San Francisco Bishop in America Mag: Poverty Must Join Abortion at Top of Church’s ‘Political Agenda’

However, regarding “poverty,” McElroy writes in his current piece:

Choices by citizens or public officials that systematically, and therefore unjustly, decrease governmental financial support for the poor clearly reject core Catholic teachings on poverty and economic justice. Policy decisions that reduce development assistance to the poorest countries reject core Catholic teachings. Tax policies that increase rather than decrease inequalities reject core Catholic teachings.

McElroy firmly concludes that “the categorical nature of Catholic teaching on economic justice is clear and binding.”

Foolish because he makes a certain tax policy as violation of “core Catholic teachings.

Foolish also because he does an apple-and-oranges equating of abortion and poverty, seeking to establish “poverty alongside abortion as the pre-eminent moral issues the Catholic community pursues at this moment in our nation’s history.”

Why? Because abortion is the direct killing of innocent people and poverty is an economic condition admitting of a variety of economic solutions.

Do bishops get economics courses in their continuing education program?

My friend Jake (not his real name) scoffs: “Continuing ed for bishops? What, you think they are professional men with standards to uphold?” (Shut up, Jake. It’s my blog, not yours.)

An economist compares minimum-wage laws, restricting or eliminating low-employability workers from employment, to Jim Crow-era banning of blacks from certain jobs.

Futhermore, there’s ample evidence that increases in the legislated minimum wage in the U.S. have a disparate negative impact on the employment prospects of blacks, and especially young blacks.

So even if such racial discrimination was not among Congress’s intended consequences of its minimum-wage legislation, ought not the “disparate impact” doctrine of Griggs v. Duke Power Co. – a statistics-based doctrine favored by the Obama administration – be used to find minimum-wage legislation to be a violation of the U.S. Constitution?

The economist can’t comment on constitutional issues here, only call minimum-wage supporters’ attention to their anomalous position.