In a time of austerity it is salutary once more to ask: what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? This is not to argue for a “Bible-says-it-all politics”, which has been out of fashion since our disastrous flirtation with it in the English Civil War of the 17th century. It is simply to recognise that all politics rest on assumptions; myths properly understood, not as fairytales but as archetypal stories about the human condition.

Both our economic activity and our political life must have ground beneath them. Human beings are not just blind globs of idling protoplasm but creatures with a name who live in a world of symbols and of dreams, not merely of matter.

If we are not only to survive this period of austerity, but even to learn to flourish in it, then we shall have to relearn a more adequate story of what is precious about human life. The story of the birth of the infant king in a poor family is a good starting place.

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…unlike the debt-ceiling drama and the destructive impasse over a grand bargain to rein in the spiraling national debt, a stalemate on the payroll tax could be good for Social Security, good for the deficit, and good for disproving the conviction that “temporary” tax cuts must never be allowed to expire.

Let us explain.

As we’ve pointed out previously, the 2-percentage-point cut in the payroll tax (from 6.2% to 4.2%) might give a short-term boost to the economy, but it contributes to Social Security’s long-term insolvency at a time when the retirement program is already paying out more in benefits than it is collecting in taxes. A one-year extension would drive up next year’s federal deficit by more than $100 billion.
The payroll tax issue also raises the question of whether there’s any such thing as a temporary tax cut. At the end of next year, the unaffordable Bush tax cuts are set to expire. Extending the payroll tax cut would set a precedent and give ammunition to those who want another extension of the Bush cuts, adding as much as $5 trillion to deficits over the coming decade.

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Underemployment, a measure that combines the percentage of workers who are unemployed with the percentage working part time but wanting full-time work, is 18.4% in mid-December, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment. This is up slightly from 18.1% at the end of November and similar to the 18.5% of a year ago.

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What this means is that there are Christians who already occupy Wall Street every day in their occupations as businessmen and women, bankers and investors, traders and executives, secretaries and receptionists, janitors and security guards. The church’s responsibility to these “occupiers” is to provide them with the moral and spiritual formation necessary to be faithful followers of Christ every day in their productive service to others.

A group of business and ministry leaders in the UK articulated this in a recent letter to The Times of London, in which they observed, “Many Christians today work within mainstream business, attempting to be ‘salt and light’. Others run organizations . . . that are committed to using business and finance to bring social benefits, raise living standards and create jobs.” Through these kinds of efforts such business leaders “are part of the broader effort of the Church to reform capitalism by going to the root of the problem: the human heart.”

Christians therefore must occupy the world in their occupations, doing all their work as Christians, whatever it is, “whether in word or deed,” as the Apostle Paul instructs, “in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:17 NIV). In this way the church finds its most significant and transformative cultural engagement through its affirmation of the daily work of Christians who already occupy Wall Street (and all streets).

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In Afghanistan, Cpl. Clayton Rhoden earned about $2,500 a month jumping into helicopters to chase down improvised explosive devices or check out suspected bomb factories.

Now he lives with his parents, sells his blood plasma for $80 a week and works what extra duty he can get for his Marine Corps Reserve unit.

Cpl. Rhoden, who is 25, gawky and polite with a passion for soldiering, is one of the legions of veterans who served in combat yet have a harder time finding work than other people their age, a situation that officials say will grow worse as the United States completes its pullout of Iraq and as, by a White House estimate, a million new veterans join the workforce over the next five years.

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Read them both.

I was interested to see the AP describe the Presiding Bishop’s remarks as “a rare comment on a local issue.”

Continuing the region’s recent streak of national recognition, greater Charleston has been tagged as one of the economically healthiest metropolitan statistical areas in the country.

The Charleston-North Charleston MSA ranked 11th in the nonpartisan Milken Institute’s “Best-Performing Cities 2011,” up from 19th last year and from 30th in 2009….

Charleston climbed to just outside the top 10 on the strength of its “vibrant aerospace sector,” “stable military presence” and other high-tech, high-skill employers, according to the report.

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Paul Klingler likes his job as a mold-maker for a Rochester plastics manufacturer.

But the 54-year-old Parma resident also liked his last mold-making job, which he held for four years before being laid off early this year. And when he didn’t get a call back regarding an open position at another company, Klingler chalked it up to his lack of a college degree. “I know I have all the other skills they’re looking for,” he says.

That’s why Klingler is working with Monroe Community College here to figure out what coursework he needs to earn an associate’s degree in its machine trades apprentice training program. He plans to start this spring.

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A majority of chief executives of U.S. firms expect their hiring to slow in the next six months as anxiety remains high over the European debt crisis and continued slow economic growth here.

Business Roundtable’s fourth quarter CEO survey released Wednesday shows that expectations for sales, capital spending and hiring were steady in comparison to the third-quarter report, with growth expected at around 2 percent for 2012, which doesn’t translate into job growth.

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A Republican payroll tax cut bill that sailed through the House despite a White House veto threat is dead on arrival in the Senate, and it will soon be time for talks on a final package, the Senate’s top Democrat says….

Reid says he will schedule a vote shortly on the House-passed bill to underscore its irrelevance ”” a vote that should start the clock ticking on what stands as the year’s final, high-stakes partisan faceoff.

“It was dead before it got to the Senate,” Reid said of the House legislation. “The Senate will not pass it. The sooner we demonstrate that, the sooner we can begin serious discussions on how to keep taxes from going up on middle-class Americans.”

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The federal government is understating the liability for its employee pension plans by $80-billion because it does not use “real world” investment returns in its calculation, a new report says.

A C.D. Howe Institute study has concluded the federal liability for pension plans now totals $227-billion, which is $80-billion more than the government reports in its Public Accounts.

“Ottawa’s calculations do not reflect investment returns available in the real world,” says co-author William Robson, who is CEO of the C.D. Howe Institute.

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One in 45 children in the USA — 1.6 million children — were living on the street, in homeless shelters or motels, or doubled up with other families last year, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness.

The numbers represent a 33% increase from 2007, when there were 1.2 million homeless children, according to a report the center is releasing today.

“This is an absurdly high number,” says Ellen Bassuk, president of the center. “What we have new in 2010 is the effects of a man-made disaster caused by the economic recession. ”¦ We are seeing extreme budget cuts, foreclosures and a lack of affordable housing.”

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Amid enormous pressure to cut costs, improve care and prepare for changes tied to the federal health-care overhaul, major players in the industry are staking out new ground, often blurring the lines between businesses that have traditionally been separate.

Hospitals are bulking up into huge systems, merging with one another and building extensive new doctor work forces. They are exploring insurance-like setups, including direct approaches to employers that cut out the health-plan middleman.

On the other side, insurers are buying health-care providers, or seeking to work with them on new cooperative deals and payment models that share the risks of health coverage. And employers are starting to take a far more active role in their workers’ care….

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The Obama White House, in its own version of the New Year’s Eve countdown in Times Square, has added a banner to its website ”“ a clock ticking down the seconds to when taxes on the middle class will rise “if Congress doesn’t act.”

That tax hit is the 2 percent payroll tax cut now set to expire at midnight, Dec. 31. If Congress fails to at least extend that tax cut, the Social Security tax rate for employees jumps back to 6.2 percent, up from 4.2 percent. If that happens, the average American taxpayer stands to lose about $1,000 in 2012.

Leaders on both sides of the political aisle in Congress offer assurances that by year’s end the tax break will be extended. As lawmakers head into an election year, the stakes are simply too high to kick that can down the road. But GOP leaders, especially, are running up against strong opposition from the rank-and-file on anything that looks like caving on pledges to reduce deficits, dramatically cut spending, and reject all tax increases (which are an issue in this case because Democrats propose to pay for extending the payroll tax by a tax hike on millionaires.

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Nearly one in five clients of Christian rescue missions said they were victims of physical violence within the past year, a 6 percent jump from the previous year, according to a new survey.

“It’s quite possible that the uptick in physical violence … is due to a friend or family member’s feeling of desperation and helplessness accompanying their unemployment and underemployment,” said John Ashmen, president of the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions (AGRM).

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When Hirshy Minkowicz was growing up in a Hasidic enclave of Brooklyn 30 years ago, he often noticed visitors arriving after dinner to meet with his father. They would withdraw into the study, speak for a time, then part with some confidential agreement having been sealed.

As he grew into his teens, Hirshy came to learn that his father operated a traditional Jewish free-loan program called a gemach. The visitors, many of them teachers in local religious schools, struggling to raise their families on small and irregular salaries, had been coming to borrow money at no interest and with no public exposure.

Now 39 years old and serving as the rabbi of a Chabad center near Atlanta, Rabbi Minkowicz has done something he never expected: open a gemach that deals primarily with non-Orthodox Jews in a prosperous stretch of suburbia….

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The number of students receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million last school year from 18 million in 2006-7, a 17 percent increase, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the Department of Agriculture, which administers the meals program. Eleven states, including Florida, Nevada, New Jersey and Tennessee, had four-year increases of 25 percent or more, huge shifts in a vast program long characterized by incremental growth.

The Agriculture Department has not yet released data for September and October.

“These are very large increases and a direct reflection of the hardships American families are facing,” said Benjamin Senauer, a University of Minnesota economist who studies the meals program, adding that the surge had happened so quickly “that people like myself who do research are struggling to keep up with it.”

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This Thanksgiving, many families are closer — really closer — than they’ve been in years.

An increasing number of extended families across the USA are under the same roof, living together either permanently or temporarily. Sometimes these arrangements are multigenerational, with adult children, grandchildren or an elderly parent sharing quarters. In other cases, an extended family bunks together, with siblings, cousins, nieces or nephews sharing space.

The reasons are economic, social and demographic. The recession and its aftermath have pushed extended families to share space at a time when the average age at first marriage has climbed to 28.7 for men and 26.5 for women. And life expectancy — now 75.7 for men and 80.6 for women in the USA — continues to rise. The flow of immigrants into this country also has been a factor; immigrants are more likely than other groups to live with members of their extended family.

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The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday downgraded its estimate of the benefits of President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, saying it may have sustained as few as 700,000 jobs at its peak last year and that over the long run it will actually be a net drag on the economy.

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Conceding that talks on a grand budget deal are near failure, Congressional leaders on Sunday pointed fingers at each other as they tried to deflect blame for their inability to figure out a way to lower the federal deficit without having to rely on automated cuts.

The testy exchanges ”” which dominated the Sunday talk shows ”” made clear that leaders in both parties now see the so-called sequester ”” a term meaning an automatic spending cut ”” as the most likely solution to reduce the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion over 10 years, instead of a negotiated package of spending reductions and tax increases, something they have been unable to achieve over the last 10 weeks.

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Fixing a painful toothache isn’t in the budget of Brandon Crew, a 24-year-old maintenance worker and father to be.

Neither is food.

Earning $300 per week working at a local hotel, Crew said he and his girlfriend are barely “scraping by….”

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Every year, young adults leave the nest, couples divorce, foreigners immigrate and roommates separate, all helping drive economic growth when they furnish and refurbish their new homes. Under normal circumstances, each time a household is formed it adds about $145,000 to output that year as the spending ripples through the economy, estimates Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

But with the poor job market and uncertain recovery, hundreds of thousands of Americans like Ms. [Hollis] Romanelli (and her boyfriend, who also lives with his parents) have tabled their moves. Even before the recession began, young people were leaving home later; now the bad economy has tethered them there indefinitely. Last year, just 950,000 new households were created. By comparison, about 1.3 million new households were formed in 2007, the year the recession began, according to Mr. Zandi. Ms. Romanelli, who lives in the room where she grew up in Branford, Conn., said, “I don’t really have much of a choice,” adding, “I don’t have the means to move out.”

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Employer’s name? “God.” His address? “Heaven.” In more self-confident days, that is how Anglicans used to answer pesky bureaucrats demanding particulars of a clergyman’s employment. But for better or worse, the old idea that “religious workers”””to use more modern language””belong in a legal and metaphysical category all of their own is being chipped away.

London’s High Court ruled this week that the Roman Catholic church””in this case, the diocese of Portsmouth””could be held responsible for the actions of a priest, now dead, who is alleged to have abused a young girl at a children’s home. This was because the church had put the priest in a position where he could perpetrate abuse, creating a relationship similar to employment. The decision will make it easier for victims of clerical crimes to demand compensation, and it could eventually oblige the church authorities to compensate abuse victims on the large scale seen in other countries.

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The European debt crisis is raising the odds of a U.S. recession, with economic contraction more likely than not by early 2012, according to research from the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank.

While it is difficult to gauge the odds precisely, an analysis of leading U.S. economic indicators suggests a rising chance of a recession through the end of the year and into early next year, researchers at the regional Fed bank wrote on Monday. The risk of recession recedes after the second half of 2012, they found.

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The percentage of American adults who get their health insurance from an employer continues to decline, falling to 44.5% in the third quarter of this year. This percentage has been steadily declining since Gallup and Healthways started tracking Americans’ health insurance sources in 2008.

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Since work brings man to experience his role as a participant in God’s creative plan, a lack of work — or precarious employment situations — can lead to identity crises, says Benedict XVI.

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The graph is a helpful one.

Americans put the most trust in the ideas and opinions of small-business owners and local business leaders on how best to create jobs. Americans have progressively lower levels of trust in the opinions of President Obama, economists, major-corporation executives, congressional leaders, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

The public’s trust in politicians, business leaders, and others on job creation in the U.S. is of particular importance at a time when Americans view jobs as the most important problem facing the nation.

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The chairman was asked if the outlook of the U.S. economy was so gloomy, why would the Fed wait to enact more monetary policy. Bernanke said the Fed has been very aggressive. He said what the Fed has are projections, so “it’s important to see what happens.” One thing economists have said over the past few months, is that the Fed is running out of economic tools. But Bernanke ruled that out, saying the Fed still has a “broad range of policies” to stimulate the economy.

However, he called on the political arm of the United States to help the Fed.

“I hope there will be a broad range of actions that complements” Fed policy, he said.

”” On Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, Bernanke said their woes have been drag on a U.S. recovery, but it’s up to Europe’s leaders to make the decisions.

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South Carolina’s teachers and state employees are willing to pay more to fix the retirement system ”” but only if they get a raise first.

That’s the plan endorsed by the S.C. State Employees Association and the S.C. Education Association, which together represent 30,000 of the state’s 141,000 teachers and state employees.

The plan, which the groups submitted in writing to House and Senate subcommittees studying the retirement system, says teachers and state employees are willing to increase their contribution to the retirement system by 0.5 percent, but only if they receive at least a 2 percent raise ”” a “cost-of-living adjustment” for state employees and a “step increase” for teachers.

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