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“This coming month and every month to come, more or less, this government will spend $300 billion a month. That’s a lot of money. It’s more than any government has ever spent in the history of man,” Florida’s Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said in a closing speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, before August recess.
The speech came at the end of the Treasury-declared Aug. 2 deadline debt-ceiling debate in the Senate and helped put the whole fight in some context.
“$180 billion of that $300 billion is money that we collect from the people of our country through taxes and fees and other ways,” Rubio, a freshman senator, continued. “But we borrow $120 billion a month to pay our $300 billion-a-month bill.”
“And that’s just too much money,” he said. “That’s too much money for Republicans; it’s too much money for Democrats. It’s just too much money.”
Rubio had voted against the final deal the White House had agreed to with congressional leaders, after the president had stalled things by nixing a framework Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., had tentatively agreed to the week before.
At the same time, though, Rubio thanked Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky for his leadership.
In doing so, he echoed the judgment of other members of his party who believed that the GOP leadership had, in fact, realized that what Washington has been doing — spending and borrowing and spending and letting itself borrow even more, all the while planning to spend more — could not be sustained.
“We have a moral responsibility to deal with this threat to freedom and liberate our economy from the shackles of debt and unrestrained government,” Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, said earlier this year, speaking to the National Religious Broadcasters.
Indeed, Boehner often spoke in moral terms about the debt ceiling, as he tried negotiating with the president and then his own caucus in the House.
Such remarks suggest that Washington is now engaged in a moral debate about the responsibilities of stewardship. And it’s one being led in no small way by Catholics.
As Capitol Hill addressed the debt-and-budget crisis, politicians have explicitly discussed and grappled with Catholic social teaching.
“It is immoral for governments to make promises they cannot fulfill,” Congressman Paul Ryan, House Budget Committee chairman, recently contended in a column in Our Sunday Visitor.
He made that assertion only after citing Pope Benedict XVI on debt. In last year’s papal-interview book, Light of the World, the Pontiff said: “[W]e are living at the expense of future generations ... in untruth. We live on the basis of appearances, and the huge debts are meanwhile treated as something that we are simply entitled to.”
When Boehner spoke at The Catholic University of America’s commencement this past May, his appearance was protested by a good number of liberal Catholic university professors. The speaker was accused of “opposition” to Catholic moral teaching.
But Boehner is not a speaker of the House who takes his moral-stewardship responsibilities lightly. And this is not a time when anyone who holds such a post can afford to shrug off the debt’s impact on the nation’s future.
Indeed, though Catholic principles of social justice have long been associated with Democratic economic policies — despite the party’s symbiotic alliance with the abortion industry and its once single-minded support for welfare programs that undermined inner-city families and neighborhoods — Republican thinkers and leaders finally seem to be fighting back.
Men like Boehner and Ryan now challenge the liberal lock hold on social justice not because they want to shield their own stance for moral scrutiny, but because they want to challenge political policies, which they believe could doom the nation. This is about survival.
Earlier this year, Congressman Ryan wrote to New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan about the budget his party proposed in the House. The exchange broke new ground between GOP leaders and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who often adopted opposing positions on economic policy.
That’s not to say that Archbishop Dolan endorsed the Ryan budget. But the details of their respectful exchange are worth reading and hint at the possibilities of future engagement. The key point broached in their discussion is this: The principle of subsidiarity should not be dismissed by students of moral economics any more than we should shrug off our obligations to those who truly need charity or a safety net.
The promising start suggests that more fruitful discussions will be forthcoming, as conservatives in Washington approach Church teaching in unconventional ways.
In a tract on wealth and justice produced by the American Enterprise Institute this past year, written by AEI president Arthur Brooks and Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Peter Wehner, the authors cite Blessed Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis in their critique of statist economic policies. In 1987, the Pope wrote that the denial or limiting of “the right of economic initiative ... diminishes, or in practice absolutely destroys the spirit of initiative, that is to say the creative subjectivity of the citizen. As a consequence, there arises, not so much a true equality as a ‘leveling down.’ In the place of creative initiative there appears passivity, dependence and submission to the bureaucratic apparatus which, as the only ‘ordering’ and ‘decision-making’ body — if not also the ‘owner’ — of the entire totality of goods and the means of production, puts everyone in a position of almost absolute dependence, which is similar to the traditional dependence of the worker-proletarian in capitalism. This provokes a sense of frustration or desperation and predisposes people to opt out of national life, impelling many to emigrate and also favoring a form of ‘psychological’ emigration.”
Some will dismiss this kind of intellectual work as an attempt by conservative ideologues to co-opt Catholic teaching to fit their political agenda. But when you look around and see other examples of this trend — like the Heritage Foundation’s SeekSocialJustice.org, you get the feeling that it is bigger than the mere promotion of a partisan agenda.
Few can look at our economic, cultural and political situation in America today and say that the last few decades on any of those fronts have served us especially well. As Marco Rubio put it on the Senate floor right before the chamber recessed for August, the economic decisions Washington faces today are not about a relatively arbitrary deadline here or there, but about a “generational choice.”
Boehner has been described as the most pro-life speaker the House. The last few decades of American political history have been characterized by Catholics — Democrats and Republicans both — as behaving badly when it comes to policy that would protect the most innocent among us, the unborn.
Boehner and Rubio come from two different generations. But they have both insisted on a different direction for the ship of state, in their different roles and with a nod to political realities.
Boehner has had to keep his caucus together while negotiating with the president. Rubio has a little more freedom to stake out his own position. Together they may change Washington yet — they certainly have made some advances — even with all the numerical, procedural, embedded obstacles in place.
They want to revolutionize how people think about and operate as Catholics in public life. For too long, the phrase social justice has been stuck in a welfare-state, largely Democratic-Party framework. This is welcome progress. As generational choices are made, our leaders need guideposts that don’t appear to belong to one party or another.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a nationally syndicated columnist.
Matthew Warner: Ask Fr. Barron: What gives you hope for future of the Church?
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I have made an observation before the debate that loyal believers are subjected to conversion by ideological beliefs. The moral stand in this case follows that the debt burden is endured by the poor in times of high unemployment and inflation, and the likely rise of interest rates. No tax revenues proves that lack of Catholic commitment.
I am SO sick and tired of the bible thumping lefties, for whom marriage is obsolete unless you’re gay, and who never met an abortionist they didn’t love, co-opting Catholic social teaching and twisting scripture to further their Marxist agenda. This is one of their favorite passages:
“The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common.
With great power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great favor was accorded them all.
There was no needy person among them, for those who owned property or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds of the sale,and put them at the feet of the apostles, and they were distributed to each according to need.
Thus Joseph, also named by the apostles Barnabas (which is translated “son of encouragement”), a Levite, a Cypriot by birth, sold a piece of property that he owned, then brought the money and put it at the feet of the apostles.
Acts 4: 32-35
Notice that Barnabas put the money at the feet of the APOSTLES - NOT THE GOVERNMENT !
Dr. Jeff Mirus summed it up best in an article titled “Subsidiarity and Solidarity are Inseparable”
“Many have confused solidarity with the adoption of governmental social programs. But in his social encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict identified this as an error when he wrote: “Solidarity is first and foremost a sense of responsibility on the part of everyone with regard to everyone, and it cannot therefore be merely delegated to the State” (38). He also discussed the propensity to rely on large, impersonal institutions, which can never be a substitute for solidarity:
Unfortunately, too much confidence was placed in those institutions, as if they were able to deliver the desired objective automatically. In reality, institutions by themselves are not enough, because integral human development is primarily a vocation, and therefore it involves a free assumption of responsibility in solidarity on the part of everyone. (11)
It is necessary to emphasize this point: Human development involves a free assumption of responsibility in solidarity. Yet this free assumption of responsibility in solidarity is precisely what is lacking when we turn to government to implement broad social solutions.”
I don’t think it’s any surprise that Obama and the Democrats just received an endorsement from none other than ...
[que the Internationale as background music]
Communist Party USA Endorses Barack Obama and Democrats For 2012 Election
http://politicons.net/congrats-communist-party-usa-endorses-barack-obama-and-democrats-for-2012-election/
Democrat? Republican? The myth of a 2 party system is propped up by a media propaganda machine that spews biased opinions for news, and fascist and atheist-sodomite talking points for the corporatocracy that has corrupted our political system. Both political parties are akin to a blind, 2 headed horse galloping the nation into a moral and financial abyss… and this Godless, self centered, porn loving, nationalistic, crony capitalistic nation deserves everything coming its way…it will slowly disintegrate into the dung pile of failed nation states.
In reply to Jim B, so the apostles are the topm 20% of americans that have 80% of the wealth
Ms. Lopez might as well say she’s turned her back on her own Church’s teachings when it comes to social justice and economics when she has to rely on her employer, the very pro-old-guard-WASP Heritage Foundation’s pseudo site SeekSocialJustice.org. Damn few Catholics participated in this shill for Calvinist economics.
As for Marco Rubio, he deserves nothing but scorn for his continuing whine about how horrible Washington is and what a broken government and all his other crybaby nonsense. He’s a greenhorn Senator who won his election due to the mere fact he had no real competition. Had he faced a stronger competitor, one who might’ve pressed him on why he couldn’t come out and give a clear concise reason for where he worships if he’s not worshipping as a Catholic and why all the fancy footwork and dodging the issue. Where he worships the Lord is less material to the voters in any state (but in FL where the real bible thumpers pick n’ choose their verses quite often…and most of them are rightists, it does matter.) What really matters is the fact he’s such a weasel about the fact he changed his religious loyalties and lacked the guts to be frank about it in a pleasant way and put it to rest that way. But if a guy can’t come out and give clear answers to something like this, what the heck else is he fudging facts and weasel words on to “be on message”?
Rubio should be on his knees day and night thanking God for the PRIVILEGE to serve his state and stop all the !@#$% and whining acts which he carried into the Senate last Sunday. He was no match for Sen. John Kerry when the latter challenged him on some points. In fact, had it not been for Rubio’s persistent whiny nature which oozed out in his speech, Kerry wouldn’t have called him out. If anybody caught Kerry’s later remarks in a full speech he gave on the Senate floor, you might be wondering who was the most grateful for being allowed to address his nation in a time of deep peril: Kerry the scion of old New England Brahmin lineage or Rubio, a first generation Cuban American. Kerry, and by at least two centuries…which is far more telling about Rubio than Kerry. Rubio’s economic and political ideals would take us back to even the pre-Shay’s Rebellion Days ... never mind just Hoover, Coolidge and the ever so beknighted Founding Fathers. Hell, why didn’t Rubio and all his Tea Party pals with their quaint but utterly nonsensical “Constitutionalist/Originalist” notions show up wearing wigs, tricornered hats and breeches while they were at it? These are the newly (self-designated) “experts” on the US Constitution who’ll tell us with straight faces that the Constitution isn’t a living document. If that’s the case, then they should stop all the bullcrap for one of their favorite holiest of all political holy grails, the Balanced Budget Amendment. How can you amend something that’s fixed in stone? Well, let’s give this bunch some time to figure out, but not another 224 years because we have an economy that needs fixing right now and if it requires immediate action taken by the president to get it fixed, let Obama at it and let these self-styled phonies howl much like the other self-styled “originalists” of a 150 years ago.
Lopez’ reliance on Paul Ryan, (R-WI) and his ever so infinite wisdom when it comes to the very complicated topic of Catholic Social/Economic Teachings is astounding. I thought she had more on the ball than to rely on a cheap shell-game con artist like Ryan… especially when she relied on him to tell us what’s moral or not. I read through his Our Sunday Visitor article and he ever so gingerly touched on some of the salient ideas of his Medicare “reforms. “ But he was too clever for his own good. Said Ryan,
“ . . . Our reforms to save Medicare from bankruptcy provide more support for sick and low-income beneficiaries to choose the best health insurance plan for them. Our supplemental medical savings accounts help low-income Medicare beneficiaries with out-of-pocket costs.”
Mr. Ryan, is it asking you too much to explain how can you provide this “support” for all the under-55 people who’ll have to take your idea of Medicare when the vouchers…which you morphed into the more contemporary “supplemental medical savings accounts” to help them pay for “out- of-pocket costs.” First it was vouchers for all Americans taking Medicare upon retirement through Social Security and these retirees are expected to find affordable health insurance packages with a six-grand chump-change voucher? How much will they be able to get for their money, or better yet, maybe we should nail this piece of jello down to explain what he means by “out-of-pocket costs”.
If Ryan’s ideas become law, I’ll be set because I’m over 55. Right now my wife isn’t. I wrote to Ryan last Spring to ask him if his Medicare and budget plan would grandfather couples who straddled his double-nickel cut off year. No reply. Now I’m asking again, only this time publicly. I’d also like to know how he can justify putting so many people in such a precarious economic situation after they’ve paid thousands of dollars through their FICA taxes, only to be stuck with such a third-rate “government health insurance” bearing no resemblance to the very idea of Medicare in the first place, never mind its present configuration, which most Americans want to see retained for all of us.
Ryan or one of his more tactile staffers … or somebody at the Heritage Foundation who might’ve been a ghost author of the article Ryan takes credit for … deliberately tweaked Pope Benedict’s warnings against promising too much, especially if these promises lead to unfair burdens on future generations. No disagreement there. Too bad the Republicans and their beaucoup buck backroom boyos who backed the recent economic crisis (essentially a failed economic coup de tat) who did the most hollering and crying about how terrible it’d be to put so much of a debt burden on our children’s and grandchildren’s shoulders never said a peep about the unfunded wars, unfunded Medicare Rx Plan D, and all those trillions of dollars Bush gave away to the billionaires ten years ago…only to wind up in Traitors’ R Us Offshore Bank Accounts or put into moving American factories straight over to China and still raking an extra buck for the tax breaks on that as well. The silence from the GOP on that little dirty laundry list wasn’t hard to miss, hard as they tried otherwise with their displays of boo hooing theatrics in both chambers. Who’ll ever forget Joe Walsh, R/TP-IL, the nation’s leading deadbeat dad for his role as the nation’s leading political hypocrite when it comes to pleading for future generations of billionaires and millionaires’ k ids.
Spare us future spectacles Ms. Lopez of Paul Ryan’s moralizing and cherry picking the pope’s words to justify this gem of wisdom from a guy who’d deliberately break the government’s pledge to Americans under the age 55 after they’ve paid for decades into the system … “It is immoral for governments to make promises they cannot fulfill.” It’s also immoral for politicians to first seek ways to break promises already made simply because the promises interfere with the new gang in town’s ideological preferences and their willingness to bend, twist and mangle every single document put before their eyes demonstrating that while Medicare and Medicaid need fixing, they are NOT irretrievably broke and doomed to the scrap heap.
This is the Budget Chairman of the same party which sent us into Iraq on bogus premises, a war that’s resulted in so much needless heartbreak due to the lives lost no thanks to headstrong neo-imperialists, none of whom have lost any of their kids in this war due to combat, Iranian-made roadside bombs and just as tragically, PTSD related suicides back home. If our nation’s broke, it’s not because of the programs guys like Ryan and his close buddy House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a character right out of Dickens(!)look down their noses at and sneeringly sniff “en-title-ment programs” as if they were welfare giveaways. Like hell they are! You have to qualify for them first, and notwithstanding what Sen. Coburn, the Republican Okie from Muskogee believes, most people receiving SSDI have a compelling reason to for doing so. When the politicians stop taking their political welfare and orders from backroom backers, … then they’ll deserve being listened to on this issue. Recently Joe Lieberman (I-CT) called for dipping into SSA to fund the ever continuing war against terror Imagine that, raiding your grandparents SS or your mentally disabled sister/brother’s SSDI program to pay for more Kiplingesque insanity.
How dare these spendthrift hypocrites dare to lecture anybody about the immorality of “broken promises” when we were supposed to be out of Iraq in months; when Bush promised to get bin Laden and then broke off the chase, protect our savings predatory banking practices and then turn the other way around leading to the big crash of 08 and so many lost retirements. How dare Ryan speak about morality and broken promises while he’s planning to do gut Medicare, long a Republican dream a long with the GOP’s even longer dream, abolishing Social Security as we also know it, too. How dare men like Ryan bellyache about entitlements when he and his party are so busy working to take it lock stock and barrel; to snatch it right out from underneath every one of us, hand it over to the private sector to do its thing and if we get robbed in the process, well, so what as Eric Cantor might put it in so many words as he did recently concerning the airlines pocketing added tax charges taken from passengers that were supposed to fund the FAA. From Think Progress.com today, a story about Cantor’s appearance on Fox earlier today. http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/08/03/287345/cantor-defend-airlines-taxes-faa/ “And what airlines have done is have stepped in and said, well, if we’re not going to pay that money to the federal government, we’re going to keep it towards our own bottom line. And I guess that’s what business does.”
Or as George Washington Plunkitt, Tammany Hall’s resident philosopher would put it, “We seen our opportunities and took them.”
If that’s what the GOP is willing to allow over a relatively minor and narrowly focused tax, just imagine what fun they’d have at the devil’s own ball if they got a hold of the entire Social Security Administration’s various safety net programs. Hasn’t it ever dawned on enough people to ask these robbers “If the safety net is so broke, why are so many Republicans, Tea Partiers, fiscal conservatives and Libertarians, not to mention the hedge fund managers who are able now to bankroll congressional campaigns for scores of nobodys just to get a hold of both branches of Congress with supermajorities for one day alone…to privatize these programs in a heartbeat? I’d like to see Ms. Lopez ask her pals within the Heritage Foundation and the GOP the same question. That’s if they’ll allow her to. As for Rubio, here’s my open plea: If you don’t like your job, just remember how fortunate you are. A lot more qualified and intellectually gifted men and women unfortunately couldn’t get elected to the Senate, no matter how hard and often they tried. You made it in on your first attempt and you’re whining? Shame. There’s a lot of men and women ready to fill your seat if you’re not man enough to fulfill your obligations to your country, and state without whining so often because you and your wealthy pals can’t get everything they want and when they want. FDR once remarked how awful it was that a full wallet or full bank account groaned louder than an empty belly. Is this what you want to be remembered for, a complainer who couldn’t enjoy one of the rarest honors his fellow citizens could bestow upon him only to use it as a pulpit to continue pouting on behalf of the materially privileged?.
What a bunch of sad-sack moralizing pampered babies, from Wisconsin to suburban Virginia, to DC to Florida.
John Boehner, catholic speaker of the house, solid catholic, solid pro-life, pro family in every way…... Nancy Pelosi, catholic former speaker of the house, catholic in name only, solid pro-abortion ,solid pro gay marraige, that’s the difference in the two party’s today
Speaking of morality! What is moral and just and moral about a tax system that permits the likes of Warren Buffet to pay, percentage-wise, less taxes than his Secretary? Tell me, Republicans, what is just and moral about a system and policies that seeks to deny the working poor a living wage; while insisting that investors get 20 to 25% on investment? A system that forces many working poor to work just enough hours to deny them benefits, etc. etc. One of the major problems with this whole mess is an ideology rooted in the evils of a regressive tax code that goes back to at least 1901, in the State of Alabama, when the wealthy sought to deny freed Africa Americans and poor whites education and health. These tax policies were later adopted by most Southern states and has now become a bedrock of the Republican Party and their extremist ally, the tea party and the founding fathers, the likes of the Koch brothers, Ruppert and their likes. So the bottom line is a well oiled propaganda machine that is backed by billionaires who continue to widen the gap between the rich, look at the 85+% of wealth in the hands of the top 1% of the population. Look at the gap between the CEO’s and the average worker! Please tell me what is moral about that?
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