The drive toward a compassionate conservative agenda was the forward moral thrust of Gov. George Bush’s 2000 presidential candidacy. Augmenting welfare with charity, the latter being the sextant of compassionate religion, culminated in the Jan. 29, 2001, creation of White House Office of Faith-Based & Community Initiatives. The mission of that vassal: “Strengthening and expanding the role of faith-based and community organizations in addressing the nation’s social problems.”

The dichotomy of modern conservatism is the contrast between compassionate conservatives and fiscal conservatives.

The fiscal conservative is always paused at occasions of spending taxpayer money.

The religious right compassionate conservatives admonish the perceived, and at times real, agendas of liberal service organizations, such as United Way and Planned Parenthood. Both what the religious right hopes and liberals argue against is an unavoidable religious influence upon recipients of faith-based federal funded aid. And the religious organizations sought out by the faith-based and community initiatives are those who (generally being compassionate conservatives) provide help to the poor and aid to the vulnerable, two missions of welfare and secular charity.

“Of course, that…leads to the question of…taxpayer’s money. My attitude is taxpayer’s money should and must fund effective programs, effective faith-based programs,” Bush said to urban leaders at a July 16, 2003 luncheon. No excess in charity exists, of course, when so many problems permeate the many blessed American lives. But financial discipline, the temperance to not have all that is wanted, or needed, because money has a foreseeable limit, is fiscal conservatism. Ms. Fiscal Conservative shakes her head, miffed at a President who inherited a budget seven hundred billion trimmer than that Mr. Bush is proposing for year 2004.

Compassion put into action has made lightning rods of many liberals who seek and have sought basic social change, and have ridden the magic carpet of a federal bankroll to the contempt of conservative Republicans. Faith-based initiatives and New Deal socialism — where do we draw the difference?

Certainly with the message disparity between those broad notions. Social liberals promote sex education; compassionate conservatives promote abstinence. Planned Parenthood has lobbied to introduce condom dispensers into high schools; the Web site for faith-based initiatives promotes access to $33 million for abstinence programs. Social liberals promote Roe v. Wade; compassionate conservatives champion pro-life initiatives. Facts draw the point into literal examples, but fiscal conservative thought hinges on one fact: Earners of money spend better their money than those who levy taxes. And yet the agenda, in different incarnations, has been to shuffle money into programs “addressing the nation’s social problems.”

Federal welfare, federal grants to secular and religious affiliated charities (but not deeply secular charities), Medicare and Medicaid are not defunct processes. Certainly clumsy with frugality, but yet another fiscal conservative complain surfaces: Aid for social problems already has a vehicle within federal bureaucratic grasp. And this vehicle is run poorly, money spent foolishly. Par for the course, Medicare spends one dollar for every 30 cents of benefit. Unacceptable.

Fiscal conservatives see waste heaped upon itself, and the fix is not subtending a convoluted disaster by funding the charitable work of churches, but fixing our existing mechanism. And tax dollars put toward faith-based initiatives could be refunded, then donated by individuals and taken as a tax deduction.

Federal assistance is economic in motivation, the compassion of taxpayer alleviation of poverty a tool for economic growth. Yet putting charity on the dole will not deal with poverty, at least not without intrinsic consequences. Anything taking money from benefactors is obliged, at the very least by good manners, to heed advice. Advice becomes consent and then permission. Permission sought establishes incorporation of the permissive into giant federal bureaucracy. And being compassionate, no self-respecting faith-based charity could ever be fully funded. After all, God’s work is never done. Neither, of course, is the work of liberal activism.

David James Sheets is a junior in electrical engineering from Toddville. He is a member of the Campus Republicans.