In the wake of the selection of Paul Ryan as the VP nominee, you will be hearing a lot about how Ryan is a bad Catholic because the Bishops criticized the Ryan budget plan.
Let me cut to the chase, the Bishops were wrong.
The text of the letter issued by the Bishops gets the basics wrong and completely ignores the immorality of continued debt. They say…
On behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, I write to urge you to resist for moral and human reasons unacceptable cuts to hunger and nutrition programs. The committee has been instructed to reduce agricultural programs by an additional $33.2 billion. In allocating these reductions, the committee should protect essential programs that serve poor and hungry people over subsidies that assist large and relatively well-off agricultural enterprises. Cuts to nutrition programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors and workers who cannot find employment. These cuts are unjustified and wrong. If cuts are necessary, the committee should first look towards reducing and targeting commodity and subsidy programs that disproportionately go to large growers and agribusiness
Except those draconian cuts they fear are not cuts at all, but reductions in growth from the projected baseline budgeting planned growth. To suggest that these are real cuts is disingenuous.
Further, this letter does not address the real problems facing America, rather the Bishops sit on their high horses while simultaneously sticking their heads in the sand.
This massive accumulating debt has real consequences, and those consequence will be disastrous for the very poor the USCCB pretends to be concerned about.
August 11, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Bravo!!
August 11, 2012 at 3:39 pm
the immorality of continued debt." After the taxpayer has been fleeced to death, there is not much more than to beg some of the tax money back for the poor. Charity, the virtue of voluntary charity is the business of the individual's private conscience, not the exchequer. Return to the people their tax dollars to realize true charity.
August 11, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Evidently, the bishops surmize correctly that government will hurt the poor first, because the poor have no voice, work day and night to keep body and soul together and suffer the disdain and contempt of the government. The fraud and waste must be contained. No more partying on the backs of the taxpayers. Not a single penny of my tax dollar is to be used for abortion, ssm or prayer ban.
August 11, 2012 at 6:34 pm
Agree that continued borrowing from China to fund our illegal unjust wars is not a good idea. Paul Ryan's budget is seriously flawed:
1) You can't reduce the debt without raising taxes in addition to cuts across the board including defense. 60% of the budget is defense, social security and medicaid and medicare. Austerity does not work look at the EU
2)Ryan suggests using premium support (voucher payments) for medicare. This will lead to rationing of care to seniors, just like obamacare. When a senior
exceeds the projected cost of their voucher and cant pay the insurance company for the remainder they will be dropped. With obamacare a death panel will deny coverage.
3) Ryan plans on eliminating most tax deductions and credits for individuals and eliminating the income tax multinational corporations pay overseas for profits made abroad. Who is this guy working for????
4) neither candidate has the interest of the amerikan people at heart.
5) We need to overhaul the entitlement system, regulate wall street effectively, punish companies that move jobs overseas and bring all our military force back here where they belong. We have no business appointing ourselves leaders of the free world.
August 11, 2012 at 6:41 pm
The bishops have been wrong about many things over the last few decades. It's why so few are willing to follow them.
August 11, 2012 at 8:00 pm
I guess I will have to vote for this ticket now. I had thought to abstain from the presidential pick.
August 11, 2012 at 9:46 pm
Alas that so many bishops are adjuncts of a political party.
August 12, 2012 at 9:24 pm
The bishops are clueless when it comes to their own faith! Why should we expect them to be anything more when it comes to politics, economics or foreign policy?
August 12, 2012 at 9:59 pm
The bishops equate our mandate as individuals to care for the poor with ceding that duty to the state via confiscatory taxes, i.e. wealth redistribution. That is marxist. And it's also an abdication of our individual responsibility as Catholics.
As a bishop, instead of actually helping the poor, all I have to do is write an op ed urging government to do it by stealing other people's money, and then I'm good to go.
Wealth redistribution is not genuine charity. It doesn't stand in substitute to our Catholic mandate to help the poor. And, in fact, it doesn't even help the poor at all. It just creates more of them. The only people it serves are the vote buying politicians and the leftists bishops.
And John, take your meds.
August 12, 2012 at 10:31 pm
John, you could reduce the debt without raising taxes by simply cutting back the Federal Government to its constitutional limitations. You assume incorrectly that we all want this behemoth.
August 14, 2012 at 4:43 am
Please remember that when Napoleon said he'd destroy the Church in France, during his bid to get Vatican support, the papal legate replied, "Please. If the French bishops didn't manage it, what chance do you have?"
And John, seriously. Paranoid schizophrenia is readily treatable with a few relatively inexpensive medications.
August 14, 2012 at 7:18 pm
Sophia's Favorite, I suggest you read about the vision of Pope Leo XIII. Neither Napoleon nor the French bishops will destroy Catholicism. Guess who will?
August 15, 2012 at 4:01 pm
Right or wrong, the Democrats will beat that like a drum.
But what did the bishops say about the Obama budget, the Reid budget? I know they're suing Obama so, that can't be good.
And Reid? Phhhhttt. No solution to an impending crisis. So, that's not good either.
I think they're OK with the Romney budget.
August 15, 2012 at 7:57 pm
Hear! Hear, Mr. Archbold!
Albert Brooks was on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, and they touched on this issue.
Brooks called the US bishop's "economic liberalism," "simplistic thinking": To diminish poverty money must be given to the poor. All the while ignoring the dependency that is created as a result.
Brooks also pointed out that on the one hand, Bishops are neither trained as economists nor policy analysts. And worse yet, "a lot of these guys were brought up in the 60s and 70s. These were guys who were brought up during the movement of American collectivism. And so the result of the matter is you see the same thing among the American bishops that you see on American college campuses."
Well, isn't that just lovely?!!
Perhaps this might explain the bishop's liberal interpretation of The Beatitudes–with the coercion of the state, of course. Or, and I hope I'm very, very, wrong about this, the bishops won't roll up their sleeves to work with the clergy and laity of their diocese, and may be simply guilty of the lazy man's way to charity.
August 15, 2012 at 10:32 pm
P.S. Sorry that should be Arthur Brooks, not Albert.