Rep. Paul Ryan, (R-Wis), chairman of the House budget committee, provoked some angry push back when he claimed that not only is his proposed sweeping revamp of the US budget fiscally sound but also morally sound.
In a CBN interview, Ryan said he draws inspiration from his Catholic faith.
He argues 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, help people get out of poverty out onto life of independence.”
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 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 that 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?
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It’s no accident that in 1960, according to the Pew Research Center, five years before President 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.
Consider Social Security. Social Security’s Board of Trustees just issued a devastating annual report. They project 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 US 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 those currently working 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 this to be down to 2.0 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. The average U.S. fertility rate, per the UN, in the period 2005-2010 was 40 percent lower than during 1950-1955.
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 those working 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.
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