Rep. Paul Ryan's budget is a moral budget

[Leanne King]

Rep. Paul Ryan's budget is a moral budget

All change begins with character and personal transformation.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, provoked some angry pushback when he claimed that not only is his proposed sweeping revamp of the U.S. budget fiscally sound but also morally sound.

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Ryan said he drew inspiration from his Catholic faith.

He argued that Catholic priority for caring for the poor should focus on helping folks move out of poverty: "Don't make people dependent on government so they stay stuck in their station in life."

Catholics criticizing Ryan don't see it this way. They see him cutting back on welfare programs that focus on the needy.

But this is not a new debate, and it's not limited to Catholics. Those on the religious left of all religious persuasions have long been criticizing religious conservatives, claiming they're indifferent to poverty and care only about abortion and homosexuality.

It's a critical discussion for our nation today and Ryan deserves credit for casting his proposed reforms in moral as well as economic terms. It provides the opportunity to challenge today's conventional wisdom that morality and economy are separate universes having little to do with each other.

It's not true.

I can speak from personal experience going back to my years on welfare. The intent of federal welfare programs might have been to help the poor, but they caused far more damage than benefit.

When you tell a poor mother that, to qualify for her check, she must demonstrate she is single, not working and has no savings, what are the chances she'll get married, look for a job and put money in the bank? When this goes on for generations, what do you think this does to a community? (Congress aimed to reverse the disincentives with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 -- welfare reform -- which set minimum work requirements and promoted marriage.)

It's no accident that in 1960, according to the Pew Research Center, five years before President Lyndon Johnson signed into law his War on Poverty, 61 percent of black adults were married. By 2008, this was down to 32 percent. In 1960, 2 percent of black children had a parent that had never been married. By 2008, this was up to 41 percent.

Social Security's Board of Trustees just issued a devastating annual report. It projected the system going into the red in 2035, three years earlier than predicted last year. The system's long-term unfunded liabilities -- the amount by which projected obligations exceed projected revenues -- are $8.6 trillion, more than half the size of the entire U.S. economy.

Discussions about how to fix the system focus on numbers and accounting. But the numbers are symptoms, not causes.

The Social Security payments that current retirees get are from the payroll taxes that current workers pay. What is driving the system into bankruptcy is the shrinking number of those working per retiree. In 1950, the average was 16.5 workers per retiree. Now it is 2.9. The trustees report projects it will be down to just two workers for every retiree by 2035.

What happened?

One major factor is we're having fewer children. Fertility rates -- the average number of births per woman -- have fallen dramatically. According to the United Nations, the average U.S. fertility rate from 2005 to 2010 was 40 percent lower than during 1950 to 1955.

John Mueller of the Ethics and Public Policy Center argues convincingly of the major impact of legal abortion to this dramatic drop in the ratio of workers to retirees.

To solve our national crisis, we need to sort out symptoms from causes. The bankruptcy of our entitlement programs is the symptom.

The cause is loss of individual freedom and breakdown of values, personal responsibility and marriage caused by entitlement culture materialism.

Paul Ryan is right to see this in moral terms. We must change, and all change begins with character and personal transformation.

 

Star Parker

[amanda choate]

Because of the welfare to work laws, fewer people are on welfare today than in 2007. That is because you can't qualify for welfare if you're not working. The private sector jobs are hard to come by and the public sector workforce is down by 650,000 people since 2009. If public sector employment had just stayed steady since 2009, the unemployment rate would be 7.2%

I think personally, though I have never received a government check, that working would be preferable to the vast majority of Americans. Ther will always be malingerers, but that is jut how it is. You don't build a system to protect from the few, you build it serve the many. Of all the ways my tax dollars are spent, feeding the hungry, sheltering the poor, educating our children, bothers me the least. If that makes me a bleeding heart so be it. We are a very rich country that can afford to rain down million dollar missiles on fifty dollar mudhuts, seems to me that this effects our national security just as much.

Tamara, sorry but USCCB is out as a valid voice on morality until they develop a little less tone deafness on many other subjects. 

[amanda choate]

This is an Ayn Rand budget. IT is not balanced, the deficit increases by 2.6 trillion dollars under this budget. Taxes on the middle class go up and taxes on the one percent go down. It doesn't decrease medicare spending until the future when it is to late. It is a bad joke. It is neither moral nor balanced. Without one, it cannot be the other. If he is going to make all this commotion, at elast solve the problems, don't exacerbate them and proclaim yourself the Apostle Paul. He is just Paul from DC. Next caller....

[tamara stephenson]

Another huge factor in the fewer number of births is women marrying later and as a result, having fewer children.  I have never heard the argument that abortions are causing that many fewer births, thus fewer workers. 

As for Paul Ryan's budget, it wasn't just a few Catholics, it was the U.S. Conference of Bishops (not exactly a liberal group).  ryan's plan is what it is; however, based on any kind of Catholic doctrine, it is not, and he shouldn't be waving around the Catholic flag as he proposes to cut programs for the neediest in this country.