Balancing the budget: welfare fraud and tax cheats

I've said before that paying taxes is a good thing, a privilege in which Christians can joyfully participate. Two things are certain - death and taxes - right? Wrong. Many people illegally evade taxes or simply exploit legal loopholes to avoid them, breaking the spirit, if not the letter of the law. Avoiding or evading taxation is (yet another) luxury of the rich that enables them to shift burdens onto others. In a country moving into significant austerity cuts at the moment, this isn't simply a matter of personal honesty and integrity but of justice.

Today, work and pensions secretary Smith announced much tighter regulation of welfare, a streamlining of benefits and harsher penalties for fraud. Simplification may be a good thing; I'm not familiar enough with the system to know. Fraud ought to be penalised. But there seems to be something deeply disturbing about chasing benefit fraud that costs £1.1 billion annually (and making other severe cuts such as university funding dropping by 40%), while tax evasion, avoidance and debt in the UK amounts to £120 billion annually, more than three quarters of the budget deficit. Of course not all this can easily recovered, but some can, and focusing political attention and government funds on the recovery of these monies repays £60 for every £1 spent on it. For comparison, clamping down on benefit fraud is more like £3 for each £1.

Why then, would a government make a further 15% funding cut to its tax office in such a situation?

Perhaps these figures are incorrect (the sources are all recorded here if anyone wants to chase them down), but there seems to be a decent prima facie case for making tax avoidance and evasion a major plank in responding to the budget deficit. This isn't about penalising the wealthy or large corporations, but simply upholding existing laws. If it is replied that cracking down on tax evasion would send these wealthy people and companies elsewhere, then perhaps the UK needs to ask itself whether it wants to provide sanctuary for such criminals.

Jesus: friend of sinners

Church: a place for broken people

Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves. By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more that the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own laws, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of the brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by his call, by his forgiveness, and his promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what he does give us daily. And is not what has been given us enough: brothers, who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of his grace? Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day? Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother still a brother, with whom I, too, stand under the Word of Christ? Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Christ Jesus? Thus, the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by the one Word and Deed which really binds us together--the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship.

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 15-17.

Jesus was not ashamed to share company with tax collectors and prostitutes; he was called "the friend of sinners" and invited national traitors to join his renewal movement (Mark 2.13-17). If we would eat with Jesus, we too become friends with the friend of sinners and are revealed as those who are sick, in need of a physician. The company Jesus keeps is not with those who believe themselves perfect, or superior, or pure, but with those who know they need such a friend. The church is a place for broken people.

With whom do you eat?
Ten points for guessing the Sydney church building.