The tax reform adopted in in the U.S. in December 2017 has significant implications for charitable deductions. Households that do not pay mortgage interest and do not have major medical expenses are likely to find that giving to charity no longer brings tax benefits. The purpose of this article is to explain how “charity bunching”…
This will be our only issue of “On the Margin” in 2019, and I am happy to give you an update on the society. CREDO continues to grow. We have nearly 600 members, and membership has already grew over 18 percent in 2018, and has already grown about 10 percent this year. We will be…
Catholic Social Teaching (CST) is generally considered to have started with the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII The Condition of Labor (Rerum Novarum). This encyclical called out the wretched conditions of industrial workers and articulated the rights and duties of workers and employers, including the rights of workers to organize. On this foundation, the social…
Following the financial crisis, already ten years old, Europe was hit by a severe sovereign debt crisis that challenged the European institutions. Should the ECB have responded to the crisis with the powerful tools of monetary issuance? Or should instead the solution of the crisis be left to the fragile European fiscal institutions? At the…
A keynote talk from Bishop Oscar Cantu of Las Cruces headlined the discussion of the family and its role in the economy on April 30 and May 1, as economists, bishops, and other scholars gather in Chicago for the Lumen Christi Institute’s 7th annual Conference on Economics and Catholic Social Thought. The theme, “The Family and the Changing Economy”, was quite timely, falling squarely between the two October meetings of the 2014-15 Synod of Bishops on the Family.
The public event was opened by Blase Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, and involved responses by CREDO economists Valerie Ramey (UC-San Diego) and William Evans (Notre Dame), as well Pierre-Andre Chiappori (Columbia), a noted expert on the economics of the family, and Christine Firer Hinze (Fordham), a social ethicist focusing on the family. …
The focus of this issue was supposed to be marriage and the family, but on April 17, Francis Cardinal George, passed away after a long bout with cancer. He was our Episcopal Moderator, that is, our church representative on CREDO’s board, and in many ways he was the impetus for the existence of our society, so I would like to spend some time in this column celebrating his life.
Francis George was born in Chicago on January 16, 1937, as the country was still struggling with the Great Depression. The second of two children, he attended the Chicago parochial schools, and he was the only bishop of Chicago to be a native Chicagoan. Although a native son, he had a measured view of the city of Chicago as an adult. He loved the people and his diocese, but he hated the corruption of local politics. …