Henry Idema: The morality of debt

In one English translation of the Lord's Prayer, Jesus prays, "Forgive us our debts." To borrow the title of one of the Beach Boys' greatest hits, "Wouldn't it be nice."

We can interpret Jesus as saying forgive us for having debt, or, as with President Biden's plan on student debt, Jesus perhaps is offering a prayer to wipe out our debt or part of it. I am not going to debate the intent of the original Aramaic Jesus spoke, but I would like to point out that the early church over time moved away from the economic implications of Jesus' teaching to a broader "spiritual" meaning. In Luke 6:20 Jesus says, "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God." In Matthew 5:3 Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God."

All of us, at least at times, are poor in spirit. Sadly, too many of us are simply poor. And one of the reasons so many of us are poor is that too many of us are buried in debt.

CNBC, a business channel on cable TV, reported that households added $351 billion in overall debt in the second to the last quarter of 2021. According to Sarah Hansen in the magazine MONEY, credit card balances rose to $916 billion last September. I am sure the holidays added billions more to our debt.

Our national debt is now over $31 trillion. President George W. Bush doubled it from $5-$10 trillion, and then President Obama took it to $20 trillion and President Trump added another $7 trillion plus. And President Biden is now also adding to the national debt.

There are many reasons for all this debt, some good, some bad, but one thing is for sure, both Republicans and Democrats are responsible for this mountain of debt. The GOP used to stand for fiscal responsibility but no more.

The major reason we have inflation is too much deficit spending by our federal government and too much spending beyond our means by us Americans.

When I served as a priest in an Episcopal church (Church of the Holy Spirit) in Lake Forest, Illinois, in the mid-1980s, we had two members in the church who were listed in the Forbes 400 richest Americans. They were multimillionaires and there were few if any billionaires on that list back then. Now you need to be a billionaire to make that list. One major reason is the government's deficit spending. Too many dollars sloshing around in our economy, which end up in the billionaires' bank accounts. There are now over 2,000 of them!

All this deficit spending and our national debt are putting our children in a precarious position. We Baby Boomers are leaving our children a horrible legacy, and it is not the peace and love from our younger years. What my generation (along with members from other generations both older and younger) has done by piling up this mountain of debt on the backs of our children is a sin. What we have done by creating this crushing debt is immoral.

I have written articles on debt many times over the past 20 years, and I always hear this feedback: We needed deficit spending during a time of crisis, e.g., the bank collapse in 2008. Maybe so, but even in the good times we keep on spending more than we are taking in at the federal level, and in far too many households. Bush gave us the Iraq war funded on a credit card. Trump gave us massive tax cuts but not enough cuts in spending to prevent more national debt. Biden has passed an amazing amount of spending bills which will benefit the American people (e.g., infrastructure and chip bills, limits on drug prices, etc.). But we are still piling up the debt, and I do not hear much outrage about this, I never hear about plans by our politicians or TV hosts about how to pay off our national debt, not to speak of reducing deficit spending.

There was much outrage about Biden's plan to forgive student debt. Yet we bailed out the banks in 2008 without much complaining, or I should say, with not enough outrage. So any help we can give students — on at need basis — will be liberating if it ever happens.

I will now close this harangue with my pet peeve on this whole subject of debt: the cost of education. When I went to the University of Michigan in 1965, my tuition was only a couple of hundred dollars per term. My college costs were easily paid for by summer jobs and working a bit during the academic school year (I had a rock band). The federal government got into the student loan business after I graduated. So schools started raising the costs of education on the backs of students, who took out loans they could not pay back. And, surprise surprise, tuition and the salaries of the staffs at these schools went up and up. Far more than the rate of inflation. Moreover, I question the quality of much of this education, which is a subject for another day.

So our young people are getting crushed by this mountain of student debt. The interest alone is difficult to keep up with. To repeat, and we can not say this enough times — what we as a society are doing to our young people with this crushing debt is immoral. The whole idea of buy now and pay latter preached by higher education is a seductive sermon, and most students can not read between the lines.

Not all debt is immoral but much of it is. President Clinton signed into law as part of an education bill that student debt could not be wiped out by declaring bankruptcy. That was immoral. Congress could change this, and there is pressure to do so. Do not count on that happening soon, however.

Sadly, I do not see debt reduction or having balanced budgets as priorities of any political party. Which is why I hope that someday we get a third political party whose focus is fiscal responsibility along with being socially liberal on the cultural issues which are dividing our country. These divisive cultural issues are being used by politicians, clergy, and the media as a smoke screen to hide the amount of debt we are piling up on all levels. That is the true immorality of our debt crisis, our blindness as to what debt is doing to the souls of our people, to the security of our families and to those who are coming after us.

That blindness to our debt crisis is the gravest sin of all because we are failing to help people who are suffering. Lord forgive our sin of debt.

— Henry Idema lives in Grand Haven. He can be reached at henryidema3@yahoo.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Henry Idema: The morality of debt