Wanted: Heroes to fight income inequality

Today’s sermon is taken from the filmography of director Frank Capra, who might have won a fourth Oscar were he alive to do a movie about how our leaders are addressing the issue of income inequality.

Mr. Capra made films featuring common, humble, but extraordinary men and women who stand up to greed and corruption. The concept is more believable on the big screen than in real life, especially when the heroes and heroines are played by Jimmy Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur and Donna Reed, and the villains by Lionel Barrymore and Edward Arnold.

The thought of the common man triumphing over greed is hard to fathom these days. Congressional and White House approval of an illconsidered, popularly opposed, partisan money grab masquerading as tax reform leaves a typically inspiring Capra ending on the cutting room floor.

This rare Trumpian triumph will turbocharge the deficit and result in cuts to Medicare and other programs benefiting the kind of people Mr. Capra’s George Bailey, the small town savings and loan operator, stood up for in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

When banking mogul Henry F. Potter, the meanest and richest man in town, belittles George for giving mortgages to a bunch of garlic eaters, Mr. Capra’s hero responds: “This rabble you’re talking about ... they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of