It’s Your Fiscal Responsibility
I reference this article Obamas Donated Less Than 1% of Their 2000-2004 Income so you might want to read it first.
I subscribe to this axiom “Tithe is at least 10% of gross income”, that’s 10% before taxes. I found this statement intriguing “His analysis of more than 56,000 survey respondents from 1995-2005 found that 90 percent of donors give 2 percent or less of their pre-tax income to charities, including their churches.” From his surveys, Christian’s weren’t tithing 10%. Assuming an even distribution between non-Christians and Christians, 90% of Christians give 2% or less though God calls us to give more. In stark contrast to the wealth and prosperity gospel which says God wants you to be rich, it should be our goal to make God “rich” – to give him all the glory he deserves – including our financial ‘glory’. We say we love God with all of our heart, but do we love God with all of our wallet?
I think this quote highlights the issue. “As new parents who were paying off their large student loans, giving $10,000 to charity was as generous as they could be at the time”. Their emphasis is on their needs and wants first, then charities with whatever is left. Our focus should be God first, then our needs, lastly our wants. Our decisions on how we treat money and how we tithe need to be grounded from the start, when we have no money. If we cannot tithe when we have little money, we won’t be able to tithe when we have more money. Tithing is a heart issue. We do not tithe out of our excess, we tithe out of our heart. The numbers of how much we actually give mean nothing to God, it’s about the heart and our desire to give him our maximum. (Mark 12:41-44)
The last issue I wanted to bring up was on saving vs spending. If what analysts say are true, that Obama’s fiscal actions are indicative of the American population and how he’ll act in office, then the economic situation may not get much better. “The Obamas’ tax returns also show they had little in savings during the same period. They reported no dividends or capital gains over the five years and reported $33 in taxable interest, all of which was received in 2002.” They didn’t save anything. The current economic problems are caused by people spending more than their income. The credit bubble is popping and people’s debts are catching up to them. Obama has little fiscal responsibility of his own, not saving anything of his 1.3 millions yearly pay. This gives me little confidence of him correcting our current credit problem by increasing the average American’s saving. Why can’t we have a president who’s fiscally responsible and isn’t in bed with big companies or the wealthy?