‘Nuns on the Bus’ tour spoke truth to power

Bill Knight column for Nov. 12, 13 or 14, 2018

Starting in Santa Monica, Calif., Oct. 8 and traveling through 21 states on the way to President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, Fla., days before the midterm election, the Nuns on the Bus tour on Oct. 18 stopped in Illinois.

With the theme “Tax Justice Truth Tour,” 35 Catholic sisters rotating as teams of 10 throughout the trek targeted the consequences, present and future, of the $1.5 trillion tax cut Congress passed in 2017. The sixth such coast-to-coast tour in seven years, the bus held 54 events in 44 cities.

“This time, we’re coming out to hold our politicians accountable for defunding [entitlement] programs,” said Daughters of Charity Sister Mary Ellen Lacey of Maryland, a one-time nursing-home administrator who’s part of the grassroots mobilization team of Nuns on the Bus sponsor Network, a Catholic social-justice advocacy group. “We’re stopping at different [Congressional] Districts and asking, ‘Why make votes that hurt your people?’

For decades, the Republican Party has wanted to cut or eliminate Social Security, but since its 1934 inception, the popular program has been relatively safe. But after President Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress last year passed a tax cut that shifted more wealth to the richest Americans and largest corporations despite repeatedly claiming the GOP sought fiscal prudence, they’ve now re-discovered deficits and look to balance the books by cutting Social Security and other entitlements.

The government’s budget deficit went up 17 percent to $779 billion from Fiscal Year 2017 to FY 2018, according to the Treasury Department. It grew mostly because of the tax cut’s drop in revenue – putting the lie to Republican claims that it would pay for itself when GOP lawmakers approved in in the House 227-205 and 51-48 in the Senate, with no Democrats supporting it.

Last month, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell from Kentucky told Bloomberg News that rising deficits are due to over-spending on entitlement programs.

“McConnell wants to cut these humanitarian programs. This is insane,” Sister Lacey said. “The tax bill threatens the people we care about.”

The tax measure, deceptively titled “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” provided an average $33,000 tax break to each of the wealthiest Americans and just $40 to the poorest, according to Tax Policy Center analysis.

Illinoisans will suffer from the law, says the Nuns on the Bus, who call it “the Tax Heist.”

“The Tax Heist cuts taxes for members of Illinois’ top 1% by $58,750 next year,” they said. “Plus, 29 percent of Illinoisans – nearly 1.8 million taxpayers – will see a tax increase when the law is fully phased in – families facing a tax hike will see their taxes increase by $970 on average next year. And the Republican Tax Heist will result in 525,000 Illinoisans losing access to affordable health care.”

While criticizing Republicans, the nuns stressed that they’re nonpartisan, and allies say that the issue is beyond politics-as-usual.

“I am not a knee-jerk Democrat,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works. “In the 1970s, I worked for a Republican Senator, and in the early 1980s, I was the top assistant to conservative economist Alan Greenspan in his position as chair of the bipartisan Social Security Reform Commission. Mainstream Republican presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George H.W. Bush, have supported Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But no more.

“Right-wing extremists – who hate all government programs that improve people’s lives – are currently in charge of the Republican Party,” she added.

The GOP’s own “saint,” the late President Ronald Reagan, on Oct. 7, 1984, said, “Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. Social Security is totally funded by the payroll tax levied on employer and employee. If you reduce the outgo of Social Security, that money would not go into the General Fund to reduce the deficit. It would go into the Social Security Trust Fund. So Social Security has nothing to do with balancing the budget or erasing or lowering the deficit.”

Sister Lacey was direct.

“Now is not the time to de-fund these programs,” she said. “We don’t want our tax money to go to the wealthy – they have so much – and then look to the poor to pay that bill.

“We expect the most wealthy to pay their fair share,” she added. “We want to care for each other. We all do better when we all do better.”