The Rev. Ed Young, pastor of Second Baptist Church
The battleship Bismarck is sinking fast, and the captain and his officers are so frantic they’re transferring their shipmates to the Titanic. Not a good choice for sailing through an ocean of economic turbulence.
Actually, the Titanic went down in 1912 and the Bismarck was sunk by the British in 1941. What the two ships had in common was they both wallowed in seas of delusion.
Not even God could sink the Titanic, her designer supposedly said. The Nazis boasted there had never been such a mighty vessel as the Bismarck.
Clearly, faith in either of the ships was a sham.
As is confidence in current strategies to rescue us from sinking economies. After all, it was delusional financial practices that brought on the global recession, and now governments are offering more delusion to rescue us.
We are jumping one sinking ship for another.
The contemporary crisis was ignited when investors, lenders and borrowers dazzled one another with empty promises. The lenders lived happily under the delusion they could relax credit requirements and tease consumers into loans whose floating rates would surge in a mere two years.
Subprime borrowers lapped up the loans, sometimes concealing their own financial problems, and not reading the small print about the floating interest rates. Investors joined the feeding frenzy, buying up mortgages and their fictional derivatives, and taking the bait of inflated forecasts projected by companies wanting to keep their stock prices bobbing high on the waves.
The financial earthquake, way down deep where most economic sages couldn’t see, swirled upward and outward as a financial tsunami. Banks, insurance companies and scores of other institutions got caught in the turbulence.
The ship began to sink.
Now the government is putting us all on a vessel whose hull is as leaky as the Titanic’s after the iceberg gashed it. The Obama administration’s $3.6 trillion budget and $800 billion stimulus plan propose to spend money that doesn’t — and may never — exist to pay for financial promises and schemes proven empty as air.
The administration’s budget rests on the assumption the economy will grow faster than projections by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Presidents have sometimes preferred to stick their own finger in the air to try to conjure the direction and speed of future winds and waves, resulting in politically driven fiscal policies rather than factually sound forecasts.
Speaking of things to come — the administration’s budget will slap our kids and grandkids with a $15 trillion national debt — at least.
Meanwhile, the corporate brass on the upper decks who steered their ships into this mess are doing swimmingly thanks to the stimulus package. It’s the crew down in steerage that’s suffering. They don’t know “trickle down” any more than they can describe the taste of caviar.
It’s all delusion, about which Scripture provides a lot of insight. The Bible’s ancient wisdom is as fresh and relevant as if written just this morning.
Take, for example, Solomon’s wry observation that “the rich rules over the poor, and the borrower becomes the lender’s slave” (Proverbs 22:7). America may find out the hard way how true this is as nations like Communist China that own hefty chunks of our country’s debt begin tightening the chains.
St. Paul writes about “lusts and desires that spring from delusion” (Ephesians 4:22). Truth blows away delusionary smoke. Right now we need a powerful gale of it to rescue the sinking ships.