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Pastors’ Housing Revisited (Again)

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(Note: this is the fourth installment of a series (Part 1: Money for Nothing and the Housing for Free; Part 2: Pastors’ Housing, Take 2; Part 3: Pastors’ Housing Revisited) that spans four years and isn’t over yet.)

Today, a district court in the Western District of Wisconsin ruled that section 107(2) of the Internal Revenue Code is unconstitutional. Again.

So what’s section 107(2)? And what relevance could it possibly have for a Mormon blogging audience? I’m so glad you asked.

Background

Generally speaking, if your employer provides or pays for your housing, you have to include the value of that housing or the amount you receive as a housing allowance in your gross income.

There are a handful of exceptions to this general rule, though. And the one we care about is this: a “minister of the gospel” doesn’t have to include the value of housing provided as compensation in her gross income. If her employing church doesn’t provide housing, but instead provides a “rental allowance” as part of her income, she can exclude that to the extent the amount doesn’t exceed the fair rental value of her housing.

Several years ago, the Freedom From Religion Foundation challenged the constitutionality of the provision. Several of its executives argued that it unfairly benefited religion, because they couldn’t exclude the rental allowance that their employer, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, provided them.

The district court found in their favor, even though, it turned out, they hadn’t bothered to claim the allowance on their tax returns. The Seventh Circuit reversed, holding that the plaintiffs lacked standing (because they hadn’t suffered an injury). In a footnote, it suggested that, if they claimed the exemption on their tax returns and their claim was rejected, they may well have standing.

So they did, and the government didn’t challenge their standing.

So What Just Happened

When I posted on this a year ago, I predicted that the district court would find section 107(2) unconstitutional. And I was right! (Btw, this is relatively important. Because the Freedom From Religion Foundation doesn’t own the housing where its executives live, they didn’t have standing to challenge the exemption for in-kind housing provided to “ministers of the gospel”; the court only ruled that the exemption for rental allowances was unconstitutional.)

I also predicted that, getting to the merits, the Seventh Circuit would probably find the same thing. After reading the new opinion, I’m more convinced of that than I was before. The court sets out an airtight case (or, at least, as airtight a case as an Establishment Clause decision can possibly be) for the unconstitutionality of the parsonage allowance. The case is evenhanded and thorough, and even if the Seventh Circuit wanted to reverse it (and I don’t know whether or not the judges on the Seventh Circuit do), they would have to work to find a way to reverse it.

Interestingly, the court didn’t order any particular remedy. It requested briefing from the parties about what the appropriate remedy would be. Which means that there will be more to this story, and more to this series.

The court also provided a framework for Congress for how they could amend section 107(2) in a manner that would comply both with the reasons given for the allowance (specifically, to help poor ministers and poor congregations) and the Constitution.

How Does This Affect the Church?

Some Mormon leaders get a tax-free rental allowance. So if today’s decision stands, what happens to them?

In the first instance, their after-tax income goes down. Suppose we have a flat tax at a 25% rate. Further suppose that the relevant Mormon leader is paid $100,000.[fn1] If the church designates $10,000 of his pay as a rental allowance, that means he pays $22,500 in taxes (that is, $90,000 x 0.25). After taxes, then, he has $77,500.

If the parsonage allowance goes away, he has to pay taxes of 25% on his full $100,000, leaving him with $75,000 after taxes. In other words, he has $2,500 less in after-tax dollars.

So are church leaders out of luck? Not necessarily. The church can do two things to ensure they have the same after-tax income as before, though both cost money. On the one hand, the church could gross them up. A pre-tax salary of $103,333.33 will leave him with an after-tax income of $77,500.

Alternatively, the church can buy housing for the those church leaders who get a rental allowance. (Remember, the decision only finds the rental allowance unconstitutional; it doesn’t address the in-kind provision of housing.) Then the church could provide the housing and would only have to pay $90,000 (which would leave $77,500 after taxes).

Which is to say, this wouldn’t be cataclysmic for the church. It would either represent additional cost, or a haircut for church leaders, but there are ways to adjust.


[fn1] Note that I’m not suggesting that Mormon leaders earn $100,000, any more than I’m suggesting that we have an income tax with a flat 25% rate. Those two numbers just make the math easier.


Filed under: Current Events, Economics, Society & Culture Tagged: district court, freedom from religion foundation, parsonage allowance, section 107(2), seventh circuit

Brigham Young, John P. Taggart, and the Federal Income Tax

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On January 3, 1871, Brigham Young sent a telegram to  his counselor Daniel H. Wells. The LDS Church History Library only has the first page of the letter, but even the absence of subsequent pages can’t disguise the story lying under the surface. The first page of the telegram reads:

We think it will be wisdom for the Latter Day Saints to omit paying tithing Some of the Officers of the government seem determined to rob us of our hard earnings which are donated to sustain the poor and other charitable purposes We will carry on our public works and assist the poor by some other method If this agrees with your feelings have Bro Cannon[fn1]

I’m not sure I can emphasize enough how crazy this is: Brigham Young suggested doing away with tithing. While I don’t know the church’s revenue in 1870, in 1880, about $540,000 of the church’s $1 million in revenue came from tithing. And yet Brigham Young was willing to get rid of it in response to some kind of robbery. So what’s going on?

I’ve spent a good portion of the last six months or so digging into precisely that question. The story starts roughly on August 27, 1869, when Francis M. Lyman, an assistant assessor of internal revenue and eventual member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, wrote to Brigham Young to tell him that John P. Taggart, the Assessor, told him to assess an income tax on tithing received by the Mormon church. (In 1862, the U.S. enacted its first federal income tax to help fund the Civil War. That tax was still in effect at the end of the decade.)

The next year and a half involves various legal arguments between Taggart, Young, and O.J. Hollister, the Collector of Internal Revenue in Utah. Interestingly, given the time, neither polygamy nor questions of territorial sovereignty play an explicit role in the conflict—in fact, neither come up in any of the letters—but they seem to be an underlying context for the dispute.

Whatever the explicit dispute, though, on December 3, 1870, the New York Times reported that Brigham had lost his case. Brigham had argued that tithing was not taxable because it was a voluntary gift, and that even if it were taxable, an 1880 1870 [ed.: oops] revision of the tax law meant the church got a $1,000 exemption for every five members. The church had 50,000 members, Brigham said, so even if tithing were income and thus taxable, the church could exclude its first $10 million.

The Commissioner of Internal Revenue determined that church members didn’t hold all of their property in common, which was prerequisite for the $10 million exemption. Further, he decided that tithing was not a voluntary donation because members who didn’t pay were subject to serious penalties, including excommunication (and possibly death as an apostate, per some of Brigham’s 1850s statements).

Of course, those are only bookends of the story (and the New York Times article is a premature bookmark). In the article I’ve been working on, I’ve filled in how Brigham got from August 27, 1869, to December 3, 1870, as well as what happened next. If you’re interested in this snippet of Mormon/federal government conflict, I’ve posted the current draft of my article for download here. Tell me what you think.[fn2]


[fn1] Unknown sender [probably Brigham Young] to Daniel H. Wells, 3 Jan. 1871, Box 73, Folder 33, Brigham Young office files: President’s Office Files, 1843-1877, Communications, 1854-1877, Letters and telegrams, 1870 December-1871 January, 1870 April. Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[fn2] Note that, in addition to a really fun story and some history of the Civil War income tax, the article has pretty awesome photos of Taggart, Hollister, and Young.


Filed under: Mormon, Mormon Studies, Pre-Manifesto Era, Society & Culture Tagged: assessor, brigham young, bureau of internal revenue, collector, daniel h. wells, francis m. lyman, income tax, john p. taggart, new york times, o.j. hollister, tithing

#MutualNight: Diwali and Indian Jazz

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(Quick reminder: if you’re curious why I’m writing about music on a Mormon blog, this post will summarize what #MutualNight posts are.)

Subharnab Majumdar, The Rangoli of Lights. CC BY 2.0

Diwali, India’s most important holiday, starts today. Most of my experience with Diwali has been at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has an annual Diwali Family Festival.[fn1] I’m far from an expert, but the outline of the holiday is this: Diwali, the festival of lights, marks the triumph of good over evil, and of light over dark.

With the upcoming holiday, I thought I’d take a quick listen to some Indian music. Now, if you’re anything like me, your exposure to Indian music has come through two routes: Bollywood and the Indian classical music that found its way into the Beatles’ music.

Unsurprisingly from a country of well over 1 billion people, that’s not the extent of Indian music.

Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Indo-Pak Coalition, “Agrima”

A couple days ago,[fn2] Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Indo-Pak Coalition released “Agrima.” I’ve been looking forward to this album for about seven months, since I saw them perform at the Harris Theater. The performance was electrifying; the band is Mahanthappa on alto sax and electronics, Rez Abbasi on electric guitar, and Dan Weiss on tabla and drums.

The band plays jazz, influenced strongly by various Indian and Pakistani musical styles. And here, I’m at a little bit of a loss to describe exactly how Indian this album is, but I hear the Indian influences. Maranthappa’s saxophone tone hints at the pungi, with a clean, sharp tone, sometimes subsumed in echoes and other electronic effects. Abbasi’s guitar plays off of Mahanthapp’s music, as sometimes they play together, but more often they take turns. And Weiss spends parts of some songs on the ground, playing tabla, but also has a drum set in front of him; in their performance, he’d rise up into the drum set.

The trio doesn’t have a bass, but it doesn’t miss it. Abbasi uses the full range of his instrument, while Mahanthappa plays pedal tones under Abbasi’s solos, pedal tones that suggest a sitar without being a sitar.

And have I mentioned how electrifying this album is? Mahanthappa is certainly one of the most virtuosic saxophone players playing today. He goes from droning long tones to Coltrane-esque sheets of sound and back. On this album, he’s clearly playing jazz, but he’s clearly incorporate language from outside of jazz. Weiss’s tabla playing, and his transitions from tabla to drums, are outstanding. Abbasi’s use of the full range of the guitar is astounding. And the electronic effects, while never front and center, create a dreamlike feel that, as much as Mahanthappa’s pedal tones and Abbasi’s low notes, suggests the absent sitar.

I can listen to this album in a couple different ways. It’s the kind of thing that I can play in the background, letting it wash over me. But it also warrants a close, attentive listen. Abbasi’s guitar’s tone and power wouldn’t feel out of place in any guitar hero band, while Mahanthappa’s saxophone playing stands apart from basically anybody else I’ve heard (it makes me think of Phil Woods and Charlie Parker, but its not derivative of either of them). And man, that tabla playing.[fn3]

Rez Abbasi, “Unfiltered Universe”

The three members of the Indo-Pak Coalition also play on Rez Abbasi’s new album, “Unfiltered Universe.” His Invocation quintet is rounded out by Vijay Iyer(!) on piano and Johannes Weidenmueller on bass, with guest cellist Elizabeth Mikhael.

Two quick asides: first, the album doesn’t come out until next month, but it’s available for listening on Spotify now. Two, Vijay Iyer is one of the most stunning contemporary pianists playing. Whatever superlatives I applied to the musicians of the Indo-Pak Coalition apply equally to him. And, while I’m not familiar with Weidenmueller’s playing outside of this album, it’s excellent here.

“Unfiltered Universe” is doing slightly different work than “Agrima.” Where “Agrima” is broadly Indian influences, with his album, Abbasi is specifically invoking South Indian Carnatic music.

Confession: I don’t personally know what that means. On the other hand, I can hear the difference between New Orleans jazz, New York jazz, Chicago jazz, and West Coast jazz, and differentiating Delta blues and Chicago blues is no problem at all.

That said, if this has Carnatic influences, I like Carnatic. Abbasi’s doing interesting work here: although he’s specifically invoking a regional music, he’s not using the regional instruments. He sticks purely with guitar, and on this album, Weiss sticks with drums, not pulling out the tablas he’s so accomplished on. Iyer’s piano runs waterfall over each other, while Mahanthappa shows the same proficiency and energy here as he does on his own album.

The guitar is as punchy as anything I’ve listened to; again, the South Indian and the jazz notwithstanding, you could listen to this easily as a rock album.

I don’t want to play the albums against each other—I sincerely love both of them. They are both deeply rooted in multiple traditions, even if I’m only really familiar with one of the traditions. They’re both also fundamentally contemporary, doing things that haven’t been done before. Every musician plays his or her heart out; interestingly, the “Agrima” album lives up to the live performance, and I definitely want to see Abbasi’s band perform live.

These albums are great, and bear repeated listening. (I listened to both this morning biking to and from a dentist appointment. Which is stupid—you shouldn’t listen to music while biking—but I really, really wanted to listen to them again.) This Diwali season, I strongly recommend either (or better, both!) to get into the spirit of the Indian subcontinent, and celebrate the victory of good over evil.


[fn1] Which, btw, if you’re in Chicago, you should definitely go. It’s a wonderful introduction to the art, music, dance, and stories of India. Also, it’s free, even if you’re not a member of the Art Institute.

[fn2] At least I think it was a couple days ago—I preordered the album two or three weeks ago, and got my download email Tuesday.

[fn3] Also, the mp3 version of the album is only $2.50, so there’s really not a lot of reason not to give it a try.


Filed under: Film & Television, Kulturblog, Media, Music Tagged: agrima, dan weiss, elizabeth mikhael, indian music, indo-pak coalition, jazz, Johannes Weidenmueller, mutualnight, rez abbasi, rudresh mahanthappa, unfiltered universe, vijay iyer

BYU and Classical Radio

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BYU has just announced that it is planning on dropping Classical 89, the classical music radio station that it runs.

I’m going to be tremendously blunt: this is a terrible idea, and it betrays the school’s educational mission.[fn1]

I understand that classical music doesn’t have the listenership it did once upon a time: in 2013, less than 3% of album sales were of classical music. And there has been a trend for a while of classical stations shifting to alternate formats.[fn2] And I get that consultants and industry professionals recommended the change. But BYU’s in a unique position that allows it to ignore consultants.

A quick personal story:

Years ago, after I had my mission call but before I went to the MTC, my family took a vacation to San Luis Obispo. Sometime on that vacation, I was waiting in the car while my family was doing something, and a song came on the radio. The song blew my mind, with a remarkable, and beautiful, cello over an orchestra. I ended up calling the radio station a couple days later to ask what I’d listened to. It was Joaquín Rodrigo‘s “Concierto como un divertimento,” they told me.

I immediately started looking for the CD. This being long-pre-Amazon, I went to the local Sam Goody (remember those? they didn’t really have very good classical sections) and the slightly-less-local Tower Records, but had no luck. I left on my mission, returned home, and eventually found it, and the concerto is still in my CD collection.

And for me, this is one of the tragedies of losing a classical radio station. The radio station is apparently going to spend the last 8 months of its life “educating” listeners on how to find classical music on Amazon Prime and Google (and, I presume, Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music). Which is fine and good, but it loses the serendipitous encounter music that you didn’t know you’d love. On Amazon, you have to search for what you want to hear, which means you need to know in advance. On Pandora, you have to give the algorithm a starting point, but that doesn’t do much for allowing you to discover what you didn’t know you’d love. Those services are fine for what they do, but I find them ultimately unsatisfying.

And sure, there’s satellite radio and streaming classical stations from elsewhere, but those, too, are ultimately unsatisfying. There’s something valuable about local radio. I wrote, years ago, about KSDS, a San Diego-based jazz station that I loved. It turns out, though, that I haven’t listened to them in years, because I’ve started listening to WDCB, a Chicagoland jazz radio station. Is it better than KSDS? Probably not. But it’s local: it will spotlight local artists, it has its thumb on the pulse of local jazz listeners, it provides information about local shows and festivals, and I can pick it up in my car. And it, too, allows for serendipitous discoveries of musicians and songs I otherwise wouldn’t have known about.

So that’s at least part of the value of local radio. And why should BYU provide it? Two reasons, at least:

First, BYU is an educational institution in Utah. Its mission is to “assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life.” In pursuit of that mission, BYU says that “[a]ll instruction, programs, and services at BYU, including a wide variety of extracurricular experiences, should make their own contribution toward the balanced development of the total person.” That is, BYU’s not there just to give individuals what they want; it’s there to give them what they need to become a total person. That includes providing cultural and artistic experiences that individuals might not seek out on their own.

Second, BYU and other colleges and universities are in a unique position: they don’t need their radio stations to be self-funding. The school has other sources of revenue that it can use to subsidize noncommercial endeavors. Schools are not unique in that regard, but they’re pretty close. Standalone classical radio stations might face significant pressure to change to a more popular format, either for advertising dollars or to appeal to donors or otherwise to raise revenue. At BYU, though, a classical station is mission-appropriate, and, in pursuit of its mission (as well as the education of its students who want to pursue careers in radio), the school can afford to participate in an endeavor that consultants and industry insiders recommend against.

In the end, I don’t have a significant dog in this fight. I don’t live in Utah, so I don’t listen to Classical 89. But as an educational, cultural, and moral matter, taking away the state’s only classical radio station is a terrible move. The only good news is, BYU has eight months to change its mind.


[fn1] It’s also dropping KBYU, its PBS affiliate, which is also probably a terrible idea, though, because Utah apparently has another PBS station, may not be as cataclysmically bad a move.

[fn2] Heck, we only have one classical station in Chicago.


Filed under: Current Events, Kulturblog, Media, Music, Society & Culture Tagged: byu, classical 89, classical music, jazz, Joaquín Rodrigo, kbyu, ksds, radio, sam goody, tower records, wdcb

Mormons and H.R. 1

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On Thursday, the House released H.R. 1, its fundamental tax reform bill. (It also released an 82-page summary of the 400+-page bill, and a 300-page JCT report on the bill.)

Now, the bill that has been presented isn’t the law that will be enacted (if any is enacted); the House is scheduled to start marking the bill up today. Still, it presents a view of the House Republicans’ vision for tax reform. I wanted to highlight three provisions that would directly impact the church and Mormons as a result of their religious practices.

Doubled Standard Deduction

The bill would double the standard deduction to an inflation-adjusted $24,400 for married taxpayers filing jointly. How would this affect Mormons and the church?

It reduces the economic incentive (and the tax savings) for tithepayers. See, while it continues to allow a deduction for charitable donations, the charitable deduction is an itemized deduction. And taxpayers have to choose between the standard deduction and itemized deductions. Taxpayers generally only itemize where the value of their itemized deductions exceeds the value of the standard deduction.

At the same time it doubles the standard deduction, the bill eliminates all but three itemized deductions. All that’s left is the charitable deduction, the mortgage interest deduction, and a deduction for property taxes (which is capped at $10,000 a year). To itemize, then, and be able to deduct tithing and other offerings, a taxpayer would have to have more than $24,400 in charitable contributions, mortgage interest, and property taxes.

Under current law, only about 1/3 of taxpayers itemize. I don’t know what proportion of taxpayers would with the expanded standard deduction, but I suspect it would be far fewer.

Does that matter, though? You may argue that taxpayers will be better off, since they’ll have a much larger amount free from taxes, and that may be true. But charitable giving is elastic; one estimate found that the increased standard deduction would lead to 28 million fewer itemizers, and up to $13 billion less in charitable giving.

And how does that affect the church? It’s unclear; what is clear, though, is that church leaders support a robust deduction for charitable giving. Limiting that deduction would likely reduce the church’s revenue; its impairment would, according to Elder Oaks, “pose[] a question about the nature and future of America.”[fn1]

Politics From the Pulpit

The bill would modify the so-called Johnson Amendment that prevents churches (and other tax-exempt organizations) from supporting or opposing candidates for office.

It wouldn’t fully eliminate it; instead, it provides that churches and their integrated auxiliaries wouldn’t be deemed to have supported or opposed a candidate for office as a result of any “homily, sermon, teaching, dialectic, or other presentation made during religious services or gatherings.” For this exception to the general rule to apply, the statement would have to be in the ordinary course of the church’s regular and customary activities, and couldn’t cause the church to incur more than a de minimis additional expense in doing so.

Leaving aside the question of the importance or the constitutionality of this change, what would it mean for Mormonism? Possibly nothing; the prohibition is nearly never enforced against churches, and our church’s neutrality statement instructs church leaders to avoid doing things that would risk violating the rule, and the church has previously announced that loosening the restriction wouldn’t affect that policy.

But it does mean that your bishop or stake president could theoretically get up on a Sunday and endorse candidate Joe Biden; it could also mean that a General Authority could endorse candidate Mike Pence at Conference.

Pay Limits

Okay, so this one almost certainly doesn’t affect the church. The law would impose an excise tax on tax-exempt organizations that pay employees more than $1 million. Tax-exempt organizations would owe a 20% tax on salaries in excess of that $1 million ceiling.

There’s no reason to believe that provision is aimed at churches (my first thought was college football coaches), but it doesn’t exempt churches from its coverage.

Family Values

Okay, this is a fourth thing, and I’m not going to go into detail, except to say that the changes are tremendously unfavorable to families. It eliminates deductions for adoption, it replaces personal exemptions with tax credits that disappear after five years, etc. (My friend, colleague, and coblogger Francine Lipman runs the family provisions down in more detail here.)


[fn1] It’s also worth noting that the plan would phase out, then eliminate, the estate tax, which is another significant incentive toward charitable giving.

Quick Update on Politicking at Church

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On Monday, I wrote about a couple ways that the House tax bill might impact Mormons. Well, today Kevin Brady, the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, introduced an amendment to that bill. One of those ways was by carving out a small exception to the so-called Johnson Amendment for churches.[fn1] There was a lot of discussion swirling around over whether eliminating it only for churches would violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

Well, apparently Brady didn’t want to take that risk. His amendment expands the exemption to all tax-exempt organizations.

A couple quick thoughts on the change. First, while it undoubtedly meets the constitutional barrier now, expanding the exemption adds really significant complexity. See, with the original incarnation of the bill, the exemption applied only to a “homily, sermon, teaching, dialectic, or other presentation made during religious services or gatherings.” Now it applies to any statement, provided that statement is in the organization’s ordinary course and doesn’t cause more than de minimis additional cost.

The thing is, though, most tax-exempt organizations don’t have general meetings where people congregate and where there is a presentation that could naturally veer into the political. So does this lack of meetings mean, in effect, that it still only applies to churches and church-like organizations? Or does it vastly expand the scope of permissible endorsements? (I suspect it’s the second.)

Second, note the weird timing. Under this amendment, the partial repeal of the Johnson Amendment doesn’t happen until 2019. And it comes back in full force in 2024. Why? Probably to keep its projected cost the same as it was when the prohibition was only lifted for churches.

Will this happen? Who knows—the Senate is supposed to release its tax bill sometime this afternoon, and I have no idea whether the Senate has any interest in repealing the Johnson Amendment. I also don’t know how the bill—including this provision—will fare once the full force of lobbying happens. Because not all churches are in favor of repealing the Johnson Amendment. Sure, there are a few vociferous supporters—often, though not exclusively, conservative Evangelical pastors—but there are a number of pastors who like the protection it offers from pressure to engage in politicking. So we’ll have to see what ultimately happens.


[fn1] “Johnson Amendment” is the stupid name that people use for the prohibition on tax-exempt entities supporting or opposing candidates for office.

What if Beehives Passed the Sacrament Too?

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I can still remember turning 12. At least the church parts of it. After I turned 12, my dad ordained me to the Aaronic priesthood, and then I got to pass the sacrament.

And I continued to pass it for the next two years.[fn1]

Passing the sacrament was an important part of my development as a Mormon. It provided me with a tangible connection to the church. My participation in the church stopped being passive, the receipt of knowledge and culture, and started being, well, participatory. I felt a certain amount of pride, a certain amount of responsibility, and even a certain amount of ownership over my church experience. I remember intricately figuring out who would go where, negotiating the pews to make sure that everybody got the sacrament, watching the priests, waiting for them to stand up so I could return my tray.

And lately I’ve been thinking, what if Beehives passed the sacrament, too?

Over the last several years (and almost certainly much longer), there’s been a lot of discussion of women’s and girls’ places in the church. It’s been reflected in everything from calls for priesthood to calls for pants.

Now, pants is easy (albeit culturally disapproved). Priesthood is probably a lot harder (requiring a revelatory change).

And girls (and women) passing the sacrament? It’s not as far-fetched as it might appear.

Yes, administering the sacrament is a priesthood responsibility. D&C 20 lays the responsibility for administering the sacrament squarely at the feet of the apostles and priests. Importantly, D&C 20 also explicitly provides that teachers and deacons do not have authority to “administer” the sacrament.[fn2] Thus, it must be that preparing and passing the sacrament are something other than administering the sacrament.

That makes sense, of course: we don’t require priesthood to hand the trays of bread and water down the pew to our family members, friends, and coreligionists.[fn3] In fact, modern prophets have recognized this. In a 1928 letter to a mission president, President Grant wrote that it was only “custom” that priesthood holders pass the sacrament, and that he’d have no objection to “worthy young brethren” who didn’t have the priesthood passing the sacrament if there weren’t boys who were ordained.[fn4]

And until the early part of the 20th century, women often prepared the sacrament table. It wasn’t until 1950 that the Presiding Bishopric shifted that responsibility to teachers.[fn5]

The requirement that those who pass (and, for that matter, prepare) the sacrament, then, is purely a matter of policy. It’s long-standing policy, of course, but policy nonetheless. And policies can, and do, change. In fact, in the mid-80s, Elder Packer explained that

Procedures, programs, the administrative policies, even some patterns of organization are subject to change. We are quite free, indeed, quite obliged to alter them from time to time. But the principles, the doctrines, never change.

Let me reiterate that: administrative policies not only can change, but sometimes should change. And the requirement that those who prepare and pass the sacrament is a policy, one subject to change, one that doesn’t need some type of revelatory impetus for that change.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that a ward or stake can abandon it, sua sponte. The policy is clearly laid out in the Handbook.[fn6] But it doesn’t have the weight of scripture, or even of doctrine. It is purely the result of policy decisions that have been made in the last century or so, and have been carried forward to the present.

So should the church let girls and women pass the sacrament alongside boys and men? I think it’s worth very serious consideration. It is an easy way to include some of those who currently feel excluded,  a way to validate their membership and their participation.[fn7]

So allowing Beehives[fn8] to pass the sacrament would represent a significant administrative change to the church. But the status quo is purely a cultural policy. And sometimes, policies feel permanent by virtue of being the way we’ve always done things. But it’s worth reexamining what we’ve always done, especially where, like here, the policy is one that is not required by scripture or prophetic utterance, and one that can easily and costlessly be changed.


[fn1] My Southern California ward had enough young men that I suspect I rarely passed anymore after I turned 14. I’m not sure about that, of course, but it’s at least really likely.

[fn2] To be completely clear, D&C 20:58 says, “But neither teachers nor deacons have authority to baptize, administer the sacrament, or lay on hands” (emphasis added).

[fn3] In fact, in 1899, Apostle Francis Marion Lyman addressed the First Sunday School Convention, and gave a Q-and-A-style address. In it, he said,

Question: Have members not holding the Priesthood the right to pass the sacrament?

Answer: You pass it to one another, do you not, all the time, all you sisters and all you brethren? Then why ask the question? The administering of the sacrament is not passing it to the people. The administering of the sacrament is when the brethren offer the prayer in blessing the bread or water. That is the administration of the sacrament. That cannot be done by Deacons, nor by members of the Church who do not bear the Priesthood.

Francis M. Lyman, “The Administration of the Sacrament in the Sunday School,” Proceedings of the Sunday School Convention 74, 77 (1899) (emphasis added).

[fn4] William G. Hartley, From Men to Boys: LDS Aaronic Priesthood Offices, 1829-1996, 22 J. Mormon History 80, 130 (1996).

[fn5] Id. at 130-31. For more on women preparing the sacrament, see Kristine Wright, “‘We Baked a Lot of Bread’: Reconceptualizing Mormon Women and Ritual Objects,” in Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives at 82 (Kate Holbrook & Matthew Bowman, eds. 2016). For even more discussion on how the church started centering its liturgy in the priesthood bureaucracy in the twentieth century, you’ll have to check out J. Stapley’s forthcoming The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology.

[fn6] For the record, though, even the Handbook recognizes the artificiality and disconnect of requiring priesthood to take the sacrament from pew to pew, but not to pass it within the pew: “After a priesthood holder hands a sacrament tray to a member, others may pass the tray from one to another for convenience.”

[fn7] I already know what two objections to this will be. One is, I (or my wife/daughters/sisters/mother/etc.) don’t feel excluded and, in fact, don’t actually want to pass the sacrament. And that’s fair. There’s no reason you or your loved one would have to pass the sacrament. But that the issue doesn’t resonate with some people doesn’t somehow invalidate those who would feel this as both an explicit inclusion and a blessing.

The second is, It will make the boys feel less special, and the boys need this to form an attachment to the church. That makes zero sense to me. My pride in passing the sacrament was based on what I was doing, not on the exclusion of others. It was an honor to pass the sacrament, an honor that didn’t diminish when the next boy turned 12 and was ordained.

[fn8] Technically, by “Beehives,” mean girls and women who are at least 12 years old. Why 12? It’s what we already do for boys, and it marks an important age in the life of Mormon boys and girls—it’s the age at which they graduate from Primary, and the age at which they can do baptisms for the dead.

Book Review: The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth and Corporate Power

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D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth and Corporate Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2017).

When I heard that the third volume of Quinn’s Mormon Hierarchy trilogy would deal with the Mormon church and money, I was totally excited. I love exploring how religions deal with money (and, for that matter, how money deals with religions). And I figured that Quinn would have encyclopedic knowledge of Mormonism and money; he has, after all, written about it in the past. And when I saw that the Kindle version was selling for just $9, what could I do? So I downloaded it and read it.

First the good: Quinn has assembled an impressive amount of information related to the LDS church and money. Nearly 200 years’ worth. Some of his history I was familiar with; a good portion (especially dealing with early-20th-century Utah) I wasn’t. For instance, he has a fascinating snippet of discussion about the church and property tax exemption (both in Utah and throughout the world).[fn1] It’s too brief, and seems at some points to conflate property and income tax exemptions, but I’m entirely sure I’ll return to this part of the book in future projects that I look at.

Unfortunately, his treatment of tax illustrates, in a nutshell, the book’s most significant flaw: while Quinn seems to care intensely about the details of Mormonism, he seems much less interested in the details of finance and money. In the middle of his discussion of the church facing property taxes during the first half of the 20th century, Quinn writes,

In time, the church obtained property-tax exemptions in Utah and for much of its real estate throughout the United States, paying only a tax on profits from its commercial subsidiaries.[fn1.5]

I can’t tell exactly what’s going on here. On my first reading, it struck me as indicating that Quinn didn’t know (or care about) the difference between property tax exemption and income tax exemption. Alternatively, it may be an attempt to transition from one to the other—he goes on to talk about how the church paid taxes on its business income and on real estate holdings it used for business. But at best, this is sloppy—obtaining property tax exemptions has nothing to do with paying income tax on its for-profit subsidiaries’ income (and, for that matter, it would have been the subsidiaries, not the church, paying taxes).

Now of course the tax stuff grabbed my eyes. But it’s not the most egregious example of the careless treatment of finances in the book. I don’t want to comprehensively lay out my problems with the book, but three examples should give a sense of the book’s weaknesses when it comes to money:

Financial Instruments

Quinn writes that under President Grant, the church engaged in risky investments that sometimes led to significant financial losses. J. Reuben Clark did his best to rein in these investments, instead putting the church’s money in “low-interest-paying banks owned by the church.” Soon thereafter, Clark was replaced as the overseer of church finances by Stephen L. Richards. Richards shifted to purchasing “commercial and financial company paper”; Quinn lists the names of the companies whose paper the church invested in, including such non-Utah, non-Mormon names as Sears, Westinghouse Credit, and General Electric Credit.

And then he writes,

Totaling $3,775,000 in 1960 and equal to $27.8 million in 2010, this was only January’s proposed purchases of stock in non-Mormon enterprises. The church’s portfolio was obviously much higher.[fn2]

Now, there’s a huge problem there: commercial paper is not stock. Commercial paper is a type of short-term debt instrument issued by companies. And by short-term, I mean really short-term, with maturities as short as one day, and that rarely extend beyond about nine months (but generally significantly shorter than that). Though commercial paper is unsecured, because of its short maturity, it’s generally fairly secure, and it pays a low interest rate. I mean, it pays slightly more than Treasuries, but just barely.

Importantly, though, commercial paper is nothing like stock. It doesn’t represent ownership in a company, it provides a steady (and stated) return.

Does it matter that Quinn’s unaware of this? Yes it does, because it means he doesn’t ask the right questions. That the church shifted from low-interest investments in Utah banks (which, by the way, does that mean deposits? bonds? something else?) to low-interest short-term commercial paper probably tells us something. Why leave Utah banks? Were they becoming riskier? Did the church want to diversify? Did it want to participate more fully in the broader US economy?

But if you believe that the church was investing in stock, those questions go away, and are replaced by the wrong questions.

And no, I don’t expect most people to know what commercial paper is. But if you’re writing a book on finance and you come across an unfamiliar term, it’s probably worth double-checking what it means. At the very least, you can Google it, which provides an accurate Dictionary.com and an accurate Investopedia hit, both of which make clear that commercial paper is not stock. And from there, you can figure what questions you should be asking about commercial paper.

Consumer Price Index

Toward the beginning, Quinn explains that, because of the amount of time his book covers, “this volume often states what the equivalent of US dollars in the nineteenth century would be in terms of purchasing power in 2010.”[fn3] And boy-howdy does it. At the beginning of the first chapter, he tells us that the $3,000 Martin Harris used to secure the printing of the book of Mormon was the equivalent of more than $72,000 in 2010.[fn4] Basically every time a dollar amount comes up, he gives a 2010 equivalent amount, and almost every time, he drops a note to the website measuringworth.com.

Basically, the website provides a CPI calculator: stick in a dollar amount, a starting year, and a destination year, and it will tell you what the dollar was worth. It uses a modified version of the consumer price index (CPI).[fn5] So why didn’t Quinn cite to the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator? My guess is because official CPI only goes back to 1913; others have extended it prior to then, using their own data and assumptions.

And there’s nothing wrong with using CPI in some cases; it gives a nice rule-of-thumb comparable. But CPI is complicated. In fact, there are different CPIs that apply to different regions, to urban, and to rural areas. And CPI is a measure of consumer expenditures (including food, housing, and transportation)—the institutional church’s expenses would be different from an individual consumer’s. Which makes this problematic:

But when Woodruff died, the church had $2,168,012.20 of total indebtedness. Thus, Snow’s 1899 discovery (calculated by Clawson) was that the difference of $2,068,961.46 came from business losses. By comparison, this would be more than $56 million in 2010 dollars.[fn5]

The problem is, using a basket of goods that households consume to calculate the current value of institutional debt isn’t necessarily accurate. And you don’t have to understand a lot about CPI to know that—even on the results page of the MeasuringWorth.com calculator warns that the $56 million amount isn’t necessarily right. Here’s what you see:

Notice that the CPI calculator suggests numbers ranging from $47 million to almost $1.6 billion. But none of those calculations of contemporary worth are entirely consonant with a church’s non-consumer debt. Still, that wide range should have made Quinn think twice about whether CPI was the right way to go.

Moreover, even if CPI were the right way to figure out the current dollar value of the 1899 debt, I’m not sure why the current value of the debt matters. It would have been more valuable to put the debt into some kind of context. A $2 million debt would be mostly irrelevant if the church had assets worth $100 million. On the other hand, it would be potentially devastating if the church had assets worth $2.5 million. But the book is content to give us a CPI-adjusted number, and not dig into the value of that number.

And maybe Quinn had reasons for using CPI. But he never explained those reason; he never offered a theoretical defense of using CPI consistently throughout the book. As such, I’m skeptical that he had any compelling reason, other than convenience. And the practical reason he offers is, well, not so compelling:

For example, even trained historians might currently think that an annual income of $10,000 was modest for the year 1899, when it was actually equivalent to $271,000 in 2010. Rather than my own estimate of comparative worth, the financial equivalents are derived from the Consumer Price Index on the internet.[fn6]

Honestly, I’d be shocked if any historian thought $10,000 in 1899 was a modest annual income. But this explanation suggests that Quinn’s lack of financial sophistication, and the siren call of easy internet calculators, led him to believe that giving the modern value of old dollar amounts was both necessary and sufficient. And I feel like the seduction of the CPI calculator kept him from carefully evaluating the relevance and importance of dollar amounts, replacing them with a facile comparison.

Tithing Revenue

Quinn calculates that in 2010, the church collected about $33.7 billion in tithing revenue.[fn7] Given that the church is notoriously opaque when it comes to finances, how did he arrive at that number?

Well, he has data from 1950-1960. During that decade, tithing was growing at a “mean average” [sic] of 12.9 percent annually.[fn8] So he estimated that tithing revenues continued to grow at a 12.9 percent rate year after year.

The problems with that approach are legion. First, it’s hard to point at the 1950s as a good baseline year. The post-WWII years were an economic boom time in the US, with huge GDP growth and enormous economic expansion. Then we had recession and stagflation in the 1970s, we had a recession in the 1990s, and the 2000s have hit us with a couple recessions, too. So a consistent growth of 12.9 percent, based on a golden decade, strikes me as unlikely.

Also, the growth center of the church shifted. In 1960, 90 percent of church members lived in the (relatively affluent) United States. Another 4-5 percent lived in Europe. At the same time, only 2 percent of church members lived in South or Central America.

By way of contrast, today, of the 15.9 million church members worldwide, only about 42 percent live in the United States. Nine percent live in Mexico, 25 percent in South America, and 3 percent in Africa. Church growth since 1960 has been disproportionately strong in developing economies, so I suspect that, even if the 1950s hadn’t been a poor baseline economically, it would still be a bad population demographic baseline.

Of course, Quinn didn’t have current data (or any data from the last half century), so wasn’t this extrapolation the best he could do?

No. He could equally well have told us that the 1950s had an average (or mean, or whatever he actually means there) growth of 12.9 percent, that the church hasn’t released anything since, and that, given economic and demographic changes since the 1950s, it is impossible to determine the amount of tithing revenue the church brings in. Maybe it’s less satisfying, but it’s more accurate.

Conclusion

So here’s the deal: I don’t know that I can recommend this book. It has a ton of interesting facts, and it’s an easy read, but the analysis is superficial at best, and frankly detracts from the story Quinn should have been telling.

That’s not to say there’s anything malicious here: Quinn doesn’t accuse the church of trying to hoard wealth, and doesn’t pretend that the church is purely a profit-making enterprise disguised as a church. That is, I didn’t read any polemic here. But I’m not convinced that he worked hard enough to understand the data that he had; he certainly didn’t construct an accurate or compelling story about the Mormon church and money. And I’m not sure that he even established a baseline for the story that I hope will one day be told.

(For other takes on the book, take a look at Ben Park’s review and Steve Evans’s summary review.)


[fn1] Loc. 4601. Since I read the Kindle version, I don’t have the physical page numbers, so I’m going to cite to Kindle locations.

[fn1.5] Loc. 4608.

[fn2] Starting at loc. 4322. Emphasis added.

[fn3] Loc. 149.

[fn4] Loc. 113.

[fn5] Loc. 4262.

[fn5] CPI creates these inter-temporal comparisons of prices by measuring the price of a basket of consumer goods year to year and using changes in that price as an indicator of how much a dollar can buy.

[fn6] Loc. 149.

[fn7] Loc. 849, Table 1.7.

[fn8] Loc. 4945.


Mormons and the Tax Bill

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Five and a half weeks ago, I posted about a couple ways that the House tax bill would impact Mormons and the Mormon church. Since that time, the House passed its tax bill and the Senate passed its bill. The bills differed, so they went to a conference committee, where (GOP) Senators and Representatives tried to come up with a compromise that both houses of Congress could agree on.

And this afternoon, they released their bill; the GOP wants to pass it before Christmas.

Now, I haven’t had time to go through all 503 pages[fn1] of the bill; still, given that I did a preview of changes that would affect the church and Mormons, I thought I’d revisit them in light of the new tax bill. 

I looked at three issues. The three issues are not a comprehensive discussion of things that might affect the church or members of the church, but they were significant. The issues I raised were (1) the increased standard deduction, (2) politicking, and (3) limits on the amount tax-exempt organizations can pay employees.

The Standard Deduction

Under current law, the standard deduction in 2018 will be $13,000 for married couples filing joint returns and $6,500 for unmarried taxpayers.[fn2]

The House bill would have changed that to $24,400 for joint filers. The conference bill is just below that: $24,000 for a married couple, and $12,000 for an unmarried individual.

I didn’t mention it in the last one, but along with this, the bill doubles the estate tax exemption to $10 million (at least until 2025).

Why does this matter to the church? Because both provisions will reduce incentives to give to charities. Why? A couple reasons. First, taxpayers can choose either the standard deduction or itemized deductions. Under current law, only about 1/3 of taxpayers itemize (and therefore can deduct their charitable contributions). With the standard deduction nearly doubled (plus the limitations on deducting state and local taxes), only a fraction of current itemizers will continue to itemize. That group won’t get any tax benefit from giving to charities, including the church.

Moreover, under the bill, individuals can leave $10 million to their heirs tax-free; that significantly reduces the number of decedents with an incentive to leave bequests to charity. And, while I don’t know how much revenue the church raises from members’ bequests, it provides assistance to those who want to leave money to the church in their wills.

Politicking

Remember the Johnson Amendment, that prohibition on tax-exempt organizations supporting or opposing candidates for office? The one Trump promised to eliminate? The one that the House bill initially rolled back for churches, and then for tax-exempt organizations in general?

Well, under this bill, it’s still here. Churches and other tax-exempt organizations will continue to be prohibited from supporting or opposing candidates for office if they want to keep their tax exemptions.[fn3] So don’t expect the church to jettison its political neutrality statement in the wake of the passage (if it passes) of the new tax bill.

Employee Compensation

Under the bill, tax-exempt organizations will owe an excise tax on compensation paid to employees to the extent that compensation exceeds $1 million.[fn4]

Honestly, I doubt this will affect the church; I really doubt the church pays any of its employees more than $1 million annually. In fact, I suspect that largely this provision will only be triggered by salaries paid to college football coaches and university presidents.

One Last Thing: Grad Students

A lot of BCC readers are grad students, or were grad students, or will become grad students, or have loved ones who are, were, or will be grad students. And there’s been a lot of outcry over the House’s plan to tax tuition waivers. (Mike and I wrote a piece about another side of the tuition waiver question over at Surly.)

So good news for you: that’s out. Tuition waivers will continue untaxed. Yay grad students!


[fn1] Yes, the PDF is 1097 pages. But the second half isn’t the bill—it explains where the House and Senate bills differed, and what they decided to do to come together.

[fn2] Note that the size of the standard deduction is indexed to inflation, so it changes every year. It’s also worth noting that, under the new tax bill, inflation adjustments move from CPI to chained CPI. Chained CPI grows more slowly than CPI, so moving to chained CPI is a stealth tax increase.

[fn3] Okay, that’s not entirely true. I mean, that’s the state of the law as it stands, but it’s terminally underenforced.

[fn4] The thought process here seems to be that publicly-traded corporations can’t deduct compensation to the extent it exceeds $1 million. IRC 163(m). Now, a tax-exempt organization isn’t really the equivalent of a publicly-traded corporation, but this provision kind of equates the two, at least in terms of compensation paid.

The Median Mormon Family and the Tax Plan

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Plenty of people are wondering how the GOP tax bill will affect them personally. Although pretty much everybody has been wondering, the Washington Post recently spotlighted a Mormon family with those questions. So I decided to take a look.

A quick disclaimer first: the answer is, it totally depends on your personal situation. And because of that, I’ve decided to construct an average (or sometimes median) Mormon family. I’ve constructed them with their Mormonism in mind where I could find specific Mormon stuff; where I couldn’t, I used Utah data. And I totally get that that’s not 100% accurate. Most Mormons aren’t in Utah, and a significant percentage of Utahns aren’t Mormon.

Still, it’s good enough to give a rough, blog-worthy estimate. So, without further ado, meet the Nephi family! 

Brother and Sister Nephi are married and file a joint return. In 2018 they will have three children who are younger than 17 and live at home.[fn1] Brother and Sister Nephi will collectively earn $62,912 in wages. They own a home, and will pay $2,311 in mortgage interest. They will pay $1,351 in property taxes, and $2,386 in state income tax.[fn2] Finally, the Nephis will pay $6,300 in tithing.[fn3]

Current Law

Under current law, the Nephis have $62,912 in gross income. They have $12,348 in itemized deductions. In 2018, though, the standard deduction will be $13,000. Because a taxpayer must choose between itemized deductions and the standard deduction, the Nephis will choose the standard deduction. In addition, they get to deduct five personal exemptions of $4,150 each (for a total of $20,750).

Subtracting those two deductions from their gross income, the Nephis are left with taxable income of $29,162. That puts them in the 15% tax bracket; their initial tax liability will be $3,421.80.

But we’re not done yet: the current tax law also provides for a child tax credit of $1,000 per qualifying child. Credits reduce tax liability on a dollar-for-dollar basis; the Nephis, then, will be left with a federal income tax liability of $421.80.[fn4]

The Tax Bill

The tax bill makes a number of changes. For our purposes, there are three important changes: it doubles the standard deduction, eliminates personal exemptions, and increases the child tax credit. So how does that play out?

The Nephis will still not itemize. Instead, they will get a standard deduction of $24,000, leaving them with taxable income of $38,912 (because remember, personal exemptions are gone). That will put them in the 12% tax bracket, and they will have a tentative tax liability of $4,288.44.

The new child tax credit is $2,000 per child; the Nephis will thus have a credit of $6,000. Of that, up to $1,400 per child (or $4,200 total) is refundable. This means that the Nephis will not owe any income tax; in fact, they will get a refund[fn5] of $1,711.56.

But Wait! That’s Not All!

So the new tax bill reduces the Nephis’ income tax liability by a little more than $2,000. In 2018. But note that all of these things revert back to current law as of 2026. I’ve heard people argue that it’s just because of procedural Senate rules, and nobody will let things revert, but in today’s political climate, frankly, who knows.

So the Median Mormon Family Is Better Off Under This Bill, Right?

That’s not clear. The Nephi family pays less in taxes in 2018 under this bill than they would under current law, but better off is up in the air.

And why is that? A bunch of reasons. Perhaps most notably, the child tax credit—the thing that substantially lowers their tax bill—may not help them much longer. Remember, the expanded child tax credit is largely meant to replace personal exemptions, which go away under the bill. For purposes of the personal exemption, though, a “qualifying child” is a child up to 18, or, if your child is a full-time student, up to 23. For the child tax credit, though, a “qualifying child” cannot be older than 16. So once the Nephi’s oldest child turns 17, they’ve lost the $2,000 child tax credit, and they don’t have a deduction for personal exemptions.[fn6]

What does that mean? It means that if the Nephis were a slightly older family—say with a 17-, 19-, and 22-year-old (with the older two being college students)—under current law, they would pay $3,421.80 in federal income taxes (because they lose the $3,000 of child tax credits).[fn7] Under the new bill, though, they’ll owe $4,288.44. So for the older version of the Nephi family (the Laman family, I guess?), the tax bill represents a tax increase, even in year one.[fn8]

In addition, while most of these benefits go away in 2026, inflation adjustments move to chained CPI. Chained CPI grows more slowly than the CPI calculation the tax law currently uses, meaning the standard deduction and the brackets will grow slower. Essentially, that creates a stealth tax increase—in 2026, the Nephis will pay more in taxes than they would have under current law, even though the tax law will have reverted to current law.

Finally, the tax bill is set to raise deficits by about $1.5 trillion. With the increased deficit, the government may cut government spending, and, depending on where it makes those cuts, the cuts may affect the Nephi family. Alternatively, it could raise taxes in the future, which also may affect the Nephi family. (My point here is that tax cuts are only one side of a complex equation; simply saying that the Nephis will pay less in taxes, without taking into account government spending, doesn’t really answer the question of whether this is good or bad.)

So the tax bill: it will affect the Nephi family (and the rest of us), and it’s important to keep in mind that the ultimate effects of the bill will be complicated and will depend on our own personal circumstances. But it is clear that some not-insignificant portion of median Mormon families will see their taxes fall, while another not-insignificant portion will see them rise.


[fn1] Okay, trouble already. Pew said that Mormon women ages 40-59 had had, on average, 3.4 children. I can’t do fractions of children for tax purposes. Moreover, since some significant portion of Mormon families are younger than 40, presumably the median family size is smaller. So just for the heck of it, I’m choosing three kids.

[fn2] I have no idea how accurate the state income tax is; I used this calculator, put in the wages, married, 5 personal exemptions, and $8,611 in itemized deductions.

[fn3] Just FYI: I’ve chosen these numbers based on Google searches. I haven’t adjusted them in light of anything in the tax law—as of when I’m typing this, I have no idea what the tax consequences will be, either under current law or under the tax bills.

[fn4] You’ll owe a lot more than that in payroll taxes, but I’m not interested in payroll taxes for these purposes.

[fn5] Actually, they probably won’t—instead, the refundable credit will probably reduce their payroll taxes which, remember, they still owe.

[fn6] Okay, so I lied just a little bit. I didn’t adjust any of the numbers after the fact, but I did ensure that the children were young enough that they all qualified for the child tax credit. In my original draft, they were all younger than 18.

[fn7] For a little more explanation of this, you can take a look at my post on the Surly Subgroup. Note that u

[fn8] And maybe this is the right answer. Older people tend to be wealthier and have higher incomes than younger people, so maybe we want the tax cut to target young families. On the other hand, the fact that the older family has the same income as the younger family—and, given the expenses of older children, perhaps more expenses—suggests that achieving that result by cutting off the child tax credit is an imperfect mechanism to achieve this goal.

Christmas in Three (Musical) Acts #MutualNight #ChristmasEve

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Chicago Decembers are a great preparation for Christmas. Between the Holiday Train, the lights on Michigan Avenue (and everywhere else), the Christkindlmarket, the Neapolitan Crèche at the Art Institute (and, in fact, the crèche exhibit at my employer),[fn1] in Chicago, the War on Christmas has been going Christmas’s way since long before our president declared victory.

For me, while all of these things are great, music is a central part of the mood and message of Christmas. And after Karen’s incredible deep dive into Mormon Christmas music, I thought I’d share how 2017 live Christmas music shaped up for me. Act 1: Matt Wilson’s Christmas Tree-O

I keep a pretty strict Christmas music calendar (much to my family’s chagrin): Christmas music can start the day after Thanksgiving (or, sometimes, Thanksgiving afternoon). So the day after Thanksgiving, after relistening to a couple of my favorite Christmas albums, I tweeted my Christmas music post from two years ago. And Matt Wilson tweeted back at me, telling me he and his Tree-O would be at the Green Mill in December:

So last Saturday I went.

Now, in spite of having lived in Chicago since 2009, this was the first time I’d been to the Green Mill, a classic jazz spot (and former Mafia bar, it appears). I walked in and was seated in the front row, close enough to the stage to rest my feet on it.

Shortly before the music started, Wilson came and decorated his drum set. He strung lights over it, set up a stuffed Santa, hung a menorah, put a couple Elves on the Shelf, and, broadly, created the most charmingly Christmas drum set a person can imagine. He and the other two members of his band (Paul Sikivie and Jeff Lederer on tenor and soprano sax, clarinet, and piccolo) wore matching red blazers (velvety, I think) for the first two sets. The third set was going to be the Christmas sweater set, but I’m getting old, so I left after the second set (which, in my defense, went until 11:15 or so).

And the music was stunning. Wilson is, to my ear, the most melodic drummer around. On the very first number—“Winter Wonderland”—Wilson took a drum solo where, between the toms, the snare, and the cymbals, he played the melody (not just the rhythm, but the melody).

Next up was “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late).” Sikivie took a bass solo played in octaves and in harmony with himself. Later came a duet (or maybe competition) between Lederer and Wilson, with Lederer blowing sharp staccato bursts at Wilson, and Wilson responding on a metal frisbee-like thing. Wilson matched not only Lederer’s rhythm, but his pitches by changing his pressure on the metal disk.

It wasn’t all aggressive, though: “O Come O Come Emmanuel” saw Lederer playing tenor with a lush, full sound, and Wilson on brushes. And “Up on the Housetop” was a straight-up bebop burner.

In short, the music was amazing. The atmosphere was sublime. And the show.

You know how I said Wilson is the most melodic drummer I’ve heard? He and his band are also, perhaps, the funniest. Each set started with a video, modeled after a classic Christmas movie (“It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Story” for the first two sets). The videos cracked the band up.

But the band also cracked the audience up. In the second set, the band played “8 Little Candles” (it was, after all, the fifth day of Hanukkah). Lederer was on clarinet. And, as he was soloing, he started deconstructing his clarinet. First he took off the bell, and then continued to play. Eventually, he took out one of the middle sections (and continued to play). By the end, he was just playing the mouthpiece. Eventually, he wandered over to the piano and sat on the keys, at which point Wilson broke down laughing. And almost fell off of his stool.

Act 2: The Brandenburg Concertos

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has had a residency in Chicago’s Harris Theater for the last seven years or so. My wife and I have subscribed since the second year (and we bought tickets to two of the three performances for the first year through a fundraising auction at my daughter’s preschool). For the past four years or so, the season has included a performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos a week or so before Christmas. And we’ve gone every year.

Now here’s the deal: there’s nothing inherently Christmasy about the Brandenburg Concertos. As the oboist who introduced the concert explained, the Concertos were a job application by Bach, and Bach ended up being ghosted.

And yet, somehow, they are the most Christmasy of Christmas music. They are lush, stunning, and beautiful. I’ve listened repeatedly to recorded versions (the Chamber Music Society’s version is available here), and I’ve been to this particular performance four times. And still I find myself shocked and delighted. I mean, they start with Concerto No. 5; at the end is a jaw-dropping harpsichord solo. And the harpsichordist nailed it.

This year, because of the generosity of friends who also subscribe, but who had family arriving in town Wednesday night, we had two extra tickets and brought our daughters. I was sitting with my younger daughter, and her jaw dropped in Concerto No. 4, right after the intermission, as violinist’s bow and fingers flew on her solo. I could point to her how the melody would pass from one instrument to another and back again. I don’t know if Christmas can happen without the Brandenburg Concertos, but they’re certainly a wonderful way to usher it in.

Act 3: St. Alphonsus

For the last several years, we’ve gone to Christmas Mass with friends at St. Alphonsus, a gorgeous Catholic church in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. We’ll go again this afternoon. Mass starts at 6:00, but the carol program starts half an hour earlier. And caroling with the choir and the church’s stunning organ is the perfect way to prepare for Christmas the next day.

And, with mere hours until Christmas day, I hope you’ve had a wonderful December, that you’ve been able to enjoy your traditions, and that tomorrow you have the merriest Christmas possible!


[fn1] And Second City’s annual Christmas show. &c. &c.

Lesson 2: God Knew Abraham #BCCSundaySchool2018

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Readings

Abraham 3, Moses 4:1-4

Learning Outcomes

By the end of class, class members will be able to

  1. Describe strategies for profitably reading Abraham.
  2. Evaluate what it means that God knew us before we were born.

Introduction

Eight years ago, I was sitting in a Sunday School class in Chicago with my daughter in my lap. I was probably half paying attention to the lesson, when suddenly the discussion started getting heated. People were arguing that we definitely, most certainly don’t believe in predestination. We’re foreordination people! Then others would pipe in that they didn’t see any substantive difference between predestination and foreordination.

Actually, maybe this is a lame attention-grabber. Because honestly, I don’t know what the end result was; the beauty of having a one-year-old on your lap in a Sunday School class is, there’s always a reason to slip out. And slip out I did. What I do know is, the next week, our ward had some sort of discussion about contention and not having it, a discussion that, iirc, didn’t directly reference the Sunday School class, but everybody knew what it was talking about.

This lesson is entitled “Thou Wast Chosen Before Thou Wast Born,” and spends a lot of time looking at foreordination. But it doesn’t mention predestination at all and, if I were teaching this lesson, I’d probably follow its lead. Why? A couple reasons. One is, as Mormons, we don’t really have a solid grasp about what predestination is. And, in fact, “predestination” is not a single thing; rather, it is a doctrine interpreted and taught differently by different religions (and, likely, within different religions). If we don’t have a solid grasp of what predestination means, our discussion condemning it will be tilting at straw men.

Also, if we believe in the KJV of the Bible, we necessarily believe in predestination. I did a quick search; neither “predestine” nor “predestination” provides any hits, but “predestinate” gives us a couple, in Romans and Ephesians. Meanwhile, “foreordain” gives us a single hit. But here’s the funny thing: “foreordained” shows up in the LDS-written headnote to Rom. 8 (where vs. 29 says “predestinate”) and to Eph. 1 (where vs. 5 says “predestinate”). Which is to say, when the church was producing the new chapter headings in the late 70s, it saw predestination and foreordination as rough synonyms.

God Chose Abraham

The idea of choseness permeates the Hebrew Bible (and, for that matter, all sorts of religious discourse). We often misinterpret what it means to be chosen, maybe in part because of Abraham. Because in the Book of Mormon and the Hebrew Bible, the idea of choseness generally seems to refer to a group of people, not an individual. In Abraham (specifically 3:23), God tells Abraham that he specifically was chosen. And he was chosen, not because of covenant or lineage, or even choices that he made, but because he was a good soul before the world was formed, and God chose him.

So, even though I said I’d skip the predestination thing, the choseness in Abraham looks a whole lot like predestination; God made a choice, not based on worthiness (or, at least, not based on worthiness in this life). And it was a choice God could and did make because He is God.

I actually really like this, because it forces us out of a rote liken-this-to-ourselves hermeneutic of scripture. (That’s not to say that this is a bad way to read scripture, but it’s certainly not the only way.) Because honestly, what’s the point in likening this to ourselves? If God chose Abraham (and other noble and great ones) before they were born, it’s too late. There’s nothing we can do to become premortally chosen. Either we were or we weren’t.

And yet the scripture is here. (Moreover, it’s buoyed by the end of the chapter: in vs. 27-28, God asks who He should send, two volunteer, and God choses one. There’s no reason to believe, based on the text, the He chose the one He chose because of merit; both say precisely the same thing, and neither offers an agency-destroying plan. That all happens in Moses 4, but this is not Moses 4.)

So what does it mean that God makes arbitrary choices, based on things that we apparently did? were? prior to our birth, and perhaps prior to our organization as beings? (N.b.: I don’t think we’ll come to a satisfying answer, because I think it’s a hard question. It seems unfair, right, that it’s already too late to become a noble and great one, and a ruler. But it may be worth guiding the class toward an idea of grace here: we’re not chosen because of what we do in this life, and, in the same manner, we’re not saved because of what we do in this life (even though what we do in this life may have some bearing on our salvation). Rather, we’re saved because of choices God and Jesus made.) (Also, if the class starts trying to assert that we’re the chosen ones, that we were noble and great before this life, and that we’re God’s chosen rulers, I’d probably shut that down. Abraham knows it because God came and told him, face to face. I haven’t been told face to face, and I suspect the vast, vast majority of people in our classes likewise haven’t.)

Contrasting Moses

This may be a nice way to get into the idea that we don’t have to harmonize scripture. Because Moses 4:1-4 tells a similar premortal story: Jesus vs. Satan volunteering to be our savior. But in Moses, Satan’s looking for the glory, where Jesus offers it to God. In Abraham, by contrast, two people say, “Here I am, send me.”

Now certainly we can read Moses and Abraham as telling the same story, just one with more detail than the other. But if we do that, why have the two stories? Why not just delete Abraham 3:27-28, and use the more-detailed version in Moses? The two stories are doing different work, and we owe it to scripture to understand what that work is. (That can profitably go to reading differing versions of history in both the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, too.)

Hierarchy in Abraham

Abraham 3 gives us a really weird cosmology. It basically creates a hierarchical cosmos, where the Earth is under the moon, which is under the sun, which is under other, greater suns, which eventually are all under Kolob, which is the nearest to God, and governs all of the other stars.

So WTF? (Maybe write the letters “W” “T” and “F” on the blackboard? That seems like an attention-grabbing activity. Alternatively, when you get to this part of the lesson, you could show this video.)

Now, as a description of how space works, this makes absolutely no sense at all. Stars aren’t above each other. They’re not greater than each other, and certainly don’t rule each other. And yet Abraham spends a lot of time assigning names, hierarchy, and even time to these various heavenly bodies. What are we to make of it?

It’s probably worth again contrasting Abraham 3 with Moses; even though Moses 1 was last week’s lesson, you’ll note that God showed Moses the earth and everything on it. He mentions to Moses that He also created the heavens, but is focused on the Earth.

So why does Moses get the Earth, and Abraham the cosmos? And what’s the relevance of a description of the cosmos that’s totally foreign to reality?

Maybe that holds a clue for how we’re supposed to read Abraham. And how is that? It’s a fair discussion for class, but it certainly suggests to me that reading it’s not meant to be taken literally as a description of nature. So the various levels of hierarchy must have some other meaning, and it never hurts to try to tease that out in class.

From the Archives

Steve Evans: Kolob and Kokaubeam

Kevin Barney: Kolob as Sirius

BHodges: Intelligences and the Mythology of Coherence

 

Announcement: Church History Symposium 2018

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This semester, I’m teaching a course on not-for-profit corporations. Today’s class deals with the duties of charitable trustees and board members to invest the organization’s money responsibly.

The class is at least tangentially related to this year’s Church History Symposium, to be held on March 1 at the Conference Center at BYU and March 2 at the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake. This year’s symposium is entitled “Business, Wealth, Enterprise, and Debt: The Economic Side of Mormon History, 1830–1930.”

The program for this year’s Symposium looks fascinating; I wish I could go to each and every session. Full disclosure: I’ll be presenting (this paper) on March 1 at 1:00. If you’re around and available, I’d love to see you/meet you IRL.

Note that, my participation notwithstanding, I think this is a critical topic. We tend to give short shrift to the economic side of Mormonism; we dismiss it as somehow unworthy or unclean. And yet questions of money are integral both to this history and present of both Mormonism and of religion in general. So if you’re in Utah on March 1 and 2, you should definitely make an effort to check out the Symposium.

Reminder: Church History Symposium tomorrow and Friday

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Just a quick reminder: the 2018 LDS Church History Symposium is happening tomorrow at BYU and Friday at the Conference Center in Salt Lake. The topic—“Financing Faith: The Intersection of Business and Religion”—looks fascinating, and there are a host of great people presenting.

Also, I’m presenting Thursday at 1:00 in room 2265 of the BYU Conference Center (“Brigham Young vs. the Bureau of Internal Revenue“). I’ve got some pretty cool slides to accompany the presentation. If you’re in town and available, I’d love to see you then!

Protests, Parkland, and BYU

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In the nearly-immediate wake of the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the superintendent of a Texas school district announced that students who participated in protests (or “awarenesses,” whatever those are) would face a three-day suspension.[fn1]

There was immediate blowback; the Parkland shooting have led to a remarkable level of engagement among high school students on issues of gun violence and regulation. But the threat of suspension could have a significant chilling effect on student activism: colleges can revoke acceptances for, among other things, disciplinary actions. So in theory, a student in the Needville Independent School District, who has already been accepted to college, could have her acceptance revoked if she participated in a protest (or awareness!) and was suspended.

In response to Curtis Rhodes’s threat, a number of universities (led, as best I can tell, by MIT) have announced that peaceful protest will not jeopardize students’ admissions. Among those universities? The University of Utah, Westminster College, and BYU. Update: per the comments , also Southern Utah University.

I have been perfectly willing to criticize my alma mater when it has done offensive and bad things in the past (for example, before it changed its policy to allow Sikh students to wear beards). But I want to praise it when it does the right thing, and this is clearly the right thing. So good for you, BYU. Thank you for making clear to students that their exercise of their political voice will not jeopardize their admission.

And for prospective BYU (and U of U and Westminster College and hundreds of other schools) students: you can participate in tomorrow’s walk-out. You can march on March 24th. Make the world a better place, and do it without losing your college spot.


[fn1] Note that there are almost certainly constitutional issues with Curtis Rhodes’s threat, but we’ll leave those aside.


Lesson 11: Because the Lord Was With Him #BCCSundaySchool2018

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Readings

Genesis 34, 37-39[fn1]

Learning Outcomes

By the end of class, students will be able to:

  1. Discuss how and why the scriptures subvert our expectations as readers.
  2. Identify different models of divine aid illustrated in the scriptures.

Introduction

In many ways, the story of Joseph in Egypt is the superhero origin story of the Israelite people. I mean, yeah, we’ve had some feints at origin already, everything from Adam and Eve to Noah to Abraham. And Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all received a covenant wherein God promised them land, descendants, and blessings.

But it’s Moses and the exodus from Egypt that really kicks things off. And without Joseph? The Israelites wouldn’t have been in Egypt to miraculously escape, and Moses wouldn’t have led them in the desert for forty years (and created the typology embraced by everybody from Jesus to the Nephites to African-Americans to Mormon pioneers).

A Favorite Son

Although Joseph is Jacob’s youngest son, he is also Jacob’s favorite. It makes sense; though he’s young, Joseph is the son of Rachel, Jacob’s favorite wife. Joseph being the younger son also connects him to both his father and his grandfather: remember, Jacob was younger than Esau and Isaac younger than Ishmael. In each case, though, the younger son was preferred by at least one of the parents.

Discussion topic: primogeniture seems fairly baked into Genesis. In fact, it’s important enough that Deuteronomy explicitly prohibits fathers from favoring the younger son of a preferred wife over the first-born son of a hated wife.[fn2]

At the same time, this is the third consecutive generation that subverts this idea of primogeniture. At this point, it’s not possible to be surprised by the fact that the father prefers the younger son. What do we make of this? Why does the foundational family of Israel subvert what we ought to expect?

The Lord Was With Him

Although Joseph is, in many ways, like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, in another significant way he isn’t. See, the Lord appeared to Abraham. The Lord appeared to and spoke with Isaac. Jacob wrestled with the Lord.

And Joseph? The Lord blesses him and the household he’s in, and makes him prosper. But the Lord never appears to Joseph; He’s always working in the background

Discussion topic: The scriptures have already given us a couple models for how God works in our lives. What role does God play in your life? And how does He manifest to you?

The Folly of Youth

I frequently fell into many foolish errors, and displayed the weakness of youth, and the foibles of human nature.     —Joseph Smith-History 1:28

I don’t want to blame the victim here, but 17-year-old Joseph was, if not insufferable, at least “immatur[e] and lack[ing] foresight.”[fn3] The text is very clear that Joseph is the favorite, and his brothers know it, and they’re not happy about it. In fact, they “hated him so that they could not speak a friendly word to him.” And, as a matter of fact, his brothers have him work helping the sons of his Jacob and his slaves, Bilhah and Zilpah. In other words, in spite of (or perhaps because) he’s the favorite son, he’s assisting the lowest-ranked brothers.

So what does Joseph do? He tattles on his brothers. He relates a dream he had where his brothers’ sheaves of wheat bowed down to his sheaf. And then, to his father, he relates a dream where, metaphorically, his brothers, mother, and father all bow down to him.

(It’s worth noting that these dreams turn out to foreshadow the rest of the story, and not just because Joseph ends up in a position of authority over them. They’re literally going to him to get food, ergo the wheat. And his father doesn’t come the first time, but does the second, just like his father doesn’t appear in the first dream, but does in the second.)

Joseph, as we know, is the protagonist of this story. As the protagonist—and proto-prophet—, then, are we supposed to emulate his naivety? I don’t think so, and I’m pretty sure the text doesn’t think so either. We get to see Joseph grow an mature over the course of his several chapters. In Gen. 39:8-9 (which we’ll come back to, I promise), we see him deferential to his master, notwithstanding the dreams he’s had of ruling. He’s shed some of his immaturity, and he’s learned tact (or something like it). And I suspect that, if we’re supposed to emulate Joseph, we should be looking to emulate his growth, not his brashness.

Sold Into Slavery

I’m not going to say a lot here about his brothers selling him into slavery; it’s a story we know well. I just want to make a couple quick points that we don’t generally talk about:

  1. Both Reuben and Judah save his life. In the first instance, Reuben prevents his brothers from killing Joseph, throwing him into a pit instead. In doing so, Reuben intended to “save him from them and restore him to his father.” It’s not completely clear that Reuben convinced his brothers, though; Judah gives it a second shot when they see the Ishmaelites coming, saying “What do we gain by killing our brother and covering up his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, but let us not do away with him ourselves. After all, he is our brother, our own flesh.“[fn4]
  2. His brothers are pretty callous. They throw him in a pit, then they sit down to eat. While their brother’s in the pit and, apparently, while they’re still considering killing him.
  3. Joseph’s brothers convince their father that Joseph is dead by killing a kid and dipping Joseph’s coat in its blood. Jacob is convinced, and is despondent. This is a really cool callback to Jacob, though. Remember, when Jacob tricked his father into giving him Esau’s blessing, he made stew from two goat kids, and used their skins to make Jacob feel hairier. Now his sons are using the exact same tools to deceive him.

Sex and Violence (Or, At Least, Sex)

The second purpose of this lesson, per the lesson manual, is to “strengthen [class members’] commitment to obey the Lord’s standard of sexual morality.” Sexual morality is important, and the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife is often used to underline the importance of not committing adultery.

That’s great, but I suspect your whole class can already answer the question, “Should I have sex with someone I’m not married to?” correctly. I also think there are other things we can get out of the story, especially when compared the preceding chapter.

All of the actors in this story, after all, are deeply constrained. Joseph is a slave, while Potiphar’s wife is a woman. Both occupy inferior social positions. Remember, when she accuses Joseph of trying to rape her, she doesn’t go straight to her husband. First she tries to get her servants on her side. And she does it, not by ordering them, but by exploiting their resentment of a foreigner (“Look, he had to bring us a Hebrew to dally with us!“). I mean, I’m far from an expert in Biblical Egyptian gender dynamics, but it looks to me suspiciously like she’s not much higher on the org chart than Joseph (and, in fact, she may be lower).

Also, when Joseph refuses her advances, he couches it in terms of ownership and control. Potiphar, he says, has put all that he owns in Joseph’s hands, except his wife. How, then, could Joseph take from Potiphar the one thing Potiphar hasn’t offered?

Moreover, Potiphar’s wife taking Joseph’s garment and using it as evidence alludes to Tamar in the previous chapter.

Remember Tamar? She’s Judah’s daughter-in-law. She married Er, but Er died, leaving her childless. So Judah tells his next son, Onan, to get her pregnant. Onan doesn’t, and also dies. Tamar moves back in with her family, but hear’s Judah’s coming and, in one of the ickier stories in the Bible, disguises herself as a prostitute. She positioned herself where Judah would see her and he does, and decides to proposition her. They sleep together. He offers to pay her with a kid from his flock, but she keeps his seal, cord, and staff as security (callback to Potiphar’s wife!). She’s pregnant by her father-in-law, it turns out, and, when he is ready to have her burned because she’s pregnant out of wedlock,[fn5] she shows him the seal, cord, and staff, and everything’s all right.

So we have two stories in which a woman seduces a man, not her husband. But the morality is different in the two; as best we can tell, Potiphar’s wife is in the wrong. But because Judah has failed his duty to Tamar, she’s in the right. In these two stories, the morality of extramarital sex isn’t black and white—it depends on the context.

Now, that’s not the lesson for us. Today’s law of chastity is unequivocal: sex outside of marriage is sinful, and sex with your daughter-in-law has to be at least doubly sinful, and super-icky. And I’m not sure we can comfortably apply either the story of Tamar or the story of Potiphar’s wife to our lives. I’m not convinced that we’re supposed to. But we can see, in a world alien to the one we live in, people interacting with God and His laws within cultural and legal constraints. And there must be value to that.

UPDATE: Genesis 34

In the comments, MDearest mentioned that every four years we skip Genesis 34, which involves the rape (maybe) of Dinah, and then the mass murder of Shechem’s family by Jacob’s sons. And she’s right—I read it, but didn’t comment on it. But let’s not let it pass without at least a couple comments.

  1. I wouldn’t classify this as a third (sexual) morality tale, along with Tamar and Potiphar’s wife. In those two stories, the women exercised agency—they chose to initiate (or try to initiate) a sexual relationship. By contrast, Dinah’s almost a MacGuffin: she’s the object that causes others to act. The only choice Dinah makes in this story is to leave to visit the daughters of the land.
  2. Verse 2 says that Shechem “lay with her by force” (or, in the KJV, “defiled her”). The notes to the Jewish Study Bible say that some scholars believe that verb means nonmarital sex, and doesn’t specify rape specifically. If that’s the case, then maybe my (1) is wrong, and Dinah is more than just a MacGuffin. But, while the text makes clear that Shechem is the Romeo in this star-crossed lovers story, it’s not clear that Dinah returns his love as Juliet.
  3. About that marriage thing: according to biblical law (which would have postdated this, because we’re not to Moses yet, but also apparently had its roots in Assyrian precedent), if a man rapes an unmarried woman, he has to pay a fine to her father and marry her, and he loses the right to divorce her. In other words, Shechem is trying to make things right (in cultural context—is it actually right? Absolutely not if it was rape; maybe, if it was a consensual Romeo-and-Juliet thing).
  4. This creates an irresolvable tension. Later laws provide that rape (or extramarital sex) can be resolved through this three-step process. But later laws also forbid intermarriage between Israelites and Hivites. So there’s not only no happy ending here, there’s no chance at a happy ending.
  5. Finally, note that there’s not a clean moral resolution here. Jacob thinks his sons have acted impetuously and dangerously: “You have made me odious among the inhabitants of the land …; my men are few in number, so that if they unite against me and attack me, I and my house will be destroyed.” Jacob’s not concerned that they killed all of the men in a town, or that they plundered. Rather, he’s concerned that their actions will cause his neighbors to unite and destroy him and his family (which would be bad, not only because he wants to live, but because of the covenantal promise he, his father, and his grandfather received).
  6. His sons respond, “Should our sister be treated like a whore?” Again, we have conflicting views: survival vs. family honor. And the text doesn’t tell us which view to adopt, if any. We’re left with an ambiguous ending, no clear moral, and total lack of respect for Dinah’s agency, or even her existence as a subject.

[fn1] Note that I’m quoting language from the Jewish Study Bible, but I’m linking scriptures to lds.org.

[fn2] FWIW, the Jewish Study Bible uses “unloved” rather than “hated,” though neither really sounds good.

[fn3] The Jewish Study Bible at 75.

[fn4] In a way, they’re kind of stuck killing him once they make their first move. After all, he’s already demonstrated that he’s a tattletale; if they let him live, presumably Jacob will hear about it.

[fn5] (because obviously women can’t be sleeping around)

Women in Jazz #MutualNight

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(Quick reminder: if you’re curious why I’m writing about music on a Mormon blog, this post will summarize what #MutualNight posts are.)

We’re nearing the end of Women’s History Month; in light of both the month and the current environment of #MeToo, I thought it might be worth looking at women in jazz.

Because honestly, women have historically been excluded from jazz. Sure, you can point me to Billie and Ella and Nancy Wilson and maybe even Carmen McRae. And you know what? They’re all singers. They’re amazing singers, but, while “[w]omen singers were tolerated and even spotlighted, especially with the advent of the big band era, … [women] instrumentalists had a much tougher time of it.“[fn1]

Besides the gender disparity in jazz, jazz has recently had its own #MeToo moment, precipitated by Ethan Iverson’s interview of Robert Glasper. Both Iverson and Glasper are jazz luminaries, and deservedly so. In the interview, the two start talking about getting into a groove, as compared with soloing. And in the course of that discussion, Glasper says:

And I’ve seen what that does to the audience, playing that groove. I love making the audience feel that way. Getting back to women: women love that. They don’t love a whole lot of soloing. When you hit that one groove and stay there, it’s like musical clitoris. You’re there, you stay on that groove, and the women’s eyes close and they start to sway, going into a trance.

Iverson not only let the comment pass unchallenged, but in the heat of the controversy, he followed up touting his bona fides as a liberal and a feminist. Vijay Iyer, another jazz heavyweight, responded by pointing out that Iverson had done 42 interviews with men, and none with women. Which is to say, even without hypersexualizing women who listen to (or play) jazz, the gatekeepers were excluding them.

The interview also brought to the fore accusations of sexual harassment in the jazz world.[fn2]

I’ve been thinking about women in jazz recently, particularly because of a couple records I own: Women in Jazz v.1: All Women Groups and Women in Jazz v.3: Swingtime to Modern.[fn3] (I don’t have volume 2 because I haven’t seen it at local record stores yet.) The albums are excellent—the music ranges from big band swing to 50s bebop. Each of the musicians deserves her place, and yet until I bought these albums I’d never heard, or heard of, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm—an amazing band that broke not only gender, but also racial, barriers in the 1940s—or L’Ana Webster (who is virtually un-Googleable) or Marjorie Hyams or dozens of other women who played on these dates that, even today, are only available on used records. And why aren’t they better-known? The liner notes to Women in Jazz volume 1 give at least some hint:

For men, it’s always been a simple formula: a newcomer arrived, was tested against prevailing standards and heroes, and either accepted or rejected [sic]. “He plays good” was all the admission required to find work, camarderie [sic]and—perhaps above all—universal respect throughout the profession

Women have had to travel a different road. With a few notable exceptions—most of them pianists of determined and forceful ways—even the best female musicians have found that most of the time just being good wasn’t enough. A woman remained an outsider, even an intruder, sometimes a threat.

So are there any women jazz instrumentalists you should listen to? Of course. But I want to highlight two whom I’ve been listening to almost nonstop: Satoko Fujii and Leslie Pintchik.[fn4]

Satoko Fujii

Satoko Fujii turns 60 this year. And to celebrate, she’s releasing a new album every month.

For most musicians, that would mean at best a lot of filler. But I suspect it won’t for Fujii. She’s a prolific composer, pianist, and bandleader, and writes and performs in a huge spectrum of voices. All of them could be categorized as free jazz, but all of them have distinct sounds.

And, to be honest, with many of her albums (especially with her various orchestras), she’s more outside than my ears really enjoy. Those are albums I respect, albums I want to like, but albums I don’t find myself coming back to.

Other albums, though, are haunting and beautiful, and I don’t won’t to leave them. And right now, I have two that keep drawing me back in. The two are wildly different, but, to my ears, wildly successful.

The first is last year’s Aspiration.[fn5] On Aspiration, she’s playing with a quartet. But it’s not a standard quartet—it features Fujii on piano, Wadada Leo Smith (another treasure) and Natsuki Tamura on trumpets, and Ikue Mori on electronics. The title track opens with a floating solo piano; at some point, almost unnoticed, electronic sounds enter in. And then you have a trumpet over piano vamps and skittering electronic sounds. The players’ performances sound organic—the lines and sounds develop together, climax, come down, rise again. (Listen to the title track here.)

And for me, I think that organic, collective nature is what makes this album so appealing. The music pulses, it grows; sometimes the various instruments seem to flow together, while other times they push each other apart. Sometimes everybody plays at once; other times we hear solo piano, or a trumpet by itself in an extended cadenza, though the move into cadenza is so natural that it might take thirty seconds to realize that the other instruments have dropped out.

I think that the glue that makes this album work, though, is the electronics. They somehow function as a connective tissue, a thread that ties each of these musicians together and prevents them from soaring away into their own dimensions.

The second album is Ninety-Nine Years. Fujii released it a couple days ago, as the March iteration of her album-per-month. The album features her Orchestra Berlin, a ten-piece ensemble she first put together two or three years ago. This album features the first music she’s written specifically for this group.

When Fujii writes for large ensembles, she (in my experience, at least) uses a lot of extended techniques. Wind players blow through their horns without producing tones, or they play in ranges far above what’s natural, or they honk or otherwise produce noise.

And all of that happens on this album, but it happens in exciting and melodic and accessible ways. The album opens with “Unexpected Incident,” the title a reference to the Japanese government’s euphemism for the Fukushima disaster. And the song traces that, opening with percussion that, after a little while, brings to mind clanging of metal on pipes, or perhaps emergency warnings. After a couple minutes, the instruments all enter, a chaotic cacophony of trilled horns and shredding guitar. A saxophone keeps the aggressive, chaotic lines over an organized, catchy line of syncopated horns. We move into two horns attacking each other.

And that kind of encapsulates the album. (Listen to the title track here.) It’s chaotic, but it’s also funky. We have unity, but we also have battles. But above all, it’s energetic—the musicians propel the songs forward, building and building until you don’t think they could possible go any higher. And then, often, they do. As of this writing, I’ve only had this album for one day, but it is includes some of the most interesting and listenable free jazz I’ve heard.

Leslie Pintchik

Like Satoko Fujii, Leslie Pintchik is a contemporary pianist. Her album You Eat My Food, You Drink My Wine, You Steal My Girl!, while significantly different stylistically from Fujii’s albums, is similarly indispensable. (You can stream it on Spotify.)

The first song starts with a two bold notes in the left hand, followed by a seven-note line in the right. The pattern continues and evolves over a funky drum line, and after a couple iterations, a horn section comes in with a line that hints at 1970s Brecker Brothers. And the song continues, funky, solid, and aggressive, a modern take on hard bop with a hint of fusion underlying it.

Much of the album is original compositions; not all are, though. The third songs transitions from a strong bass line, and a Latin feel in the percussion and piano, into the jazz standard “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” Although I’ve listened to the album countless times—especially on my commute—when the third song passes through my headphones on the El, it still surprises me. The song is immensely familiar, and yet she makes it her own.

The whole album evinces Pintchik’s sense of humor. It comes through on the song’s titles, including not only the title track (a phrase, she says, she heard yelled in Soho in New York), but the fifth track, “Your Call Will Be Answered by Our Next Available Representative, In the Order in Which It Was Received. Please Stay on the Line; Your Call Is Important to Us” (a title so long that, when I downloaded the album, my computer was initially unable to recognize the file name).

It’s not just the titles, though. Her sense of humor underlies her playing and arrangements. She plays solid, with a tone and power that certainly match Ethan Iverson’s, but with a different goals and different motivations. Although the album is thoroughly modern, it’s also thoroughly accessible. And I don’t mean that in any way to insult the music; she’s made an album that is both listenable and surprising. (Shoko Nagai, another female musician, adds some fun color to some of the songs on accordion. And no, it’s not polka-esque; it’s more texture than anything.)

Successful and recognized jazz musicians are invariably virtuosic. And, while it’s unfair that women should have to be more than normally virtuosic to gain recognition in the jazz world, these three albums are more than virtuosic. They are great on their own account, and serve as sharp rejoinders to anybody who believes that somehow women are unworthy to enter into the jazz pantheon.[fn6]


[fn1] It’s not unique to jazz, of course. Think about concert music: how many female classical composers are you aware of? Or look at rock and pop music: how many major acts feature women in any role other than vocalist? I mean, there are a few, but in comparison with the total number of acts, women are grossly underrepresented.

[fn2] I should note here that, while I listen rabidly to jazz, I don’t follow closely the ins and outs of the jazz world. I became aware of these things listening to the New York Times Popcast.

[fn3] I wish I could give you a link to the songs, but these albums appear to by vinyl-only. I searched for a couple of the songs on Spotify and couldn’t find them. Some background: the albums were released on Stash Records in the 1970s. Stash got its start with an album of novelty marijuana songs, which sold well enough that the record label was able to produce legitimate (non-pot-themed) jazz. (If you don’t have a record player—or access to a good used record store—Stash released Forty Years of Women in Jazz under its Jass Records imprint, and that album is available on CD.)

[fn4] As an aside, if you want to understand how the toot of a flute can be more exciting than the grandeur of an orchestra, look no further than Elena Pinderhughes, easily the most exciting young flautist out there, and probably one of the most exciting young jazz musicians, period.

[fn5] It’s shockingly hard to figure out where to buy Fujii’s albums, and Spotify has a limited number. You can buy her albums here; while the website is offputting, I promise the music is worth it.

[fn6] An addendum of sorts: I wrote this post Saturday night; Sunday, before it went live, I wanted to listen to some sacred jazz. Based on an NPR blog post, I streamed Mary Lou Williams’s “Mary Lou Williams Presents Black Christ of the Andes” (available on Spotify here). If you like to listen to worshipful music on Sundays, you need to listen to this album. Williams’s was another voice I hadn’t listened to. But her piano playing and her composing are excellent, and are clearly infused by her adopted Catholicism. Her piano is definitely another that needs to be in the pantheon, both of excellent women jazz musicians and of excellent jazz musicians, period.

Why Mormons Should Root For the Ramblers in the NCAA Tournament

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So there are four teams left: Kansas, Villanova, Michigan, and Loyola University Chicago. And as Mormons, you should probably be cheering for Loyola this weekend. Why? Let me count the reasons:

Your team’s out anyway

I mean, unless you’re a fan of Kansas, Villanova, or Michigan, in which case I assume you’ll be rooting against Loyola (though you can still cheer for the Ramblers!). But there are no Mormon-adjacent schools left. BYU? Never been to the Final Four. (In fact, it holds the kind of depressing record for most trips to the tournament without making the Final Four.)

University of Utah? Last time they made the Final Four was in 1998 (and I remember that tournament: one of my roommates at the time was a huge U fan; I’m not entirely sure how he ended up at BYU, except probably peer pressure on his mission. He eventually repented (or sinned, depending on your alma mater) and ended up graduating from the University of Utah). Utah state? Hasn’t been. So you don’t have to worry about rooting for a Mormon-related school.

Underdogs FTW!

Let’s see, we have a No. 1 seed, a No. 1 seed, a No. 3 seed, and a … No. 11 seed. In fact, no team higher than 11 has ever gone to the Final Four, and Loyola’s only the forth 11 seed to go. Like an underdog story? This is a pretty good one.

The Motto

Loyola’s motto, “Ad majorem Dei gloriam” (“For the greater glory of God”) should resonate with us. Loyola is a Jesuit school, and deeply steeped in Jesuit spirituality.

And it has a history of pursuing justice for the greater glory of God. In the early 1960s, Loyola broke with the unwritten rule of not starting more than three African American players. In 1963, Loyola’s one national championship, Loyola started four African American players. (It was radical enough that the Mississippi State team they beat during the tournament defied a state injunction meant to prevent them from playing an integrated team.) (For more context on the Game of Change, look here.)

Sister Jean

Seriously, who wouldn’t want a 98-year-old nun like Sister Jean as their team’s chaplain? (BTW, it looks like there’ll be a pretty good supply of Sister Jean swag available for fans to purchase!)

Make Basketball Fun Again

I get that I’m biased (after all, I do work at Loyola). But basically everybody else agrees, too: Loyola’s fun to watch. They have great shooting percentages, they play selflessly, passing the ball around, and, whether they won with a miracle shot in the final seconds or they won by a double-digit score, their playing is joyful.

On Kirton McConkie’s (Lack of) Women Shareholders

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The other night, I was listening to the most recent Slate Money podcast. In its second segment, the hosts talked about the recent gender pay report in the United Kingdom. They specifically mentioned about Goldman Sachs and Condé Nast, both of which, it turns out, have a pretty sizeable gender pay difference.[fn1]

There are undoubtedly many reasons why men’s income was significantly higher than women’s, but the podcast highlighted one in particular: high earners. At Goldman, women make up only 17% of the top quartile by income. At Condé Nast, there are more women at every income quartile, but it appears that incomes are skewed by the top 5%; in fact, the five-person executive committee is entirely men. What does the UK gender pay disparity have to do with Mormonism? It’ll take a couple steps to get there, but my thought process went something like this:

Gender in Legal Practice

I’m a law professor, and prior to legal academia, I was a practicing attorney at a big white shoe law firm in New York. And hearing about the lack of women at the top of Goldman Sachs and Condé Nast made me think of the law. See, legal practice has an enormous attrition of women as they rise through the ranks. Women make up just under half of law students, and receive just under half of JDs awarded.[fn2] They make up about 45% of associates.[fn3] But women only make up a hair more than 20% of partners. That is, for some reason (or, more likely, reasons) women leave law firms before making partner or without making partner.

Gender in Legal Practice in Salt Lake

I became curious about how these numbers played out in Salt Lake. Now clearly, not all attorneys in Salt Lake are Mormon, and the vast majority of Mormons in Salt Lake are not attorneys. Still, how women did in Salt Lake firms struck me as an interesting question, and not one entirely irrelevant to lived Mormonism.

In 2010, the Women Lawyers of Utah initiative did a study of precisely what I was wondering about, and the results were, well, abysmal. Similar to today, eight years ago, about 19% of law firm partners nationally were women. And in Salt Lake? That number was 11%. Of course, those numbers are eight years old, and I couldn’t find anything more recent. So I decided to look at the numbers in a tiny, not-random, not-representative sample.

Now I’m not super-familiar with the legal market in Utah—I’ve heard of a couple law firms there, but don’t know how they’re positioned. I was interested in looking at big law firms with relatively sophisticated practices, both because that’s the world I came from and because small firms risked more noise in the data. To figure out which ones, I Googled, then looked at the number of attorneys and their practice areas. I ended up deciding on six firms:

I wanted to focus solely on Salt Lake offices, so, other than Snow Christensen, where a firm had more than one office, I only looked at partners are the Salt Lake office.[fn4] Once I was looking at Salt Lake partners, I counted the number of partners who were women and the total number of partners. And how did the firms come out?

The firms I looked at still tended to fall behind the national average, but, by and large, did a lot better than the 2010 study. Here’s how these firms are doing:

  • S&W: 5 of 25 partners in Salt Lake (20%) are women.
  • PBG&L: 10 of 57 (18%) shareholders are women.
  • RQ&N: 9 of 69 shareholders (13%) are women.
  • H&H: 9 of 47 partners (19%) in Salt Lake are women.
  • SC&M: 5 of 35 of shareholders (14%) are women.
  • KM: 4 of 93 shareholders (4%) are women. (I had to double- and triple-check this number..)

So What to Do About It?

There are two big groups that can cause law firms to diversify: their own attorneys and their clients. The good news is, Kirton McConkie seems to recognize that having women is important. Among its associates, 15 of the 35 attorneys (43%) are women. That provides the firm with a pipeline to partnership.

Unfortunately, as the national numbers show, without active engagement, equal numbers of associates doesn’t lead to equal numbers of partners. And that’s borne out by the experience of Kirton; in the last two years, they’ve elected five new shareholders. Of those five, only one was a woman.

But there’s another side to the problem: clients. When clients demand diversity, law firms work to provide it. And guess who is one of Kirton’s major clients? The church! If the church were to exert pressure, Kirton would presumably do what it needed to advance more women, and to diversify its partnership ranks.[fn5]

It won’t be easy. It will take an active focus, not only on voting for women when the shareholder meetings happen, but on enacting policies that retain, advance, and prepare women. And the national market needs to do it. But so does the Salt Lake market, and so does the church’s external counsel.

 


[fn1] At Goldman, women’s mean hourly rate was 55.5% lower than men’s, while their median hourly rate was 36.4% lower. At Condé Nast, those numbers were 36.9% and 23.3% lower, respectively.

[fn2] For all of the national statistics, I’m using the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession’s January 2017 report.

[fn3] In case you’re not familiar with legal practice terminology, “associates” are basically junior and mid-level attorneys. They’re employees of the law firm, and get paid a salary. At some point, the firm allows certain attorneys to buy in, and become equity owners of the firm (which means that, at the end of the year, they share in the firm’s profits). Depending on how the firm is organized, these attorneys are either “partners” or “shareholders.” In New York, most law firms are organized as partnerships, so I always think partner. In Utah, it looks like many are organized as professional corporations, and so the equity owners are shareholders. Either way, the partners and shareholders are the senior attorneys and the higher earners.

[fn4] Snow Christensen’s website made that hard: you can filter attorneys by position or by office, but not by both, and filtering by office, I would have had to click on every name to see whether the attorney was a shareholder or not. That was more work than I was willing to do for a blog post, so my numbers for Snow include both Salt Lake and St. George attorneys.

[fn5] I’ll note that I suspect the representation of attorneys of color and of LGBT attorneys in national and in Salt Lake law firms is even worse. I didn’t look at that question because race is harder to divine from names, and sexual orientation is impossible. I will say, though, that I don’t remember seeing any persons of color among the pictures of partners I looked at; I didn’t look at pictures in every case, though, and that wasn’t the question I had, so I may have missed somebody. It’s worth noting that The Vault has data on larger national firms (though not divided by office), so I do know the national numbers for Snell & Wilmer and for Holland & Hart. Among partners at S&L, 19 of 182 (6%) are non-white, and none are openly LGBT. At H&H, 11 of 262 (4.2%) are non-white, and 2 (0.8%) are openly LGBT.

Taxsplainer: How the Utah Legislature Is Raising Taxes By Doing Nothing

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The Salt Lake Tribune is reporting that the Utah legislature has just enacted a large tax increase on many Utah families, in spite of its putative 0.05 percentage-point tax cut. How can that be?

It’s the result of something called “federal conformity.” Federal conformity basically means that the state income tax uses the Internal Revenue Code as a jumping-off point, and then makes adjustments where it feels adjustments are necessary. Why federal conformity? I’d imagine for a couple reasons. For one thing, writing tax laws is complicated, time-consuming, and hard. If a state starts with the federal income tax, it outsources most of that work to the federal government. For another, it makes it easier for a state resident, who has to calculate her taxes for both federal and state purposes, to use a single set of calculations.

Of course, outsourcing that work means that, when they federal government makes changes to the tax law, those changes potentially affect the state’s revenue, too. As a result, some states employ “static conformity,” meaning they’ve adopted the Internal Revenue Code the way it looked in 2008 or 2011 or 2016 or some other specific year. To the extent the federal income tax changes, the state legislature has to look at the changes and decide whether to accept them for state income tax purposes.

Other states (including Utah) employ “rolling conformity.” That means Utah’s tax law changes when the federal income tax changes.

And therein lies the problem.

So What’s Up With This Utah Tax Increase?

Two things. Utah bases its state taxable income on federal adjusted gross income. It allows certain adjustments to adjusted gross income, though. Two significant adjustments are credits for the standard deduction or itemized deductions and for personal exemptions. In short, it I take the standard deduction for federal income tax purposes, I get a tax credit against my Utah state income tax of 6% of my standard deduction. Similarly, I get a tax credit for 6% of my personal exemptions.[fn1]

Now, if you’ve been reading my posts regularly (and who hasn’t?), you may remember something about this new bill: it doubled the standard deduction and eliminated the deduction for personal exemptions. And because Utah has rolling conformity, that means these two changes factor into the state income tax. What does that mean, numerically? Let’s imagine you have a family of six. Before the tax bill was passed, the standard deduction for a married couple filing jointly would have been $13,000, and the personal exemption would have been $4,150 per individual. Combined, they would have reduced this family’s state income tax bill by $2,274.

But under the tax law as it now stands, the couple will have a standard deduction of $24,000 and personal exemptions of $0. Combined, the family’s state income tax is reduced by $1,440.[fn2]

The federal income tax partially and temporarily makes up for the loss of personal exemptions by basically doubling the child tax credit.[fn3] But that doesn’t work for Utah taxes, because Utah expressly disallows the use of federal tax credits in calculating state income tax.

Could the Utah Legislature Have Done Anything About This?

Of course they could have. States decouple their tax law from the federal income tax all the time. Sometimes that decoupling is broad; sometimes it’s only one or two provisions.

Moreover, the legislature did enact tax changes. Specifically, it cut the tax rate from 5% to 4.95%. Legislators can claim they cut taxes. And they did cut some individuals’ taxes. If you’re unmarried and don’t have kids, or if your income is high enough that the Utah tax credits I mentioned above have phased out, your taxes have been cut. But for our family of six, assuming they have state taxable income of $66,000 (roughly Utah’s median household income), that tax cut reduces their tax bill by $330. On net, then, the legislature’s inaction on the personal exemption and its tax reduction have increased the family’s state income tax by $504.

Now frankly, raising taxes is not necessarily the wrong thing to do. But it should be done transparently, rather than with the plausible deniability of a putative tax cut that turns out, in fact, to be a tax increase. And that’s what Utah’s getting.


[fn1] Note that these benefits phase out for higher-income individuals. I’m not an expert in Utah tax law, though (honestly, this is the first time I’ve looked at it specifically), so I’m going to call the phaseout outside the scope of this blog post.

[fn2] The bigger the family, the bigger the difference between the amount of tax reduction under prior law and the amount under current law.

[fn3] It’s not a perfect fix, as I explained in my earlier post, but it resolves a lot of the problems associated with the loss of personal exemptions for a lot of families.

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