Category Archives: budget

A Letter to Leaders

Dear leaders,
Everyday there are opportunities for principled compromise and proximate justice in your service. Some questions to guide your actions:
Do you care about the poor or your power?

Do you want hospitable, legal and secure immigration or talking points?
Can you critique ideas and policies without exaggeration and insult?
Will your secure our financial future with a balanced budget, or just pretend that it does not matter?
Will you look for partnerships or do you prefer polemics and “gotchas’?
Will you fashion reparations as access, equity, and opportunity or another way to stoke resentment?
Will you affirm freedom of conscience and religion and allow people to bring their best selves to the public square, or will you despise the very traditions that offer your current liberties?
Are you willing to normalize your pensions and retirements, saving buckets of money, and serve the public without thought to your gain?
In short, will you be adults, reflecting before reacting, negotiating instead of just negating, and offering vision for the future?


Letters to Leaders, Part 2

Dear President Trump,
I pray for you: for purity of heart, divine love, and the wisdom and strength to carry out the impossible duties of your office.


Three things I long for as you lead:

  1. Clear policy communication without personal insults.
  2. A balanced budget for our children’s future.
  3. More convening with people that do not agree with you so we might discover a principled middle ground.

I agree on some policies and disagree on others. Your desire to help our nation will be enhanced with humility. I do not mean apologizing for particular principles, but opening pathways of peacemaking.

OK, three more things:

  1. Call a racial reconciliation summit and listen deeply to the cries of the historically underserved.
  2. Call an immigration summit and forge a hospitable, secure and compassionate policy.
  3. Meet with leaders of all faiths and none and reaffirm the brilliance of freedom of conscience and true toleration.<


I was no fan of the prior administration, but I prayed for and still pray for those that were part of those years. While applauding some of your initiatives, I long for you to choose statesmanship. You will never win over inveterate enemies, but you may get more done in service of all.

For our Political Leaders

Our political impasses are solvable…except the lust for power blurs vision for the common good. We can balance a budget, secure our borders, offer equity and opportunity, provide for our defense and rebuild infrastructure with skilled people ready to help. But too many leaders would rather agitate than build. It is easier to promise the unachievable than call for integrity.

I have three questions as you propose legislation:
First, who benefits? Are we aiming for the common good or lining the pockets of a few?

Second, what are the principles behind the laws? The ideas and virtues underneath do matter.

Third, how will we pay for this? Are we moving toward fiscal stability or deficit-spending our way to power?
Stewarding the public trust requires courage, moral clarity and wisdom.