I am watching with great interest the hoopla surrounding the “stimulus package” being offered by the Democrats in our U.S. Congress. According to Daniel Henninger’s excellent analysis in today’s Wall Street Journal, this American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (just 700 pages of reading) is more a “self” stimulus bill than it is an economic stimulus bill because of how much would be spent on rebuilding the government’s infrastructure. For example, the boast within the bill that says 3 million jobs will be created fails to clarify that these jobs will all be on our government’s payroll with the federal government as their boss. Is this economic stimulus? Sounds sketchy and a bit scary to me.
Whatever happened to zero-based budgeting? You know, where we figure out what is needed first and then assign a cost. It seems we have reversed this process to something like, “How much money can we spend or print?” and then let’s start putting everything into categories of spending. We can’t operate our own homes this way.
I looked over some of the numbers in the stimulus package and have never seen so many zeros in all my life. There is $6,000,000,000 for the construction, repair, and alteration of Federal buildings. How about $375,000,000 to rebuild trails on our Federal lands? Or we have the Weatherization Assistance Program chiming in at $6,200,000,000. By the way, what is that $500,000,000 of expenses included within this? No detail, just half-a-billion dollars of expenses.
Perhaps in contrast, I became aware that Wycliffe Bible Translators launched the Last Languages Campaign. This campaign focuses on translating the Bible into 2300 languages that remain on their list of people groups without a Bible in their native language. Bob Creson, President of Wycliffe, gathered their staff together to pray and plan this campaign. It was fueled by a donor who asked the question, “If I gave you $100,000,000 for your work, what would you accomplish?” This is cold, hard cash. The Last Languages Campaign will enable all of these remaining languages to have a translation started by the year 2025. The price tag is $1,000,000,000 (give or take a few dollars).
This represents billions of dollars that will accomplish something far-reaching on a scope that influences many people groups on the face of the earth. It is not an “invest in ourselves” mentality like the Democrats are proposing, but rather an “invest in others” plan that will influence untold cultures and societies for the better. The lesson for us, and for the next generation, is to look at how we invest in others and how we learn to be a conduit for good while we inhabit a short time on the face of this earth. The present fades away, the eternal endures. This must become our focus.
