needs and is ready at a moment's notice to deliver aid to those in need all over the world. In addition to this, the church has no debt.

Maybe our government can learn something from Mitt Romney and the Mormons.

On Paying Tithes and Throwing Stones: Judgement and Morality in American Politics

Now that Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney has made his tax documents for 2010 and 2011 public, the press has latched on to the statements therein about his payment of tithes.

Romney is a faithful Mormon, or at least says he is. Faithful Mormons follow the Biblical commandment to tithe, that is, to donate 10% of their income to their church. Tithing, or payment of the tithe, is one of the items on the checklist that gives you access into the LDS temples.

Some pundits have done the math and determined that Romney's 2010 contributions fall short of the 10% mark. I'm not sure what kind of conclusion they intend to draw from this calculation. Let's follow a few logical trails, shall we?

First, there's the "A bad Mormon will be a bad president" line of reasoning: Mitt isn't a full tithe payer, therefore he's not a good Mormon, and therefore he's unworthy to be president. That's pretty funny, considering how many people out there say that a devout Mormon is also unworthy to be president. The poor guy is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't.

Then there's the "The Mormon church will exert undue influence on the president" line of reasoning. I tried to follow this one, but it broke down somewhere in the middle. I think it goes like this: The Mormon church exerts this degree of financial "control" over Mitt's life, and therefore (this is the part where I got lost) the church exerts control over other areas of his life, and will tell him what to do as president. Hey, this isn't Scientology, guys. Stop trying to paint it as such.

Third is the "What a waste of money" line of reasoning.  The idea that Romney pays tithes at all really bothers some people, who feel that he is deluded or misguided in his support of an institution that, in and of itself, doesn't deserve to exist. These people feel that Romney's $2 million per year, give or take a bit, would have been better used elsewhere, and that it's a real shame to see him throwing it away like he did.

(Personally, knowing what the LDS church does with the tithes it collects, I can't think of a better use for his money. There's good info on lds.org or mormon.org, telling about it from the official LDS point of view. For an outsider's view, you can look up that old investigative report from the Arizona Republic: "Counting Its Blessings", June 30, 1991. The thesis of the AzRep article was "Well, we set out to do a hatchet job on the LDS church, to uncover evidence of rampant fiscal irresponsibility. However, in everything we dug up, we couldn't find any sign of wrongdoing. We did find lots of do-gooding, though. We were really disappointed.")

Payment of tithing has always been voluntary, and it has always been confidential. At the end of the year, those who pay tithing get a summary statement, for use in preparing their state and federal income taxes - this is the same thing that other charitable organizations provide for their donors - it's required by law. And the leader of the local congregation meets in private with each member of the congregation, points to the bottom line on the statement - the total contribution - and asks one question: "Does that represent a complete and full tithe?" The parishioner's answer is kept confidential.

The church doesn't even care how big the number is. And the member isn't audited or fact-checked; his word is trusted. How much a member pays, and whether it represents a full tithe, is NOBODY ELSE'S BUSINESS.

I also find it funny that anyone would sit in judgement of Romney and whether he's a good Mormon or a bad Mormon because of this. The Fraser Institute reports that 1999, the average Californian gave less than 2% of their income to any charity, and in 2007 it wasn't any better. With only two or three exceptions, the rest of the country followed the same patterns as California. And the average Canadian was even stingier than the average American. Within religions themselves, according to an article online yesterday, the average Christian in the U.S. donates between 2% and 4.6% to his church or local congregation, and a large percentage of Christians donate nothing. Ever.

I find it even funnier that this may be used as ammunition by Romney's opponents or their proxies (including certain members of the press corps) to judge him as a bad candidate for president. This is where the "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" thing comes in. I don't think anybody in the world is qualified to pass such a judgement. Moreover, Romney's tithe donations are handled through his charitable foundation, which also gives away millions of his dollars to other charitable causes, besides the LDS church.

I think that people are trying to find chinks in the White Knight's armor. They can't zing him for sexual harassment, like Herman Cain, or for divorce or infidelity, like Newt Gingrich. (Come to think of it, a majority of the voting public are overlooking Gingrich's divorces and infidelity. What's that all about?) They can't hit him for bigotry or intolerance, although he has been the victim thereof. They can't even call him stupid, ignorant, or uninformed, as they have done to Sarah Palin - or forgetful, like Rick Perry. He doesn't even come across as arrogant or out of touch, like Gingrich and Ron Paul.

They can't find anything illegal or unethical about the way he made his millions. They haven't found any evidence (yet) of bribery, influence peddling, or shady dealings during his terms as governor of Massachusetts, chairman of the SLC Olympics, or partner at Bain Capital.

They can't even find anything wrong with the way he calculated his taxes. (If they did, the IRS would have been all over his case, and they're completely ignoring him in public.) People seem to resent the fact that Romney is so rich, and that of all the money he made last year, he only gave 15% of it back to the government - all that he was legally required to give back, according to the IRS.

So they have to find some weakness somewhere. And this is the closest they've gotten: a private and confidential religious practice, which affects only his standing before his church and his God, and which came to light only because of the quirks of the U.S. tax code (which requires charitable contributions to be reported) and the U.S. political system (which requires - not by law, but by public acclamation - that candidates for political office make their tax records public).

Postscript: For the record, I am still not an official supporter of Mitt Romney. I keep my religious affiliation separate from my political preferences. (So does Romney - or at least he would, if people would let him.) It really bugs me to see these politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, putting their religion on their sleeves, like a secret signal to fellow believers or an endorsement from God. While other candidates tell reporters where they're going to church on Sunday, and even invite reporters to accompany them, Mitt quietly slips away for three hours to perform his devotions, away from the public eye. And it amuses me to hear so many of them (I think the count is up to four, and Romney's not one of them) claim that God told them to run for president. If I vote for Mitt Romney, it will be because I think he is the best qualified candidate for the office, regardless of his religious affiliation.

Thoughts on the South Carolina Republican primary

I think it's pretty funny that the conservative voters in South Carolina chose the practicing polygamist. Or in other words, to quote Senator Boies Penrose in 1906, they chose a monogamist who can't monog over a polygamist who won't polyg.

Word peeve: an egregious overuse of a perfectly good word

Remember studying comparative and superlative in school?  Good, better, best. Bad, worse, worst. Fast, faster, fastest. Many, more, most.

For years, a beautiful word lurked in the huge English dictionaries at high schools and universities. It meant "bad". Really bad. Bad-beyond-superlative-bad. The kind of bad that only exists in a few rare places in space and time. The word was "egregious".

Then O.J. Simpson went on trial for the murder of a couple of people. One of the teams of lawyers discovered the word "egregious" (thanks for nothing, Mr. Roget) and started using it in court. Over and over. Then the other team of lawyers latched onto it and started overusing it. Then the reporters covering the trial started using it on TV. (But not in original print, astonishingly. I guess it's too hard for reporters to spell.)

Suddenly everybody in the English-speaking world was using "egregious" when any one of a number of other synonyms for "very bad" would have sufficed. It lost its sense of "really, really, bad". The poor word got overused to the point of meaninglessness.

At least it relieved some of the pressure on "heinous".

Word peeve: The proof is emphatically NOT in the pudding.

A long time ago (relatively speaking), the English language included a useful proverb about pudding. Let's take this proverb into the 21st Century, and go into any gelateria. You go in and look at all the gelato behind the glass panel, and you see one called "mascarpone". The description sounds pretty good, so you ask the clerk "Is it any good?" The clerk pulls out a tiny plastic spoon, scoops up a sample and lets you try it.

Why?

Because if she just tells you it's good, you'll have to take her word for it. The proof of whether mascarpone-flavored gelato is any good comes from actually tasting a sample.

In other words, "the proof of the gelato is in the tasting."

Now go back in time a century or more, into Jolly Olde England, and try the same experiment with a pudding vendor in the streets of London. You don't know whether the pudding is any good until you try it yourself. Hence, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."

It's another way of saying "try before you buy". We use the concept when buying automobiles, home entertainment systems, tuxedos and fancy dresses.

But sometime in the end of the 20th Century, some ignorant mangler of the English language got it wrong, and said "The proof is in the pudding." And it stuck.

The proof OF WHAT is in the pudding? Did you stick raisins in it? Do you want me to go digging around in it with a spoon, looking for hidden treasure?

The proof of the quality of the pudding lies in the eating of it, not in its ingredients or in its mere existence.

Word peeve: nuclear

In my previous two peeves, I pointed out a couple of metaphors that get regularly mangled. Somebody is sure to tell me that the English language is constantly evolving, and I might as well accept the fact that these mangled metaphors are part of that evolution. To this, I reply "Oh, I hope not."

However, I think may as well wave the white flag on this next one.

Nuclear power entered civilization's collective consciousness with a bang - two bangs, in fact, in Japan, in 1945. Fortunately, those were the only two times that the nuclear demon has been unleashed in anger. After the war, the demon was harnessed and put to work to create steam and electrical power.

Along the way, English-speaking people began increasingly to mispronounce the word "nuclear". It's like the missing "r" in "library" and "February": some do, some don't, and the ones that do, sound stupid. I'm sorry, but it's true.

The correct pronunciation is "NOO-clear". Or maybe "NOOK-lear". They sound the same to me.

The wrong pronunciation is "NOOK-you-ler." It sounds like "jugular", but with "nuke" replacing "jug". If that were the right way to say it, wouldn't we spell it "nucular"? But we don't, do we?

Go ahead and call me intolerant. I'm also intolerant of the sound of fingernails scratching on a chalkboard, and "nucular" sounds about the same to me as those fingernails.

But like I said, I'm fighting a losing battle. U.S. President Jimmy Carter always pronounced it "NOOK-you-ler". Before he was president, he was a millionaire peanut farmer. And before that, he was an officer in the U.S. Navy.

In the submarine corps.

As a nuclear engineer.

And he has a lot more credibility than I do.

Word peeve: "home in" versus "hone in"

This one's a little more insidious. It can't be blamed solely upon the Internet, and we can only blame TV for its spread, not its origin. I don't even know where it originated, but I've heard some respected and intelligent people making this mistake.

You've heard of homing pigeons, right? You can take them hundreds of miles from their home, release them, and after enough time, you can find them back at their home.

In the 20th century, air forces invented a type of missile called a "homing missile" - you know, like a "homing pigeon." Just as a homing pigeon could find its way to its destination without guidance, so a homing missile could find its way to a target without any guidance from the pilot who fired the missile. The Sidewinder heat-seeking missile is the most well-known example of a homing missile.

A homing missile finds its target, and then "locks on" to the target, getting progressively closer to it until it hits it. This is called "homing in." A related metaphor is "zeroing in."

Somewhere along the line, someone substituted an "n" for the "m", and "honing in" was born. The reverse etymology for this term referred to honing as the act of putting a sharper edge on a knife or an axe, so that it could penetrate difficult material better.

But "homing in" with an "m" is the act of focusing on something and steering ever closer to it, ignoring any distractions or obstacles, and the metaphor of the homing missile makes sense. Trying to use "honing in" with an "n" in the same way makes no sense at all. In fact, it sounds stupid.

I'll bet people that say "honing in" also say "NOOK-you-ler" instead of "NOO-clear."

And with those last two sentences, I'm sure I've offended somebody. I'm sorry. And now I'm done.