Case in point: College students take a pass on GPA redistribution.

Oliver Darcy, a recent college graduate, proposes that students with good grades contribute their GPA to their academically sluggish friends. He argues that this is how the federal government takes wealth from the country’s high wage earners and distributes it to the low income earners.

“They all earn their GPA,” said Darcy in an interview with “Fox and Friends.” “So we asked them if they’d be interested in redistributing the GPA points that they earned to students who may be having trouble getting a high GPA.”

Darcy, who films his encounters with teachers and fellow students, doesn’t have much luck selling this theory.

He said many students on college campuses support high taxes on the rich, but when put into relative terms, cringed at the thought of spreading around their academic wealth (Fox News).

This reminded me of my own experiment I once conducted with similar results. It was during a weekend and those of us working at my office were working nights. The office decided to order pizza. As we were getting our orders, I let it be known that I did not have any cash on me. However, I did not mention that I had brought leftovers and wasn’t interested in the first place. At any rate, we were fresh off a big office debate on healthcare and taxes. I thought this little learning lesson was too good to pass up. Once the pizza arrived I made my way over to the boxes and began stacking my plate. I even made critical comments of some of the selections. I purposely honed in on the orders made by the office socialists. Out of a group of, say, 12, there were only three of them. As you can imagine, they were none too pleased over me rummaging through their pizza.

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As one of the few Jews willing to admit to a politically conservative slant, I get asked the same question all the time, “How can you be both politically conservative and a Jew?” Most of the questioners are either liberal Jews who consider me something of a heretic, or a non-Jewish fellow conservative who is shocked at the rare find of a conservative who is a Jew.

My response to the query is usually “How can a Jew not be politically conservative?” Conservative principals such as limited government, individual responsibility,  and traditional morals are all deeply rooted in Jewish tradition. Even the fact that America’s  founders intended for the county to be led by people who based their political decisions on religious values (something that scares the heck out of most liberal Jews) complements Jewish tradition.

The  creation narrative in Genesis explains that man is created in God’s image.  But we also taught that our maker has no bodily form, so how can that be?  The Bible is not teaching us that we are all dead ringers for  ”big guy upstairs,”  if that was the case the pictures on everyone’s drivers licenses would look alike and no one would be able to get a check cashed and CSI would be a very boring TV show.

“Created in God’s image”  is supposed to teach us that just as God acts as a free being, without prior restraint to do right and wrong, so does man. God does good deeds as a matter of his own free choice,and because we are created in his image so can man. Only through free choice, can man truly be, in the image of God.  It is further understood that  for Man to have true free choice, he must not only have inner free will, but an environment in which a choice between obedience and disobedience exists. God thus created the world such that both good and evil can operate freely; this is what the Rabbis mean when they said, “All is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven” (Talmud, Berachot 33b). God controls all the options we have, but it is up to man to pick between the correct or incorrect option.

As explained by the Rabbis, free will is the divine version of limited government. God picks the winning direction, but does not pick winners and losers.

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If you want to get depressed or angry, the New York Times has an article celebrating the effort by politicians at all levels of government to lure more people into the food stamp program. New York City is running ads in foreign languagues asking people to stick their snouts in the public trough. The City is even signing up prisoners when they get out of jail. The state of New York, meanwhile, actually set up quotas for enrolling new recipients. And on the federal level, there apparently is a program that gives states “bonuses” for putting more people on the dole. No wonder one out of every eight Americans is receiving food stamps.

By the way, this is not just the fault of Democrats. The ranking Republican on the Agriculture Committee is a big defender of the program, in part because of the sordid pact among urban and rural politicians to support each other’s handouts. And President George W. Bush’s food stamp administrator actually had the gall to assert “food stamps is not welfare.” No wonder the burden of federal spending skyrocketed during the reign of so-called compassionate conservatism.

The correct policy, of course, is to get the federal government out of the welfare business. If Mayor Bloomberg thinks it is a “civic duty” to expand food stamps, he should see whether New York City voters agree with him – and want to foot the bill.

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Politicians in Washington have come up with something far more impressive than turning lead into gold or water into wine. Using self-serving budget rules, they can increase the burden of government spending and say they are cutting taxes instead.

This bit of legerdemain is made possible, thanks to the convolutions of the personal income tax, by adopting or expanding refundable tax credits. But in this case, “refundable” does not mean the government is returning money to taxpayers. Instead, it means that money is being redistributed to people who do not earn enough to be subject to the income tax.

This is hardly a trivial issue. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the amount of income redistribution being laundered through the tax code is now so large that the bottom 40 percent of the population has a negative “effective” income tax rate. In simple terms (though perhaps with profound political implications), the income tax is a revenue generator for a big share of the population.

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