Ryan’s budget: Would Jesus vote for it?

Rep. Paul Ryan seems to think that cutting benefits to the poor is the Christian thing to do, said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. But the Catholic Church has rebuked him for that bit of heresy. Ryan, a Roman Catholic who’s become the Republican Party’s most influential budget and tax strategist, has proposed a 10-year blueprint for reducing the deficit that cuts trillions in spending on food stamps, Medicare, and education, while giving trillions in tax breaks to the wealthy. But in an embarrassing slap-down, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has denounced Ryan’s budget, saying it “fails to meet” the essential moral mandate of Catholicism: to help what Jesus called “the least of these”—the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the jobless. A group of 90 Jesuit scholars and Georgetown faculty joined the bishops in protest, telling Ryan that his budget “appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

That’s a misguided attack on a good Catholic, said Marc Thiessen, also in The Washington Post. Ryan’s so-called “cuts” merely slow the growth of spending to 3 percent a year, as opposed to President Obama’s proposal to increase spending by 4.5 percent a year. Obama’s “fiscal profligacy” has led the nation to the brink of a catastrophic debt crisis that would, as the congressman points out, “hurt the poor the first and the worst.” Pope Benedict recently called huge budget deficits a moral problem, describing them as “living at the expense of future generations.” That generational theft is exactly what Ryan is trying to stop.

Ah, what a fine rationalization, said Jay Bookman in AJC.com. As the Jesuits pointed out, it provides a convenient cover for Ryan’s true moral inspiration—Rand, the “libertarian philosopher-queen” whose book Atlas Shrugged Ryan has said he gives to all his interns. Rand believed that compassion was morally wrong, and despised the poor as leeches who weakened society. But now that Ryan’s got national political ambitions, he’s apparently undergone a conversion. Last week, he said of Rand, “I reject her philosophy,” and said his new role model was Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic saint. But Aquinas once said, “Man should not consider his material possession his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need.” Sure doesn’t sound like a Republican to me.

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