Mark Whitehouse reported in the September 25th issue of the Wall Street Journal that the living standards of average Americans will have to be adjusted downward in coming years because a larger share of our national debt is going to debt-service. He writes, “That means Americans will have to work harder to maintain the same living standards—or cut back sharply to pay down the debt.” Catherine Mann, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics notes, “Our net international obligations are coming home to roost. It’s as if on our personal MasterCards we have run up large obligations and never had to make personal payments. You can’t believe that is going to last forever.”

I am not a professional economist but such news makes me wonder how we will really handle these things as a nation when the spend-spend-spend spigot is finally turned off. The pay day is coming, maybe sooner than later. Our prosperity is always one really bad cycle from a serious implosion and then the country will either adjust corporately, and grow stronger morally and spiritually, or it will […]

In a blog posted on October 2 I wrote: "First, if you want to change a society you must first change the culture, not the politics. Second, modern liberals are morally challenged when it comes to culture."

A friend, who is a Christian accountant, wrote the following personal response (used with permission) to my comments:

Here’s my local church experience. No one seems to be interested in these [cultural and biblical] issues. When I speak to other Christians (including pastors) about a transformed life, both individually and corporately, I get a blank stare. Ask someone to actually read an article that might inspire a discussion on what God would want us to be in our culture . . . no time to read it. I find that we must plead with leaders to admit that "decisions" [for Christ] without discipleship (in our experience) inevitably lead to baptism without fruit. 

We’ve plenty of time for Sunday school but that has shown no meaningful effect in decades of effort. We’ve plenty of time to encourage people to attend a public […]

I occasionally listen to the liberal talk-radio station in Chicago. The longer I listen to liberal (or progressive) talk-show hosts and commentators the more evident it becomes to me that most of these folks are extremely bright but morally challenged. One such liberal national radio host is the infamous Jerry Springer, the former mayor of Cincinnati. Springer was crowing last week about how the liberals have already won America. (He could be right but the evidence is, generally speaking, still quite anecdotal.) Springer said: “We may not be winning all the elections yet but give us time since we are winning the culture wars!”

Jerry Springer’s argument was based upon his personal vision of moral values, which in his case is an extremely limited vision in terms of anything you could remotely define as decency and morality. He asked, “What books do young people read? What shows do they watch? What music do they listen to? Where do they spend their time? What are their real sexual practices?” He concluded that the evidence abounds that liberals have won the day and the […]