Inequity: Is it a sin?

Father Sirico favors a flat tax, where everyone pays the same percentage of their income and the poorest of the poor are exempt - a direction in which some say the US is heading. He sees the progressive system, which taxes higher incomes at a higher rate, as not only unjust, but as proportionally decreasing economic productivity.

Others take issue with that view. "If you look at economic performance over time, or at international comparisons, there is no evidence that more unequal income distribution is good for economic growth," insists Bernard Wasow, senior economist at The Century Fund.

In Mr. Wasow's view, a progressive tax is fairer. "Economists generally talk about the burden a tax places on a family, and it's a question of imposing equal burdens," he says.

Many of those concerned with rising inequality agree that it is not the gap per se that is the problem, but what is happening to people at lower income levels.

"I'm less concerned with the ratio between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent than with what's happening to the bottom 20 or 40 percent," says Ron Sider, head of Evangelicals for Social Action. "It's a scandal that the richest society in human history has the highest poverty level of any industrial nation."

People of other faiths share that concern. "Poverty is a theological issue from a Jewish perspective," says Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, because it "assaults a human being's dignity as the image of God." But, he adds, "I worry even more about the dignity of a society that allows people to be impoverished."

In Islam, the Koran's emphasis on a just society requires that every Muslim give 2.5 percent of his wealth each year to the poor. "Yet most Muslims would say, too, that public policy must address poverty," says Ihsan Bagby, of the University of Kentucky. "If God doesn't want disparity between rich and poor, then that has to be addressed at all levels of society, from political leadership to corporate managers down to the individual."

While tax policies are far from the only means to attack poverty - education, minimum wage, the faith-based initiative, and welfare reforms are also seen as key - many see the large tax cuts as undermining the country's capacity to support those programs adequately.

They say that bringing moral considerations into the economic debate is essential to the well-being of a democratic society.

"We must be concerned with the ratio of unequal wealth because money is power, and when it is divided very unequally, those with power use it politically in selfish ways," says Dr. Sider. "When that inequality removes hope and incentive for people at the bottom, it undermines character and responsibility, producing despair and more bad choices."

It can also increase cynicism about public institutions. In Alabama, even low-income people who would have benefited from the tax reform voted against it, largely, observers say, because of their deep distrust of government.

Yet Hamill is encouraged somewhat. Though she's been bitterly attacked by some Christians, some denominations in the state are calling for a renewed reform effort, and she's been invited to other states to talk about her work. She's also engaged in research on the federal tax system.

"Economic studies provide no clear answers other than really high taxes are bad and regressive taxes are bad," she says. "Other claims being made regarding flat taxes have no hard evidence, but they're being substituted for moral analysis."

Sider suggests that both religious and secular traditions are to blame for the lack of moral deliberation. "From the evangelical side, there's the dreadful privatizing of Christian faith where it relates to personal life and sexual and marriage issues but somehow not to ... economic policy." And the secular academic world became relativistic so there was no way to get common moral values to shape arguments, he says. "So economists tend to ignore morality and say that's not what they are doing, and thus it's largely not acceptable to have explicitly moral arguments about public policy."

Fairness may be in the eye of the beholder. But in a democratic society, these leaders say, that's a very good reason for insisting that the deeper issues be brought into the public conversation.

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