Why Christmas Matters to America

    This is a dark and difficult time in America. Violence is in our schools, discord is in our national institutions, decline haunts our dreams, want and need stand threatening at the door. The season of joy and giving seems hollow, as though something is missing.

     But of course, something IS missing.  Perhaps more than ever before the real message of the real Christmas is missing from our national narrative. And I don’t mean that warm emotional feeling that goes with giving Christmas gifts to old friends, or watching tots await Santa’s visit, or drinking cocoa at grandma’s snow covered house, or even giving food to the poor. I am talking about the core understanding of how life works for our people and our nation -- how this specific holiday fits into our narrative of who we are and how we act. So here is a Christmas review of the real Christmas story and why it is so important to us as Americans. The story we have forgotten follows this logic:

·         There is a God – a first cause – a Creator.

·         He created Man as a unique creature – with the instincts of other animals, but the intelligence and ability to reason beyond our passions and instincts. So man occupies a unique place in nature, with unique value, but unique responsibilities as well.

·         Those responsibilities are to respect God and the guidelines He established. The resulting healthy balance between God, believers and other people brings happiness and fulfillment in this life and the next.

·         But because of their base nature, men and women consistently reject God and His guidelines. Instead, they “sin” – which means to fall short of the mark – in their behavior toward God, their own selves, and others.

·         When people turn from God to embrace selfishness and irresponsibility, the decline and fall of the individual and the society inevitably follows. This is the story of Eden, of earth before Israel, of the Israel of the Old Testament, and of all nations everywhere for all times – past and future. Freedom without respect toward God and self-restraint toward our fellow man is simply license – the destruction that follows is as certain as gravity. The miseries of this earth are the direct result of mankind’s misbehavior.

·         With the original Christmas – the birth of Jesus -- God tried a new approach. Instead of rules delivered by priests, he offered principles delivered to us directly – his mouth to our ears.   “Love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus said.  Control your behavior with these principles and you can govern yourself and your society. The path to self-control and governance (and thus salvation) is through belief in Jesus as God, and thus adherence to the principles He teaches.

·         Delivering this good news, that men and women can be saved from their own nature to live respectfully toward God and each other, cost Jesus his earthly life. But it successfully established for 1600 years of Western history the belief and self-discipline of Christianity as THE solution to the challenges of this life and the next.

·         Initially the political and religious elite controlled the way this message was distributed, and they emphasized the sinful nature of man, excusing their own dominance and opening the door for their abuse of power.

·         But once new learning (the Renaissance) and technology (printing) allowed the principles of Jesus to be translated and read by all the people, the value of the individual, the ability of the individual to govern his/her own behavior, and the responsibility to do so, became clear. This moment was called the Reformation (in Martin Luther’s words, every man could and should be his own bishop). The associated ideas of individual worth, individual capability, and individual responsibility – all endowed by a Creator -- changed the world.

·         In Europe the old regime stood in the way of this revolutionary concept. So Christian believers fled to America, where they established a society dedicated to putting these exceptional ideas into practice. The New World provided a new opportunity to avoid some of the institutional sins of the past, and the result was “American Exceptionalism” – an imperfect but self-correcting social, political and economic system that promoted freedom and creativity for every individual, but demanded individual responsibility and accountability in exchange.

·         America has not been perfect. It is populated after all by humans, each of whom carries the dual nature of sinner and saint, capable of selfish rebellion or responsible behavior.

·         But America’s embrace of the real Christmas Story – the ability of every individual to be saved from his animal nature, and to rise above it to govern himself, and cooperate in the good governance of society –established the foundation of American government and society, and made it the most successful and envied in history.

     The way this embrace has played out in politics and economics, its failures and triumphs, its detractors and competitors, and how its abandonment by citizens has precipitated a troubling national decline, are all subjects for separate exploration.  But for this Christmas Season, please accept this gift, explaining why THE Gift of Christmas – God’s son come down to explain our worth, our opportunities and our responsibilities -- still matters to America today.     Dave McIntyre

CENTERLINE

I have a firm rule against using my blogs to hype my own books. Writing your own book review just doesn’t seem right.  But each week (5:25 pm Central) I conduct a 15 minute interview with Dan Cofall and Danny Stewart  on the Wall Street Shuffle radio program. (Heard on 1190 AM in the Dallas-Ft Worth area and on other stations nationwide). I also provide them a blog piece to start our discussion. And this week we will be discussing my new novel, CENTERLINE. So here is the one exception to my rule.

CENTERLINE is a fictional account of a real event – the trip home for wounded warriors who have finished their time in military hospitals and return to their communities for recuperation or discharge. The military medical system may treat patients at a variety of military hospitals depending on their specific need: orthopedics, burn recovery, etc. When they are well enough, they are consolidated at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, for aeromedical evacuation home. They travel by C-130 transport aircraft. Nothing fancy – it is the same aircraft that carries supplies to disasters or troops into combat. But it also carries an experienced medical team and their equipment to provide excellent medical care enroute.

So periodically this large transport aircraft arrives at a local or regional airport--say Lubbock, Texas or Garden City, Kansas—and drops off a wounded warrior headed for recovery at home.  Sometimes there is a big crowd and a band to meet the vet. Sometimes just a small group of family.  Sometime there is no one at all.

My youngest son piloted some of those flights at Christmastime during the Surge in Iraq. He also evacuated wounded from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. My older son deployed to Iraq as did his wife, several more of my family members, and a number of friends. Several of my friends returned wounded, and more returned changed in ways even they don’t quite understand. I have known doctors and nurses who participated in the treatment and evacuation of wounded. And I have known many military mothers and spouses—six in my own family—who have done the job of two parents while waiting out deployments and operations and praying for a safe return.

Given the 37 years I spent in uniform, from high school through retirement as Dean of the National War College, I was especially sensitive to the story of these heroes – those who served, and those who waited at home for an uncertain return. I came to realize that everyone who goes to war is wounded in some way – in the body or in the heart. And I became convinced that this was a story that someone needed to tell.

The result is CENTERLINE: the story of Air Evac 1492, a great but tired transport aircraft carrying 31 souls on board through bad weather, inflight emergencies, and the demons of the past in an effort to get bodies and psyches home to heal and back on center.

          At this point, let me turn to a review provided by Colonel Randall (Randy) Larsen, U.S. Air Force (Ret.). He is the founding director of the Institute for Homeland Security and the author of Our Own Worst Enemy: Asking the Right Questions About Security to Protect You, Your Family, and America (Warner Books, 2007). He retired from the Air Force in July 2000 after serving in both the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force (USAF) for a combined total of 32 years. His flying career, which included 400 combat missions in Vietnam as an officer in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, began as a 19-year-old Cobra pilot. His Air Force service included a tour as commanding officer of the USAF’s fleet of VIP aircraft at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Here is what he wrote in Domestic Preparedness http://www.domesticpreparedness.com/Commentary/Viewpoint/DPJ_Book_Review%3a_Centerline/  :  
        David (Dave) McIntyre, a name well known in the field of homeland security, has written his first novel. Many in the U.S. armed forces who have already read the book have highly recommended it.
        The concept of “Centerline” was created when Dave spoke with his son Sam shortly after the young soldier had returned from his second tour flying C-130s in Iraq. Sam told his dad about racing a huge sandstorm to an airbase just outside Baghdad. In most circumstances, he would have diverted, but the medical crew in the back said that several of the aircraft’s more critically injured passengers would die if they did not get to the base’s critical-care facility immediately.
        As Sam talked about landing in what are called zero-zero conditions – i.e., no visibility, either vertically or horizontally – Dave remembered that only five years earlier he had been reluctant to loan the family car to this immature college student. Dave was now listening to a different man – a professional military officer, mature far beyond his years.
       “Centerline” is a fact-based, fictional account of a C-130 flight, and its medical crew, taking wounded warriors home for Christmas. It tells the arresting story of the last leg of that journey through the eyes of the patients, the crew, and the medical caregivers. Each person on board has a unique individual story of hopes, dreams, fears, and even a few regrets as the aircraft wings its human cargo home through dangerously bad weather – frequently punctuated by emotional flashbacks and difficult in-flight emergencies. “Everybody who goes to war gets shot,” one soldier says. “Some in the body. Some in the head. Some in the heart.”
        McIntyre has all of the professional credentials needed to write such an inspiring and insightful novel. He taught English at West Point (and wrote his master’s thesis on American war novels). He also served as the Dean of Academics and Faculty at the U.S. National War College in Washington, D.C. In writing “Centerline,” he worked in close collaboration with Jay Lavender, a Hollywood writer/producer. McIntyre’s two sons – Roy, a third-generation Army ranger, and Sam, a U.S. Air Force pilot who recently returned from his 11th combat deployment – assisted in the technical editing.
        There already are plans to turn “Centerline” into a movie or a television mini-series. Set as it is at Christmas in 2007, there is no doubt that it is destined to become a holiday classic.

You can learn more at CENTERLINE at http://CenterlineTheBook.com or
https://www.facebook.com/CenterlineTheBook

It’s Simple Math

That’s what the President said recently about his plan to solve the debt and deficit crisis. If “we can just get the richest Americans to pay a little more,” we can solve this fiscal problem.

Not even close.

At least the Republicans have stopped claiming (as they did throughout the election) that the problem will go away if we can just get enough tax cuts to create more jobs.

Both claims are simply wrong. On a galactic scale. Here is some simple math that explains why.

In very round numbers, this year’s federal budget is about $ 4.5 Trillion.  About 60% of that budget (a bit less than $3 Trillion - what we are actually spending) is paid for by taxes. About 40% (more than $1.5 Trillion) is borrowed.

(By the way, it is NOT borrowed primarily from China or Japan any more, but from the U.S. Treasury. That’s right -- we are now routinely printing money to buy the bonds we issue. We are inventing money with nothing behind it and lending it to ourselves to pay our debts. We have seen this before in history and it leads to catastrophe. Not the “Jimmy Carter 14% interest” kind of catastrophe. But the “Germany in 1935 - 5 million DM for a loaf of bread” kind of catastrophe.  But that is a story for another day.)

The 40% we are borrowing is 2/3 of the 60% we are actually funding.  This is not hard – follow me here. If we are going to balance the debt without cuts:

·         We either need to raise 2/3 more money by new taxes above the tax we pay now,  OR

·         We need to raise 2/3 more taxes at the current rate through new jobs.

Got it now? Raise every federal tax in America (income tax, gas tax, customs tax, etc.) ON EVERYBODY by 66%, or increase the number of jobs by 66%. Both absolutely impossible.

      Let’s look at the Dem solution first: Don't tax the middle class -- just raise taxes on the top 2% (it used to be 1% -- remember “we are the 99%”?)  The “simple math” does not work.  Even if you tax every penny of the earnings of the top 2 %, you still fall far short of this year’s $1.5+ Trillion deficit. And of course, this does not pay a penny toward the existing $16 Trillion debt.   (Read that sentence quickly – because the debt is about to zoom over the Congressional limit once again).  Also, if you take all of the earnings from the 2%, they quit working and earning for next year.  As the Soviets found out, you can confiscate everything from “the rich” just one time.  Then you have to confiscate the wealth of the “nearly-rich” – and so on, and so on, etc.  Keep raising taxes and people work and save less because they do not get to keep the profit from their labor. That is why socialism always fails eventually. Always. The Dem solution of taxing the rich to cover the deficit cannot possibly work. The rich don't have enough money.

Now the Rep solution – cut taxes to grow the economy enough to close the deficit by taxing the new growth at the old rates. But remember, all our current jobs only pay 60% of the taxes we need to cover annual spending. To break even we need 40% more. That requires growing jobs by 2/3. Really? How much of a tax cut do you think business needs to encourage them to hire 2/3 more people? Sell 2/3 more product? Create 2/3 more businesses?  Impossible.  The Rep solution for covering the deficit can’t work either.

And remember, these solutions fail to pay the DEFICIT for just this year’s budget.  The DEBT is TEN TIMES AS LARGE.  The debt does not seem to matter much now because the Treasury can control the interest rate it is paying, since it is essentially printing pretend money to lend to itself. This is the key to the whole scheme.  If you could pay your mortgage by printing money and lending to yourself, you could lend at 0% interest – because you would be paying it back to yourself.  Get it?  

            Since the election, the initial Republican plan – cutting taxes to promote new growth – is entirely off the table. The Republican Plan B is “just don’t end the tax cuts put in place 10 years ago.” That is not enough to grow any new jobs, but maybe (they argue) it will keep the economy from getting worse. As a concession to surrendering on new cuts, they want reductions in social spending (benefits). And they are willing to compromise with the Dems by means testing those reductions. (So if you are in the middle class, your taxes remain the same, but the benefits you paid into are reduced when you come to claim them.)

The President’s response is a political “in your face.”  Keep the 10 year old reductions (again, these are not new cuts and will not generate new growth) on “the 98%” (or more precisely 51% of the 53 % that actually pay taxes. Jack up taxes on the top 2%. Reduce some benefits by means testing. And dramatically increase other benefits – and the deficit in the process.

Again, neither solution can possibly work – the deficit and debt are way larger than the solutions being offered.  Unless social benefits are reduced, taxes must go up on everyone. And the one thing both parties are willing to give up is the government benefits earned by the middle class who paid for them.

Oh yes – for those who say “take the cuts from the military.”  Total military spending is about 18% of the budget. Remember, 40% of spending is borrowed.  So close the entire Department of Defense, shut every base, release every soldier, park every ship and tank and airplane, and stop paying every retiree, and you are still spending 22% more than you  are taking in.

If your grown daughter is spending 40% more than she is taking in, would you advise her to just get a job making 40% more? Or cut spending a little and get more income? No!  You would tell her "Stop spending now! We can worry about the better job and more income later. Stop digging the hole now!” It’s simple math.

So why don’t we?  Watch this space for the answer.