House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), whose budget plan recently passed the House in a party-line vote, says his faith contributed in shaping the proposal, which he says is consistent with Catholic teachings.
“A person’s faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private,” Ryan said in an interview released on Tuesday by the Christian Broadcasting Network. “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.”
The parties are using the budget, which cuts about $5 trillion more than the president’s 2013 proposal and would create a partially privatized “premium support” option for future Medicare recipients, to create election-year contrasts between them on spending and the debt.
The Republican budget aims to reduce the federal deficit almost entirely through spending cuts, while Democrats say there must be a “balanced approach” of spending cuts and tax increases.
The White House has attacked the plan, saying in a statement that Republicans “banded together to shower millionaires and billionaires with a massive tax cut paid for by ending Medicare as we know it,” and President Obama has called it “thinly veiled social Darwinism” that disproportionately hurts the poor.
"It's antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who's willing to work for it, a place where prosperity doesn't trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class,” the president said at a luncheon hosted by The Associated Press last week.
But in the CBN interview, Ryan made a moral case for his budget, saying that the government shouldn’t be responsible for lifting its citizens out of poverty — rather, that it’s the obligation of the citizens themselves to be society’s caretakers.
For more on Ryan's budget plan and faith, click here.
