This is from Catholicsinalliance.org a Catholic organization
advocating for the Catholic viewpoint on social justice issues.
Even those not Catholic might find value in reading up on the
positions of the largest single Church in this country, and the
church of the overwhelming majority of Christians in the world.
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*The Question of the Ryan Budget and Christian Values*
by Scott Lilly, Senior Fellow at the Center of American
Progress, former staff director of the House Appropriations
Committee, and past executive director of the Joint Economic
Committee.
A few weeks ago Congressman Paul Ryan wrote the Most Reverend
Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, to argue that the budget
he had crafted on behalf of House Republicans was consistent
with the teachings of the Catholic Church on questions of social
justice. "Nothing but hardship and pain can result from putting
off the issue of the coming debt crisis. Those who represent the
people, including myself, have a moral obligation, implicit in
the Church's social teaching, to address difficult basic
problems before they explode into social crisis."
There is no question that America has a budget problem. We have
made some major mistakes since we had four straight years of
budget surpluses in 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. Unfortunately,
Congressman Ryan was complicit in nearly all of them: the
Economic Growth and Tax Relief Act of 2001; the Jobs and Growth
Tax Relief Act of 2003; the Iraq War; the passage of a major
expansion of Medicare structured to make the major
pharmaceutical companies the biggest winner and the American
taxpayer the biggest loser.
Both pieces of tax legislation were advertised to spur growth
and create jobs. Instead we had one of the slowest periods of
economic expansion and job creation since World War II. The
Congressional Budget Office now estimates that the two pieces of
tax legislation, and the subsequent legislation that extended
them, cost the Treasury $2.8 trillion over the past decade.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the decision to
fight the Iraq War without paying for it cost more than $800
billion. CBO estimates the Medicare Part D benefit has thus far
cost $300 billion.
But now we are in a different mode. Ryan and his colleagues
have decided that deficits do matter --or at least that is the
point he seems to be making in his open letter to the
Archbishop. But what is mysteriously absent from that letter to
the Archbishop is any in-depth discussion of his tax proposals,
which are by far the biggest, and from a budgetary standpoint,
the most important part of the proposal.
According to Ryan's own analysis of his program (Tables S2 and
S4) he
shaves nearly $800 billion off the cost of Medicaid over the
next 10 years, $30 billion from Medicare, $1.6 trillion off
non-security domestic programs such as education, health
research, worker safety, and space exploration, but his proposed
revenue changes slash taxes nearly $4.2 billion. He not only
makes the temporary Bush tax cuts permanent but also drops the
top tax rate that the most well-to-do pay from the current 35
percent to only 25 percent.
Are these policies consistent with Christian moral values?
Should someone dedicated to the teachings of Christ and moral
principles contained in the social gospel of the Catholic
Church be comfortable with the choices that are made in this
budget? I think there is a fairly simple answer to that
question.
If you believe it is credible that making deep cuts in programs
that serve the poor are necessary so that the wealthy in our
society can pay less tax -- and that by paying less tax they
will create jobs, ultimately helping the poor more than the
spending cuts in the Ryan budget will hurt them -- then you
should believe that Ryan's proposal is consistent with Christian
values.
But if you find little factual basis for the presumption that
further increasing the share of our nation's wealth held by the
top one percent of households will speed job creation then the
Ryan proposal is simply not consistent with Christian values.
And if you worry that many innocent and needy souls will be
trampled by his proposed budget cutbacks in another failed
experiment in trickle-down economics, then the Ryan proposal is
not just inconsistent with the value inherent in Catholic social
justice. It is the antithesis.
I think so much attention has been directed at the Medicare
proposals that Ryan has put forward that too little attention
has been focused on other aspects that will not only change the
role of government in this society but will profoundly change
the society in which we now live. A good example is the proposal
he has put forward for Medicaid.
First of all, Ryan would repeal the health care reform
legislation signed into last year. That would preclude about
18 million adults and 4 million children from households with
too little income to pay insurance premiums from getting
Medicaid coverage in 2014 as scheduled under the new health
reform legislation. But in addition, Ryan would cap federal
Medicaid payments to states to levels well below the expected
growth of the program.
Using CBO data, I estimate that in order to preserve current
levels of service, states will need to come up with $300 billion
more in state revenue than they are currently providing. They
can slash the payments they make to nursing homes for the
elderly and send them back to live with their sons or daughters.
They can stop paying the hefty costs associated with the care of
severely retarded children, Alzheimer victims and other
disabled.
Alternatively they can eliminate the coverage they provide to
people who are not elderly or disabled -- namely pregnant women,
poor children and their mothers. If the states were to choose to
do that then they would eliminate about a 1/3 of the cost of the
Medicaid program but they would also eliminate 75 percent of the
program's beneficiaries. Yet the funding gap for the states
created by the Ryan proposal is so huge that elimination of this
set of beneficiaries would not entirely close it.
The health care provided to pregnant women, poor children and
their mothers covers the cost of 40 percent of the deliveries of
all babies born in this country. Since the program was adopted
in 1965 infant mortality has dropped from nearly 25 percent to
slightly above 6 percent. The prenatal care has reduced the
number of low-weight babies born and helped bring many tens of
thousands of problem pregnancies to term.
The jeopardy in which Ryan places such services should bring
grave discomfort to anyone professing Christian values.
http://www.catholicsinalliance.org/thecommongoodforum.php
Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good is a lay Catholic
organization that promotes public policies and effective
programs that enhance the inherent dignity of all, especially
the poor and most vulnerable. Our work is inspired by Gospel
values and the rich history of Catholic social teaching as they
inform pressing moral issues of our time. We accomplish these
goals through public policy analysis and advocacy, strategic
media outreach, and engaging citizens in the service of the
common good.
BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn
... Don't tell me you are pro-life if you don't support health care for all.
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