Paul Ryan’s subsidiarity
The Wisconsin congressman and rumored Romney veep candidate talks to The Brody File about his controversial budget proposal. President Obama has called it “social Darwinism,” a characterization that has generated a good deal of blowback. Ryan, a Catholic, calls his budget an example of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity:
David Brody: Tell me a little bit about the morality and the debt. Where does your Catholic faith play into the way this budget is crafted?
Paul Ryan: “A person’s faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private, so to me, using my Catholic faith, we call it the social magisterium which is how do you apply the doctrine of your teaching into your everyday life as a lay person? To me, the principle of subsidiarity, which is really federalism, meaning government closest to the people governs best, having a civil society of the principal of solidarity where we, through our civic organizations, through our churches, through our charities, through all of our different groups where we interact with people as a community, that’s how we advance the common good by not having big government crowd out civic society, but by having enough space in our communities so that we can interact with each other, and take care of people who are down and out in our communities. Those principles are very very important, and the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenants of catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life, help people get out of poverty out onto life of independence.”
Ryan’s explanation seems a bit simplistic to me, and the details of his budget — which would penalize the poor and middle class, favor the wealthy, and increase the budget deficit — don’t seem like Catholic social teaching in practice.
But the principle of subsidiarity is certainly one of the most interesting and contested and perhaps exploited in CST.
At the Catholic Moral Theology blog, Meghan Clark had a recent post on subsidiarity as a “two-sided coin” that recalled the centrality of the common good.
And Morning’s Minion delivered himself of some thoughts on subsidiarity in connection with the contraception mandate.
BTW, in the CBN interview, Ryan also says that President Obama’s vision for America “is to equalize the outcome of people’s lives” and blames the president for the high rates of poverty in this country.
And for good measure he adds that Obama is in the business of “demagoguery” and believes that if he and fellow Wisconsinite Scott Walker fail in their attempts to get budgets and debts under control then, “courage will never be exercised again.”
So there’s that, too.
I note the absence of any mention of the Catholic teaching of solidarity in Ryan’s comments.
(Apologies if he mentioned it elsewhere in the interview. And if he did, would someone please provide the text or a link?)
Duh. Ignore me. I’m not reading well at all today.
Wnat Ryan says about subsidiarity and the preferential option for the poor is fine. He should be given credit for it. His problem is application of the principles. He seems to think there can be only one sort of relationship between higher level governments and the people. He’s wrong.
He’s also right that keeping people poor by just giving them hand-outs is also not the solution to poverty. When a person’s problem is lack of training or education the thing to do is educate them. But that costs even more money, and a lot of people aren’t willing to tax themselves to get it.
Taxes, taxes, taxes.
In the political realm, subsidiarity, as Mr. Ryan means it, is just fancy name for States Rights. It’s something George Wallace would have fully embraced, but I don’t think he was a Catholic.
If the states had uniform advantages and if people were uniformly virtuous, States Rights would be the way to go. But we don’t and we aren’t.
Actually, it is a very good principle, but it too often cynically and selectively applied.
I don’t think BXVI would agree with the Ryan understanding – a problem is the posture of our American bishops.
President Obama got it right when he characterized the Ryan/Republican budget proposal as social Darwinism.
Not that social Darwinism is something new in the United States. However, it’s not been discussed much lately.
It’s risible that Ryan thinks that he and Walker are manifesting courage. I’d say they are manifesting brashness and irresponsibility.
FINALLY! I thought dotCommonwealers had given up their favorite parlor game of savaging Paul Ryan. And of course, jbruns chimes in with the apt analogy to George Wallace!
As for Pope Benedict’s views on Medicare reform, I’m an ardent admirer of His Holiness, but I’ll politely defer to Ryan on the policy details in this case!
Jeff –
How ’bout we agree to talk about subsidiarity but leave out both Paul Ryan and Commonwealers? They’re both distractions from an interesting topic.
The US Catholic bishops have lobbied Congress against the kinds of cuts proposed by Ryan. Why does nobody point this out? Why does Ryan get away with this?
Am I forgetting my 5th grade history class or is Rep. Ryan? Isn’t federalism actually the opposite of “government closest to the people governs best”? Isn’t it confederalism (i.e. The Articles of Confederation and the Confederate States of America) that minimizes federal power in favor of local (state) power and Federalism that argues in favor of a more central government?
Matthew ==
Never let facts interfere with a stong political pitch.
A guy that requires his staff to read Ayn Rand and claims to be Catholic is a fraud.
“Those principles are very very important, and the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenants of catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life, help people get out of poverty out onto life of independence.”
“Primary tenants?” Oh, well. (Help the “tenants” to get rich so they can pay higher rents to the landlords?) Even if you correct Ryan’s English, it’s still unclear how his budget is going to achieve these goals. Have the budgets of Republican administrations actually increased the possibilities of social mobility? I don’t know, but I doubt it (though I’m not sure I’d want to claim rousing successes in this respect for the Democratic budgets in recent decades either).
My problem with Ryan’s philosophy is that it makes no provision for the poor while they are supposedly catching up with the rest of us. Worst of all he seems to ignore the disabled and poor old people. At least I don’t remember his talking about them. Representative Stoneheart.
A guy that requires his staff to read Ayn Rand and claims to be Catholic is a fraud.
Wow, I read Ayn Rand and claim to be Catholic. I didnt realize that being Catholic required me to tightly censor my reading material. I wonder if Commonweal and its blogs are ok.
Interviewer David Brody references the budget Ryan crafted. Here are two relevant numbers to keep in mind about Ryan’s recently released federal budget proposal for the coming decade:
* $4.6 Trillion – That’s the total amount of unexplained new tax revenues Rep. Ryan projects over the next decade that will come from eliminating unidentified tax loopholes. When and if Ryan puts forward a tax reform proposal that contains an average of $460 billion in new tax collections due to closed loopholes, then we can begin to have a discussion about the merits of his tax policies.
* 3.75% – In Ryan’s budget proposal, that’s the percent of GDP in 2050 that will contain all federal government spending—except for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). As Jonathan Bernstein notes, “Since Ryan has separately objected to cuts in the military below 4% of GDP, it means that Ryan would theoretically not be able to meet his own target, even if he shuts down student loans, FEMA, NASA and the National Weather Service, the FBI and federal prisons, all immigration enforcement, the FDA and other food safety programs, air traffic control, and more. Including programs for veterans.”
http://plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com/2012/04/in-which-i-disagree-with-paul-krugman.html
Although Ryan has a reputation in some circles as a serious budget and policy politician, in this case at least he has put forward a fundamentally unserious, incomplete and self-contradictory proposal.
Nicholas — Ryan was giving a live interview and he said the correct word. The word “tenant” comes from whoever (mis)transcribed the interview. You might want to check on such things before expressing unwarranted smugness.
The principle of subsidiarity is a formal principle, that is, that the smaller unit (whether person or community) should have the freedom to meet its own responsibilities on its own, with the larger, more inclusive unit intervening only when necessary, and this all the way up the line. It does not, however, contain the criteria that would determine whether the smaller unit is meeting its responsibilities well or it is time for the larger unit to intervene. Perhaps one could say that the burden of proof is on the larger unit. In any case, however, it is to be expected that there will be disputes about the application of the principle. Such disputes are as old as our Republic, and they are visible today notably in the European Union (which mentions the principle of subsidiarity in one of its founding documents). What used to be considered a “Catholic” principle of social life is now widely accepted at least as a principle.
The ambiguity involved in applying the principle is also seen when it is proposed that subsidiarity be applied to the life and structure of the Church. The vigorous debates about whether it can apply in the Church and especially over whether particular applications were or are appropriate affect not only the Catholic Church but other Churches as well. Among Anglicans, for example, while some see the autonomy of individual provinces as illustrating the principle, others do not want it invoked at all because it implies that if an individual province fails in its duties, there must be a higher instance which can intervene–e.g., the Archbishop of Canterbury–, and that would be the slippery slope that would end with an “Anglican pope”.
Ryan’s overly-simplistic discussion of, among other things, subsidiarity is rightly challenged here (and other places), but I’ll give him credit for doing the wrestling. And his wrestling, while no doubt crude, is certainly no more crude than are the “analyses” of his policy proposals frequently offered here (not to mention the personal attacks on him, many of which would make the Wanderer blush). Catholic liberals have long-celebrated Mario Cuomo’s (crude) justification of his position at Notre Dame; perhaps we can hope Ryan offers a similar opportunity.
As for the details of Ryan’s policy, the best features of it are the reform proposals to the entitlements, which are built on long-standing bipartisan consensus (e.g., his proposal to reform Medicare was first proposed to Pres. Clinton by the Breaux Commission chaired by John Breaux (D-LA) and John Kerrey (D-NE). Since those programs are the real budget busters, I think most of the focus should be on them rather than on largely illusory proposed cuts elsewhere.
Just saw Luke Hill’s closing line above: “Although Ryan has a reputation in some circles as a serious budget and policy politician, in this case at least he has put forward a fundamentally unserious, incomplete and self-contradictory proposal.”
Which is disappointing when one considers that Ryan significantly re-vamped his earlier budget proposal in two significant ways.
First, he changed his Medicare reform proposal to provide for the selection of the current Medicare plan among the choices available, a revision which attracted the support of Sen. Ron Wyden. Second, he adopted the President’s projected number for the growth of health care expenditures. As Reihan Salam details in the Daily Beast:
“Both Ryan and the president call for growing expenditures at the gross domestic product plus 0.5 percent a year. If the overall economy grows at 4 percent, Medicare expenditures would grow at 4.5 percent, whether the president’s vision or Ryan’s prevails.
So if Ryan’s Medicare proposal represents a “radical vision,” Obama’s does as well.”
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/04/06/040612-opinions-column-ryan-budget-salam-1-3/
It would be helpful, I think, to have a definition of social justice. It’s been my observation that the term “social justice” is commonly used when what is really meant is distributive justice. It seems to me that matters such as how much to tax the wealthy, or how much to fund Medicaid and Social Security, or whether we should have an ACA-style health care benefit for the uninsured/underinsured, or to what extent the EPA should regulate the petroleum industry, are really matters of distributive justice.
I’m glad to see Rep. Ryan trying to use a Catholic idea like subsidiarity in his legislation – even if his equating it with federalism misses the mark. I am also glad to see Ryan use as the starting point of his legislation the accumulated federal deficit. Both of these, it seems to me, are important factors in the just ordering of society, i.e. the achievement of social justice.
Klein’s and Krugman’s critiques of Ryan’s budget are distributive-justice critiques. From a Catholic point of view, such critiques are legitimate (well, Klein’s more so than Krugman’s :-)). I just want to note that Ryan’s budget is itself a critique: a social justice critique. It is a statement that the ordering of American society is unjust: specifically, that the federal government’s size and scope is improperly ordered; and that saddling future generations with an outsize burden of debt is a grave social injustice. This gets to the heart of why the Ryan budget excites conservatives – why, for example, Governor Romney thinks it is “marvelous”. It is specifically these social-justice aspects of the Ryan budget that excites conservatives.
Could it be that the key to a bipartisan rapprochement on the federal budget would be for conservatives to acknowledge, and be willing to compromise on, the distributive-justice critique of the Ryan budget; and for liberals to acknowledge, and be willing to compromise on, the social-justice critique that the Ryan budget makes?
@Jeff Landry (4/11, 11:30 am) Thanks for the response. I confess I haven’t looked into the details of Ryan’s Medicare proposal from this year.
However, part of why I haven’t is the examples I gave above. Ryan’s budget plan relies on $4.6 trillion in new federal revenues from eliminating tax loopholes—but he has yet to name a single loophole he would close? Ryan projects that by 2050 under his plan non-Social Security and health care spending by the federal government will be 3.5% of GDP—but he opposes lowering the military budget below 4% of GDP?
Like I said, it’s hard to take his proposal seriously when it has such fundamental flaws.
@Jim Pauwels (4/11, 11:42 am) If I understand you correctly, Ryan’s proposal has three key “social justice” components that excite conservatives:
*that the federal government’s size is improperly ordered;
*that the federal government’s scope is improperly ordered;
*that saddling future generations with an outsize burden of debt is a grave social injustice.
As to the first two, what do you mean by “improperly ordered”?
As to the third, could you explain why conservatives find Ryan’s budget proposal exciting when it fails to balance the federal budget for another 2-3 decades?
In addition, Chairman Ryan was first elected to Congress when the federal government was running record surpluses. Shortly thereafter, Rep. Ryan voted for the 2001 & 2003 Bush tax cuts, the (unfunded) Medicare Part D program, and to wage two wars without raising taxes to pay for them. It’s possible Ryan as given an explanation for why he cast those votes at the time, how he understood them as an expression of his Catholic faith and commitment to social justice, how and why his views have changed in the intervening years, and what he has learned from the experience; if so, I’d appreciate someone providing a link to that explanation.
And, as noted above, his current budget proposal relies on $4.6 trillion in new tax revenues over the next decade—and Ryan has refused to identify even a single tax expenditure he would repeal or limit as part of raising that revenue.
Bruce –
Reading Ayn Rand is one thing. I’ve read one her (bad) novels too. How can you admire her selfishness and indiffereness to the poor? Granted, being responsible for yourself — if possible — is a virtue, but her selfishness is a vice.
That she is required reading isn Ryan’s office is scandalous.
@Ann Olivier (4/11, 1:14 pm) I think your question is an important one and I hope Bruce will respond.
Just for the record, if I recall correctly from a discussion here last year, there’s some question as to whether Rand is required reading or merely recommended reading in Ryan’s office.
Jim P. –
There is no social justice without distributive justice, any more than you can have a peaceful life without a domestically peaceful life. The distributive justice is a specific kind of social justice in which each individual or group gets its fair share of a particular kind of good. Usually the kind of good at issue is land, other property, or money.
“. . . the federal government’s size and scope is improperly ordered; and that saddling future generations with an outsize burden of debt is a grave social injustice.”
Jim P. –
The problem is not social justice v. distributive justice. As I see the SS-Medicare problem t is part of the problem of the fair distribution of debt to the Iindividuals* in each generation. (Strictly speakin, individuals pay taxes, not generations.)
Let’s over-simplify the whole SS-Med system this way:
After WW II, say from 1950, the economy boomed, and so did government spending, all the way up to 2008 at least — let’s say for 60 years. That has affected 3 current generations more or less. Let’s call them the “boomers”, the “Xers”, and “the geezers”.
The boomers, a disproportionately large generation, has been paying for the SS-Medicare of the geezers who had previously paid for their own old people. At this point in time, most boomers are paying for the geezers, but some of the the boomers are starting to claim their benefits and, being retired, are paying less taxes. This will progressively distribute the debt and needed taxes downward to the Xers, a proportionately much smaller generation. Being a much smaller generation, the Xers *as a group* has much less money than the boomers, so (as things stand) they will have to pay a much larger amount *individually* for the numerous boomers than the boomers are now paying for the geezers (also a smaller group than the boomers). As i see it, the boomers have the distribution of debt/taxes advantage over both the geezers and the Xers — they pay less for fewer old folks and are paid more by individual Xers.
Also, if we look the the GDP since 1950 (adjusted for inflation) we see that the boomers have been well-to-do their whole lives (including their childhood which was paid for by the current geezers who were usually dreadfully poor when children). The geezers and Xers have not be constantly well-off.
The question then becomes: what would be a fair distribution for paying the government’s current debts — and not just the SS-Med debts — and its future debts when more and more boomers kick in to SS-Med? It’s all a matter of social justice.
Wow, I read Ayn Rand and claim to be Catholic. I didnt realize that being Catholic required me to tightly censor my reading material. I wonder if Commonweal and its blogs are ok.
Bruce,
If you have never read the 1957 review of Atlas Shrugged from National Review, you might be interested to check it out. (Interestingly, it’s by Whittaker Chambers.) Here’s a brief excerpt:
“As to the first two, what do you mean by “improperly ordered”?”
Ryan explains in the Brody Report snippet at least some of what I think he means: that government programs crowd out mediating institutions that could better serve our society, and that its programs trap the poor in unbroken, intergenerational cycles of poverty. Also, among Ryan’s motivators is the conviction that that the government is unaffordable by the society it serves; that the mounting debt burden will seriously inhibit our ability to care for the poor and seniors; and that saddling future generations with this debt burden is unjust. In these ways, the government is not ordered appropriately to its proper role in our society. The government, in its current state, is not as socially just as it should be.
This is a social justice critique. Do you agree?
Hi, Ann, in broad strokes, I rather like your geezer/boomer/Xer analysis :-). I will risk Jean Raber’s wrath in making this point. That the Xer generation is significantly smaller than the boomer generation isn’t a matter of pure random happenstance, nor is it the result of the external forces (war and disease) that historically have reduced the size of a generational cohort. If boomers had adhered to the reproductive norms of every previous generation – and as enshrined in Catholic moral teaching – and if traditional legal and moral restrictions on abortion, also enshrined in Catholic moral teaching, had remained in place, Generation X would be substantially larger than it is. (The demographic imbalance is even more pronounced in Europe.) A significantly larger generation X and ensuing generations would be supporting the boomers’ retirements and senior medical care. I’ve suggested in the past that this is part of a generation’s responsibility in our intergenerational entitlement system. (Not that different from the old days when, I’m told, people had large families in part so that their family could care for them in their old age).
@Luke Hill: “Like I said, it’s hard to take his proposal seriously when it has such fundamental flaws.”
If that’s true, then so is the President’s proposal, which is FAR less detailed than Ryan’s. I have not yet seen any version of the “Buffet Rule” proposed by the President. That’s not only my view, it’s Tom Friedman’s in this morning’s Times. As a political sidenote, it’s fascinating to me that people on the left are castigating Ryan’s plan for not containing sufficient details, and some one the right are castigating it for being TOO detailed! So, we’re told this proposal is a radical, revolutionary, far right Social Darwinistic re-writing of the social contract, yet a woefully incomplete one because it doesn’t solve all the problems in the world?!? The critique about the tax loopholes strikes me as naive: everyone knows the three biggest tax deductions that need to be reconsidered – the home interest deduction, the employer health care deduction and the charitable deduction.
I think both critiques miss the correct reading of Ryan’s plan. First of all, it (like all budgets proposed by politicians) is a political document. So, of course, Ryan is going to object to cutting defense spending, just like the President and Democrats are going to say taxes need to be raised and education spending increased. These things are like the tides: constant and unchanging. Let’s be clear: the most likely outcome is defense spending will be trimmed, along with other domestic programs, because ALL the viable plans call for across the board cuts. The more interesting parts of the plan are, as I said above, in the entitlement reform sections, which are not only NOT far-right-wing/social-darwinism, but reflect bipartisan consensus. So the best outcome (and only viable outcome) it seems to me are a combination of Obama’s more targetted cuts with Ryan’s (and Wyden’s) entitlement reform proposals, mixed in with a Simpson-Bowles-esque tax reform plan.
Finally, you repeat (again) in a later comment the now-tired history of Ryan’s (and the GOP’s) fiscal irresponsibility during the Bush year’s, as though it somehow disqualifies Ryan on these issues. If that is so, then it seems a one-sided critique, as many Democrats also voted in favor of tax cuts and the Iraq wars (which passed with large majorities) but also ignores those policies on which the President has changed his mind. That politicians should do one thing some time ago, and something else in a different political climate really shouldn’t be that shocking, should it?
@Jim Pauwels (4/11, 2:33 pm) Thanks for the answer. I confess my ignorance of the categories of justice (both generally in moral philosophy and in Catholic theology). Having said that, I guess Ryan’s a critique would fall in the category of a social justice critique—but it strikes me as a particularly poor one.
First, I’m not sure exactly what Ryan means by the “government programs crowd out mediating institutions that could better serve our society”. Social Security and Medicare (by far the two largest domestic government programs) exist precisely because of the failure of mediating institutions and of local and state governments to serve the retirement income and health care needs of the elderly. We could go program-by-program through the remaining domestic “social justice” programs in the federal government and perhaps find a few that are “crowding out mediating institutions” that could do a better job, but let’s be honest: we’d be talking about a trivial percentage of federal government spending.
Second, “unbroken, intergenerational cycles of poverty” have increased over the last 30 years as the agenda Ryan supports has increasingly been implemented. The post-WW II generation (1946-73) saw increased economic mobility, decreased economic inequality and faster economic growth than the generation from 1973-2007.
Third, the mounting federal debt burden over the past 30 years is largely the result of fiscal and economic policies put in place by Rep. Ryan, his allies and his ideological predecessors. Why, if Ryan considers the federal debt to be such an important social justice issue, has he not put forward proposals aimed at reducing the debt—as was done in the early 1990s by both Democrats (like Bill Clinton and George Mitchell) and Republicans (like George H. W. Bush)?
And if Ryan isn’t willing to put forward serious debt reduction policy proposals, then why should the rest of us take him seriously—either when he talks about federal debt, or when he talks about how his actions are motivated by Catholic social teaching?
Geez, I read Ayn Rand so long ago I cant remember anything really specific other than these 2 items:
1) Her characters delivered 20 page speeches without interruption in normal conversations and
2) They were able to accomplish astounding feats when not tied down by others on misguided tasks.
While I certainly cant imagine myself listening to someone deliver a monologue like that without wandering away the second point resonates with me. Despite all the hype about multitasking, I personally find I can accomplish much more while working with a single-minded focus on one project at a time. And we all have our individual and unique strengths. A friend of mine made the point that the best way for him to accomplish charitable goals was to work very hard at his day job which allowed him to make significant monetary contributions to charity. While the latter may not be a part of Ms. Rands philosophy, the former certainly is and in my estimation is on point. So perhaps I just didnt consider her materialism and selfishness as extreme as others because I viewed it more as literary excess to make a point. Further, when I consider many of the government programs I run into these days, which I will assume are well-intentioned, the results are at best mediocre and sometimes terrible. That seems consistent with her books as well.
So I guess in summary, I found her focus on self-reliance and discipline appealing, and kind of ignored the balance. I certainly wasnt looking for her insight into morality.
When it comes to Washington programs the public often wills the end but not the means to achieve the ends in a responsible way. Obama notices this and gleefully attacksRepublican proposals to balance the budget but without offering any of his own. Republicans likewise observe disconnects in the public mind regarding health care and therefore attack Obama’s mandate without putting forward a substitute program to broaden health care.
Both Democratic and Republican leaders can be faulted for acting in this way but even more than they the public is responsible. Until there is a change in the inconsistent and short-sighted outlook of public opinion we are virtually guaranteed to get demagogic responses from the Right and the Left. Someone must have formulated an Iron Law of Symmetry to explain these political reactions. But we create the opportunity.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our Democratic and Republican stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Just a note concerning distributive justice. Distributive justice concerns not only such things as land or money. It deals with all the benefits and burdens that a society’s legal system distributes among its citizens and inhabitants. It is relevant to such issues as immigration policy, taxes, eligibility for holding public office, etc. Thus, for example, the Constitution establishes patterns of distribution for some goods and burdens. So do many laws.
And by the way, there is a close link between the principle of subsidiarity and distributive justice. At bottom, subsidiarity calls for the distributors of the benefits and burdens to be as closely linked to the people to whom the benefits and burdens are distributed as is feasible. I emphasize “feasible” because circumstances change and affect what counts as feasible. For, example, it makes sense to have states and not cities issue automobile drivers’ licenses. It would make little sense to allow each state to issue its own aircraft pilots’ licenses. Obviously, there are hard cases. For example, what about licenses for drivers of trailer trucks? One thing is obvious. The principle of subsidiarity cannot reasonably be read as one that favors smallness. It favors giving the power to distribute some benefit of burden to the agency that is best positioned to understand the needs and reasonable aspirations of the recipients.
@Jeff Landry (4/11, 3:43 pm) Thanks for the response.
Actually, I think it excuses too much to say “of course, Ryan is going to object to cutting defense spending”. First, if Ryan’s top (political and moral) priority is cutting deficits and reducing the federal debt burden on future generations, then it doesn’t logically follow that he will “of course” oppose cuts to military spending. (For the record, Ryan apparently wants to put more money in the Pentagon budget than the DOD is asking for.)
Second, deficit reduction in the early 1990s happened because of a combination of tax increases and spending cuts—both military and non-military. Ryan continues to oppose any tax increases.
So Ryan can, it seems to me, legitimately be called a “defense hawk” and a member of Grover Norquist’s “Tax Club”, but his actions are not those of a “deficit hawk”—or of a Catholic politician who considers the federal debt burden a pressing moral issue.
To clarify, I cite repeat Ryan’s deficit-increasing voting record of the early 2000s as “disqualifying” him from speaking with authority as a politician who cares about deficit reduction. I cite his record because, as far as I know,
1 – he still thinks he made the right decision on those votes,
2 – he largely, if not completely, ignores the importance of those votes in creating the huge amount of federal debt incurred during the Bush administration and,
3 – his policy proposals today look a lot like his views and votes of 10 years ago: tax cuts targeted towards the wealthy, increases in military spending, continuing deficits for the next 20-30 years.
The one area in which I note some change is in domestic policy. Whereas Ryan voted for Medicare Part D, he voted against the Affordable Care Act (despite its deficit-reducing provisions).
If Ryan wants to explain why he changed his views (as, for example, Obama did in embracing the individual mandate as part of the ACA), I’m happy to give him a fair hearing. In the absence of such an explanation, it seems to me that the most reasonable course of action is to assume that he *hasn’t* changed his views.
Again, I’d be happy to discuss Medicare reform proposals and other policy ideas. It just seems like a waste of time—and an exercise in evasion—to do so when Ryan’s “deficit reduction” plan for the next decade relies on $4.6 trillion in new tax revenues, and he refuses to identify where *any* of those revenues would come from.
(And when he insists that defense spending be at least 4% of GDP when his proposal envisions that by 2050 the entire federal government (except for Social Security and health care) will spend only 3.5% of GDP.)
I think about mediating institutions in a much larger context that levels of government. Churches, social clubs, sports leagues, etc have all decreased dramatically in number as government has expanded. Also, when I look at the government’s take of wages I see dramatic crowding. For example, in NYC (admittedly a high-tax locale) an employee earning 26K per year, will cost an employer about 28.5k before medical insurance and only receive about 20.5k in take-home pay. So for a low-paid employee, all levels of government are consuming 28+% of wages.
The other issue I think people regularly dont consider is that subsequent to WWII, the US was in a unique economic position, with our productive capacity intact and the rest of the world in a productive shambles. That situation allowed us to make outsized economic gains across the economic spectrum but it was unsustainable. Governmental economic policies did not create the situation nor could they sustain or recreate it.
I have found the following thought experiment useful when thinking about retirement across generations. In the late 90s dot com boom, many young were contemplating retirement in their 30s. So what would society look like. Well, most important of all, who is going to do the work? Early retirement doesnt mean less food to grow, cars to make, dinners to serve, clothes to clean, etc. So that society will ultimately have to find a way to get those retiring early back into the work force because money is not storehouse of work. Its just a medium of exchange. Government and government benefits cannot replace the actual work.
NCR has an important piece today on GOP budget proposals. It’s by Fr. Fred Kammer, S. J. It challenges the kinds of arguments made here by Jim Pouwels and others about the fit between the GOP proposals and Catholic social thought.
Sorry. One more word. Social Justice, so far as i know, includes but distributive justice and the rectifying justice involved in a society’s remedial action for past unjust distributions.
Thus there is individual justice between individual persons. For example, just rules or practices within families or neighbors, not involving regulations issued by officials of some social institution. And there is social justice having to do with the regulations issued by officials of some social institution (professional groups, religious bodies, civil governmental offices). Some of these regulations make distributions and others rectify previous injustices.
“Again, I’d be happy to discuss Medicare reform proposals and other policy ideas.”
Luke, it seems to me we’ve been round this hill lots of times before. Respectfully, it seems to me you aren’t interested in discussing policy at all; rather, you’ve made up your mind with respect to Ryan personally in a way which forecloses a fair analysis of his policy propsals, which I suppose is fine. But I’d submit that your responses indicate to me that you are quite unfamiliar both with Ryan’s actual proposals and the background to those proposals. A few relevant examples:
1) “Ryan continues to oppose any tax increases.” This is true, but what he favors is what in large measure has become bipartisan consensus: a reformed tax plan that reduces individual and corporate rates while broadening the base via eliminated tax deductions, loopholes, etc. Again, that he himself doesn’t articulate the particular deducations he’d remove, but that’s fine with me because, again, these proposals are well-known and it’s easy enough to look up, for example, the Bowles-Simpson plan and see what those suggestions are. Secondly, I would submit that it is the President who is the outlier on this issue, insofar as he refuses to adopt this bipartisan consensus on tax reform AND also opposes tax increases on certain middle class earners – a proposal that is (I would submit) equally flawed in its lack of specificity and fiscal consequences.
2) “a member of Grover Norquist’s “Tax Club””: See above. No one in their right mind would put Ryan’s tax views with Grover Norquist’s.
3) With respect to Ryan’s past disqualifying him, I’d submit you have missed Ryan’s admission that the actions during the Bush years, as he’s stated he regrets certain votes. Again, as a Catholic, I’m more than willing to give people the opportunity to change.
As a summary, I’d suggest you take a look at this piece from Bloomberg pointing out the ways Ryan and Obama are more similar than different. I think it aptly sums up the point I was trying to make re: the partisan nature of the respective budgets, not that it’ll change your mind, but you never know:
“Let us stipulate that Ryan’s budget includes more deficit reduction, larger tax cuts and higher defense spending, and is paid for with big cuts in domestic discretionary programs. In contrast, Obama offers somewhat less deficit reduction, less defense spending, significantly higher taxes on the rich and smaller cuts to programs for the poor.
But clear that away (and clear away the election-year demagoguery while you’re at it), and the 10-year numbers tell a more interesting story. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the 2022 deficit under Obama’s plan would be about 3 percent of gross domestic product, down from about 8.1 percent this year. Ryan would bring the deficit to 1.25 percent of GDP by 2023.
Obama would bump tax revenue to 19.8 percent of GDP, up from 15.5 percent now, mostly by letting the Bush tax cuts expire on upper-income households. Ryan would extend all the Bush tax cuts and reduce the number of tax brackets from six to two — 25 percent and 10 percent. Still, revenue under his plan would rise to 18.75 percent of the economy, more than the historical average of 18 percent. ”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-10/don-t-tell-obama-and-ryan-but-their-budgets-are-similar.html
“First, I’m not sure exactly what Ryan means by the “government programs crowd out mediating institutions that could better serve our society”. Social Security and Medicare (by far the two largest domestic government programs) exist precisely because of the failure of mediating institutions and of local and state governments to serve the retirement income and health care needs of the elderly. ”
… and it is pretty much unanimously agreed that both are on a financially unsustainable path – especially Medicare. Ryan’s budget is remarkable for being willing to touch this political third rail. I see Ryan’s voucher proposal as somewhat of a risk, although certainly not deserving of the “dismantling” rhetoric that Democrats are flaming it with. What are the serious Democratic proposals to fix Medicare funding?
“Second, “unbroken, intergenerational cycles of poverty” have increased over the last 30 years as the agenda Ryan supports has increasingly been implemented. The post-WW II generation (1946-73) saw increased economic mobility, decreased economic inequality and faster economic growth than the generation from 1973-2007.”
I think we’re talking about different things. For the sake of discussion, let’s agree that economic mobility has stagnated recently and inequality has increased. Neither of those necessarily equates to poverty.
This chart shows the US poverty rate since the late 1950s, through the start of the Bush-Obama recession. In 1960, the poverty rate in the US exceeded 20%, and started declining soon after. It dipped under 15% in the mid-60s. Since then, it’s bounced around between the 10% and 15% marks, more or less correlating negatively with periods of growth and recession.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_poverty_rate_timeline.gif
These are the very poorest in the US. They are the ones whom government education has failed, the ones whose unemployment rate is through the roof, whose out-of-wedlock birth rates are astonishingly high, whose rates of incarceration are very high, and so on. Speaking as someone who ministers to the poor in a very modest way, I can tell you that they are utterly dependent on government aid – this is why the US bishops always decry cuts to these programs, and why they always lobby for more funding for these programs. Without those government programs, many more people would be living, and dying, on the streets.
I don’t think it’s controversial to state that nothing that either the left nor the right has tried has moved the needle on the poverty rate for 2-3 generations. The numbers in that chart can’t be interpreted any other way, istm.
Certainly, I don’t think Ryan’s budget is the right answer on this score. I don’t want those programs to be gutted. As I’ve stated on dotCom a number of times, there are still some really big holes in the safety net, in areas like housing assistance and mental health treatment for the poor, and my own view of subsidiarity is that government, at some level, needs to do more than it does for those problems. But I think Ryan is right to call attention to the problem of permanent poverty in the US, and to ask if government may be part of the problem.
@Jeff Landry (4/11, 5:40 pm) I’m glad to hear Ryan’s rethought some of his votes from 10 years ago. (Do you know which ones? In your view, how has Ryan grown and changed as a legislator since then?) Again, I don’t think Ryan’s past disqualifies him from much of anything. But I do think it’s relevant history—and, to the extent he still embraces those votes or doesn’t acknowledge their impact, it’s relevant to the present moment as well.
I was under the impression that Ryan had signed Norquist’s “No New Taxes” pledge. Am I wrong about that? Which tax increases has Ryan voted for/supported in recent years?
Thanks for the confirmation that Ryan opposes *any* tax increases. That means, as you note, his 10 year plan relies heavily (to the tune of $4.6 trillion) on increased revenues from reduced “tax expenditures”. Again, given the experience of the Bush tax cuts (which weren’t supposed to cause deficits), I’d rather see some “skin in the game” from Ryan in terms of concrete proposals for reducing tax expenditures. Otherwise, frankly, it looks a lot like the same game Bush played.
As for Bowles-Simpson, wasn’t Rep. Ryan on that commission? And didn’t he vote against the chairmen’s final proposal? (As I recall, there was no official proposal from the commission—which Obama created after Congress refused to create its own commission—because no proposal received enough votes.*)
*I also recall that Obama didn’t embrace the chairmen’s recommendation as his own in large part because he had concluded that if he did, Congressional Republicans would reject it—simply because Obama had endorsed it. A few months later, Obama attempted to negotiate a $4 trillion debt reduction deal with Boehner—but House Republicans refused to accept any deal that included any increase in revenues.
@Jim Pauwels (4/11, 6:02 pm) Thanks again for your detailed and thoughtful response.
I think we agree here more than we disagree. Above, I drew a distinction between economic growth, economic inequality and economic mobility. I also distinguished between two economic eras: 1946-73 and 1973-2007. You add, correctly I think, an important focus on the poor (using the US poverty rate).
I don’t have the data at hand, but there’s general agreement (I think) among social scientists who study these things that during the 1946-73 period, Americans who were poor had a better chance of rising out of poverty than poor Americans did in the 1974-2007 period (i.e., greater “economic mobility”).
It sounds like your experience in ministry reflects that change—that the poor you serve today often have had a hard time (indeed, have failed at) becoming “non-poor” in recent decades. Statistically, your predecessors in ministry in, say, 1965, would have been ministering to people who were more likely (that today) to: 1) have moved in or out of poverty in the past 10-20 years, and 2) have moved out of poverty altogether.
Bruce –
You have left out one crucial government expenditure post WW II — the GI Bill of Rights which paid for further GI education, including college and skills. Without that big expenditure the post-war boom would not have been possible because there wouldn’t have been the work-force capable of producing it.
We’re in a somewhat similar position today — a large proportion of the population is ill prepared educationally to maintain a competitiive work force. And, of course, we’re not willing to spend the money.
Here’s a review of a book about the failure of family life in the U. S. with the attendant effects on the economy and on children, especially males. Here’s the worst of it: for every 100 females in U. S. jails, there are over 1,400 males, and 11% of American males will find themselves in jail at some time in their lives.
Yes, failing marriages help cause failing education, and it’s a vicious circle. Money alone won’t solve the problems. The book is Mitch Pearlstein’s “From Family Collapse to American’s decline”.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/11/book-review-mitch-pearlstein.html
This needs its own thread.
Bernard – thanks for the call-out of that Kammer piece at the NCR site. It’s here: http://ncronline.org/news/politics/moral-measurement-candidates-tax-plans
I would say that Kammer’s recital of Catholic principles is impeccable – and I’ve consistently supported those principles in my comments at dotCom, here and elsewhere. I’ve made many of the same points that he makes regarding regressive taxes. If you think Kammer’s principles challenge my comments, please show me where.
Regarding his analysis of specific plans: he seems to dislike all of them, including the President’s. One is left with the impression that, from his point of view, no tax cut is a good tax cut.
I’d reply that the purpose of tax cuts – besides the obvious short-term political benefit, which is omni-important to any politician – is to stimulate economic growth. If the stimulus works – and it is not guaranteed that it will work – a lower tax rate can actually result in higher tax revenue. The reason is that a growing economy ‘increases the size of the pie’ – a smaller slice taken from a substantially larger pie may result in the government having more pie on its plate than before. There is a concept in economics called elasticity that speaks to this effect. The trick is to enact elastic tax cuts: cuts whose stimulating effect on the economy will cause the economy to grow large enough to more than offset the reduction in tax revenues resulting from the cut in the tax rate.
Luke -
It just seems to me that rather than focusing on the policy specifics, you’ve made your mind up about Ryan himself, i.e. he is a hypocritical, not-very-serious, not-to-be-taken-seriously, and not-so-good Catholic. I would submit that Ryan has submitted an interesting, serious, yet flawed policy proposal that deserves serious consideration (and critique in other ways). I wish the conversation could focus on those contributions (and flaws) rather than on whether he himself is disqualified or not. Because on the basis for which you judge his qualifications, I don’t see ANY politician who passes muster. For example, you castigate him for not voting for Simpson-Bowles (which you correctly note he was a commissioner); he voted against the final plan because it contradicted his own Medicare reform proposals and (in his view at the time) was insufficient in holding down the growth of health costs. Yet, the President (who as you point out appointed the commission) has COMPLETELY ignored the proposals. You castigate Ryan for insufficient mea culpas for his past positions; yet you are unaware of TWO significant revisions to his Medicare reform proposals which have attracted the commendation of both Alice Rivlin and Ron Wyden. I fully admit that Ryan’s plan has certain weaknesses which I would like to see addressed (and as I said above, his discussions of CST leave much to be desired); but what frustrates me in the POLICY discussion, is I see no justification for the alternative – the President’s own meager proposals which suffer from many
My bottom line, Luke, is that I suspect if you and I had to hash it out, we’d come out with a fairly consensus plan that contains some of the short-term Obama proposals (including cuts to defense), some of the long-term Ryan entitlement reform proposals and a tax-reform proposal along the lines of Simpson-Bowles. Rather than that, though, it seems we’d rather spend out time trying to de-legitimize the moral and policy POV and bone fides of the other, which doesn’t seem to be a very fruitful conversation.
Here’s a real life example of crowding out
3/24/12 – 12:49 pm
A federal judge in Boston yesterday ruled a federal contract with a Catholic charity to administer a program to aid people brought here as prostitutes violates the First Amendment because the charity ordered subcontractors not to refer victims for abortions or birth control.
The ruling comes in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Massachusetts. Although the government’s contract with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has expired, US District Court Judge Richard Stearns said the issue is not moot because the conference had indicated a desire to re-apply for the job of administering benefits under a federal human-trafficking law – even though government lawyers argued future programs would “give strong preference to organizations that will make referrals for the full range of legally permissible obstetrical and gynecological services, including abortion and contraception.”
Newt Gingrich characterized Paul Ryan’s first budget plan as radical social engineering. This new plan is that old wine in a new bottle. It is still social engineering — which is not necessarily bad, although in this case I hope we all understand what it really is proposing.
Paul Ryan’s budget is aimed at the dismantling of LBJ’s Great Society. While Johnson and his programs have been subject to criticism from both Conservatives and budget hawks, let’s remember what the Programs were and what they attempted to do: Civil Rights legislation, Urban Development, Food Stamps, Federal aid to education, rural development (e.g. Appalachia) Medicare and Medicaid, and scores of bills aimed at raising up the underclass in America.
Did all the programs work? No, of course not. Some were ill-conceived, wasteful or ineffective. But many were extremely effective. More to the point, they were aimed at the aspirations of America to be, as Ronald Reagan later put it, the ‘shining city on the hill.’
Paul Ryan’s budget lowers our sights and our aspirations as a society. It may not be ‘social Darwinism,’ but it does say that we cannot, or more properly, choose to not afford our National aspirations in any aspect except to dominate the world militarily. We are probably going down this path. But in the long run we will be a poorer society for that decision.
a lower tax rate can actually result in higher tax revenue
This has been proven the case for capital gains taxes. When the tax rate is too high, owners of capital assets dont sell and hence incur no tax. When the rate is low enough, they are willing to sell and pay the tax. It is also the case for taxes on dividends: when the rate is considered high, companies only pay small dividends, hence low receipts from dividend taxes, yet when the rate is low, investors are more insistent about receiving dividends. Thus the lower rate actually produces more income to the government.
These effects occur regardless of growth.
To Kammer’s point, here is Ezra Klein on the two major parties and taxes. Klein’s view seems to be that the differences are not as stark as often portrayed – and neither party is serving our country well in this regard. Headline: “Washington’s counterproductive consensus on taxes.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-11/washington-s-counterproductive-consensus-on-taxes.html
jburns ==
Robert Caro’s 4th volume of his monumental biography of LBJ is scheduled to come out in several months. Word is that it’s about LBJ at his greatest. I might even read it. Don’t think I’ll read the projected 5th volume — a very different and tragic story.
@Jeff Landry (4/12, 10:45 am) Thanks, I appreciate your persistence and patience.
I apologize for not making myself clearer. First, I try (not always successfully) not to make judgments about Paul Ryan’s Catholicism. That’s best left to him and to those who know him far, far better than I do.
Second, in this thread I’ve tried to confine myself to Rep. Ryan, his views and his actions. That’s not because I’m unwilling to discuss other public figures (e.g., Pres. Obama). It’s because I’m trying to keep to the topic at hand as presented in Mr. Gibson’s original post.
David Brody’s question to Ryan was, “Where does your Catholic faith play into the way this budget is crafted?”. For me, the fact that Ryan:
1 – made no effort in the budget (and has resisted opportunities since) to outline where he’d like the $4.6 trillion in new tax revenues to come from, and;
2 – wants military spending to remain at or above 4% of GDP indefinitely when his proposal envisions all government expenditures (except SS and healthcare) capped at 3.75% of GDP in 2050;
means that until that fundamental (and significant) facts are wrestled with, there’s not much point in moving on to discuss policy proposals for smaller segments of the budget, or how Ryan’s faith does or does not inform the budget.
I agree that you and I could probably negotiate some sort of deficit reduction package that included tax hikes and spending cuts. I think Obama and Speaker Boehner could do the same (and almost did last year).
However, as long as most/many House Republicans are opposed to any revenue increases, and as long as that view is party orthodoxy for presidential candidates (as it was in a debate last year in which every candidate opposed the idea of a deficit reduction package that included a 10:1 spending cuts to revenue increases ratio, then I don’t see much chance of a deal.
Once more on the Kammer piece in NCR: James R Rogers has an interesting analysis of one proposal to make taxes more progressive:
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/04/the-newest-sin-tax