Will the Next National Struggle be over Age? - Dr. Steve Elwart - www.harvest.org
An interesting article came out in the Washington Examiner last week. The article pointed out that there has been a massive shift in population distribution in the United States since the 1950's. The shift has been so great in fact that the over 40% of the seats in the House of Representatives has shifted from eleven states in primarily the "rust belt" of the U.S. to the Southeast and Western U.S, along with Texas.
The reason for the shift has been blamed on the high taxes in states like Massachusetts and Connecticut, while the "low tax" states such as Texas and Florida has seen booming growth.
People and businesses are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet in states that overtax and overregulate and for the past 60 years they have been voting with their feet.
Northern and northeastern politicians, see the writing on the wall, that their power is slipping away will begin to introduce legislation to make it against federal law for state and local legislators to levy "predatory taxes" in their areas. "Predatory Taxes" mean taxes that are lower than other states in the Nation. What is wanted is for all the states to levy the same tax as every other state so that people and companies will not have an incentive to move.
This is a legislative move that may actually start to have traction. High tax states wants other states to tax "fairly" while low tax states may want such a law to provide cover for them to raise taxes.
Whether there is a conflict over tax rates among the states, there will definitely be a fight over "who gets what".
People in or approaching retirement will demand that their Social Security payments are preserved, while younger workers will balk at continuing to pay higher taxes to support seniors in a program they had no say in joining.
Public service unions (i. e. state, municipal, and teacher unions) will fight hard to keep their benefits while taxpayers will continually balk at paying taxes to support a level of benefits they could only dream of.
What many political watchers fear is a battle between two (or three) generations. The Boomers (those either getting ready to or have retired) and those younger tax payers who have to pay the bill for their elder's benefits.
Some believe that this is just one facet on what some believe is a coming "war on elders."
If there is a coming war, it will fit the continuing narrative on life itself. Starting in the womb, people have debated when life began. The definition of the beginning of life began with it being at conception to the horrific notion that the beginning of life does not actually begin until a baby is fully delivered, leading to partial birth abortions.
Now man has taken this abomination one step further. In February 2012, writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME), Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argued in 'After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?', that fetuses and newborns 'do not have the same moral status as actual persons'. They concluded that 'after birth abortion' (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled'.
These bioethicists are arguing that infanticide is morally no different to abortion.
Rather than being dismissed as ridiculous and morally repugnant, this theory is being openly debated. The thinking being that it is not life itself that is sacred; it is the quality of life that is important. If a child has a lo9w quality of living, it isn't really human, since it is not being "fulfilled".
The consistent theme here is a president was started where is was acceptable to abort a living being. Over time, definitions of "life" were moved so that a child could be aborted later and later in a pregnancy. Finally, a fully formed and developed child could be killed.
If the same article, Giubilini and Minerva argue that the child could be killed up to the age of two, because they are not self-sufficient, therefore have a low quality of life.
Once the terms "sanctity of life" and "quality of life" are comingled, the same argument used to euthanize infants can be used on the elderly.
If an infant needs to have a "meaningful "quality of life" to live, why shouldn't that argument be used for the elderly?
That argument has already been used in Europe to legalize euthanasia.
In the Netherlands, which is often in the forefront of liberal social movements, euthanasia has been practiced for some time, although it's legal status was ambiguous.
In 1984 the Dutch Supreme Court ruled voluntary euthanasia was acceptable, provided doctors followed strict guidelines. But, under Dutch criminal law, physicians could still face prosecution. In the fall 2000, the Dutch parliament voted to formally legalize the practice, making the Netherlands the first nation in the world to do so.
It was the first nation since Nazi Germany to legalize euthanasia.
Critics charge the right to die could quickly become "the duty to die," pressuring on the terminally ill to take their own lives when they believe they have become a burden. They say the elderly will be afraid to enter hospitals for fear of being euthanized.
'The Dutch experience shows that euthanasia becomes routine,' she added. 'It traps more and more people into thinking they ought to leave this world prematurely. 'In that kind of culture euthanasia becomes expected and inevitable and everything else - such as good palliative care and a functional hospice movement - is gradually portrayed as rather selfish.' Nikki Kenward of Distant Voices, a disability rights group, said: 'These numbers fill me with fear and horror.
Great Britain and some other European nations are following close behind the Dutch model and allow doctors to stop trying to prolong the life of a terminal patient.
The United States is not far behind. Euthanasia is illegal in all states of the United States, but physician aid in dying (PAD), or assisted suicide, is legal in the states of Washington, Oregon, Montana, Vermont and New Mexico. The key difference between euthanasia and PAD is who administers the lethal dose of medication. Euthanasia entails the physician or another third party administering the medication, whereas PAD requires the patient to self-administer the medication and to determine whether and when to do this.
There is a real fear that as the U.S. economy worsens, that "duty to die" may put more pressure on legislatures to pass euthanasia laws and for the older generation to use them. As Colorado's former governor Richard Lamm once famously said, elderly people who are terminally ill have a ''duty to die and get out of the way'' instead of trying to prolong their lives by artificial means. (This was said in the context of the costs of medical treatment that allows some terminally ill people to live longer was ruining the nation's economic health.)
By contrast the Christian view of the sanctity of life at any age is that human beings have value not because of any 'intrinsic' qualities, but for two main 'extrinsic' reasons. First, that they are made in the image of God for an eternal relationship with Him, and second because God Himself became a human being in the person of Jesus Christ and thereby bestowed unique dignity on the human race.
If we follow that view through to its logical conclusion it leads us to say that any human being, regardless of its age, appearance, degree of deformity or mental capacity, is worthy of the highest possible degree of protection, empathy, wonder and respect.
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