Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand: An Unholy Alliance

This piece written by FPL Executive Director Rev. Jennifer Butler and originally posted at Huffington Post, Religion.

In an op-ed this week, Rep. Paul Ryan claims the GOP budget he authored would help poor and vulnerable Americans. In reality, this budget violates the principles laid out by major faith groups including the Catholic Bishops and would shred our safety net while preserving tax giveaways for the rich.

In a recent letter to Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Rep. Ryan said that the Republican budget is consistent with Catholic social teaching and is “aimed at strengthening economic security for seniors, workers, families, and the poor.” But his plan, which the House of Representatives passed and the Senate will vote on soon, reflects the philosophy of Ayn Rand more than Ryan’s religious rhetoric.

Ayn Rand, of course, is the extreme right-wing philosopher who advocates self-advancement over the common good, and who Ryan credits with articulating the (im)morality underlying his economic philosophy: “Ayn Rand more than anyone else did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism…”

Ryan is using his position of great power to enact policies that would inflict concrete hardship on the most vulnerable Americans. And in the GOP budget authored by Ryan, low-income families face certain harm; millionaires are given massive tax breaks. Ayn Rand would be proud of this fact.

The budget makes two-thirds of its immediate cuts to programs that protect low-income people — programs like SNAP, which provides nutritional assistance to struggling families. Ryan’s transformation of Medicare shifts staggering out-of-pocket medical costs to seniors while ending the guarantee of full coverage. And his proposed conversion of Medicaid into a state block grant will lead to massive health care cuts for children, poor families and seniors in nursing homes.

Ryan is either under the mistaken impression that the best way to help poor people is to give rich people more money with no strings attached, or he believes — as Ayn Rand would — that it is morally right to use his office to reward the powerful even at the cost of harming the powerless.

Ryan’s Randian sympathies further shine through in his letter to Archbishop Dolan. He claims:

“…We believe human dignity is undermined when citizens become passive clients living on redistributions from government bureaucracies. … Sustaining national moral character and human dignity have been our paramount goal in developing this Budget.”

Ryan’s clear implication here is that both poverty and use of the safety net are marks of moral defect. At a time of 9 percent unemployment, when job seekers outnumber job openings 4-to-1 and tens of millions are trapped in poverty, that’s a purely Randian position.

Does Ryan conceive of the millions of Americans who can’t find work amid the slowest economic recovery since World War II as “passive clients living on redistributions”? Does he believe that making it harder for seniors and struggling families to get the health care they need and put food on the table is good for their moral character? If the answer is yes, as Ryan’s letter to Dolan suggests, he needs to stop, reflect and choose between God or Rand. He can’t serve both.

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Paul Ryan Misapplies Catholic Teaching

Most of the attention given to the release of a written exchange between Archbishop Dolan and Paul Ryan yesterday has focused on what the Archbishop did and didn’t say in his message. But just as interesting is Ryan’s initial letter to Dolan in which he tries to defend his budget in explicitly Catholic terms. While it’s nice to see Ryan endorsing these important Catholic social principles, his arguments make clear that he’s deeply confused about both Catholic teaching and what his own budget actually does.

Ryan’s letter opens with his standard misinformed talking points about the details of the economy and the budget. Policy experts have already addressed these claims at length, so I’ll leave it to them to answer how Ryan’s budget relies on funny numbers, increases–not decreases–the debt, voucherizes Medicare, devastates programs for low income Americans to pay for tax cuts for the rich, and is far from the only budget proposal on the table.

I want to focus more specifically on some of Ryan’s religious references.

1. On protecting the most vulnerable:

“Ultimately the weakest will be hit three times over: by rising costs, by drastic cuts to programs they rely on, and by the collapse of individual support for charities that help the hungry, the homeless, the sick, refugees and others in need.”

Ryan warns of these ills as a potential future if his budget is not enacted, but the reality is that they’ve already arrived! Costs are rising while wages fall, the recession decimated charitable giving, and Ryan himself is the one suggesting drastic cuts to social safety net programs. If Ryan is concerned about the most vulnerable among us, he should be proposing solutions that address the crisis we have right now.

2. On his budget’s Medicare proposal:

“The proposal is consistent with the preferential option for the poor, providing more support for low income groups and the sick…These reforms protect and preserve Medicare – with no disruptions – for current seniors and those nearing retirement, and offer a strengthened, personalized Medicare program that future generations can count on.”

Ryan’s Medicare proposal has gotten the most attention for good reason. It’s the area from which he gets most of his budget’s “savings” by undermining our societal commitment to providing adequate health care for our senior citizens. Rather than addressing the spiraling costs of health care, Ryan’s budget simply shifts the costs onto seniors. It’s not a solution to the actual problem; it’s an accounting trick that balances the books by forcing seniors to pay dramatically more for their health care or go without. This was one of the concerns raised by Bishops Hubbard and Claire in their letter to Ryan last month, and he has done nothing to address it.

Even worse is what Ryan’s budget does with these “savings.” The money generated by placing a burden on seniors enables the GOP to continue extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans: $3.8 trillion over the next decade alone.

For Ryan to try to allege that this combination lives up to the preferential option for the poor is an insult to Catholic teaching.

3. On subsidiarity as it applies to Medicaid:

“Our Budget …[provides] a block grant of Medicaid funds to the states, allowing them greater flexibility to administer and supplement federal support levels to suit the unique needs of each. “Subsidiary” and “federalism” both counsel that the states, as “subordinate organizations” closer to the people, can do better in applying funds to the neediest.”

Subsidiarity is the Catholic concept that societal issues should be addressed by the least centralized body competent and able to do so. In his letter, Ryan uses one of the Catholic Right’s favorite arguments about subsidiarity: claiming that subsidiarity is a blanket endorsement of all “states’ rights” claims. But what Ryan leaves out is the second half of that equation which Archbishop Dolan helpfully filled in: “The principles of subsidiarity and solidarity are interrelated to one another.” A budget that delegates full responsibility for Medicaid to the states, but gives no concern with the impact that will have on the vulnerable participants in the program is short-sighted.

Indeed, Ryan’s plan makes deep cuts in funding for the program: $771 billion in the next decade alone and 49% of all funding for the program by 2030. Ryan claims these cuts will force states to find savings, but in the absence of any actual cost control suggestions, it’s clear that states will cut benefits and kick people out of the program to achieve this cost-saving. By relaxing the federal protections preventing governors from shrinking the rolls to save money, Ryan all but guarantees this result.

Subsidiarity applies to situations when the lower-tiered entity is sufficient to address the issue at hand. But what Ryan fails to take into account is that the lower-tiered entity (state governments, in this instance), are inadequate to ensure the Catholic principle of “solidarity” and care for the poor, so there is still a need for robust federal government involvement.

4. The ‘Social Assistance State’

Lastly, Paul Ryan refers to the problem of the ‘Social Assistance State’ referred to by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Centesimus Annus. Of course, the Pope was writing at the end of the Cold War and reacting to the failures of Marxist regimes. It’s more than a stretch to suggest that the United States today is equivalent to Soviet Communism. Privileging this quote at the expense of numerous others expressing the fuller balance of the Church’s stance on this issue is political cherry-picking.

It’s ultimately a good sign that Ryan wants to engage in a conversation about his budget proposal’s compatibility with Catholic Social Teaching. And it’s certainly true that prudential judgment allows Catholics to disagree in good faith about the political application of various principles like giving preference to the poor. Under closer scrutiny, however, Ryan’s budget appears to differ not only in the means but in the fundamental ends as well.

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Politico Falls for Paul Ryan’s Spin

Archbishop Tim Dolan’s response to Paul Ryan’s letter yesterday has caught the attention of the Beltway press. Unfortunately, they’ve misinterpreted what the Catholic prelate was saying.

Politico’s story yesterday, titled “Paul Ryan gets boost from Catholic bishops,” features this misleading line:

The letter also clearly disputes one of the chief rallying cries against the budget: That it would hurt the poor to benefit the rich.

As we showed yesterday, this is decidedly not true. Dolan praises Ryan’s expressed commitment to Catholic social principles, but cautions that “assurances” are not enough, and the bishops will be watching what effect the budget actually has.

This is the consensus opinion amongst almost all of the religion writers who have covered the story so far.

Rev. Chuck Currie:

That’s no endorsement. In fact, the Archbishop is simply saying: we’re watching and will continue and weigh in. Archbiship Dolan refers Ryan back to a letter sent by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to members of the U.S. House of Representatives on April 13, 2010 in which they wrote [concerns with the Ryan budget framework]…In short, the U.S. Conference of Catholics Bishops oppose the heart of the GOP’s budget.

Paul Moses at dotCommonweal:

Some news accounts from Washington have fallen for the spin and reported that Dolan had written that the GOP budget plan takes Catholic social teaching into account. But if you actually read the letters instead of the press releases, it’s clear that Archbishop Dolan is non-committal on the Republicans’ budget proposals.

And Michael Sean Winters at National Catholic Reporter:

The first thing to note is that if Ryan went looking for an endorsement of his budget bill, he failed to get it. Dolan praises Ryan’s assurances of moral concern, not his budgetary proposals. Dolan focuses his attention on Ryan’s initial letter, not on the budget. Dolan’s letter, on its, face, is a tightly, carefully written text, but he was about to throw it into a political and media environment that is anything but careful.

MSW also includes a call for Dolan to clarify for the press:

The larger problem for Dolan is that the media is viewing this exchange of letters as mere cover for the GOP. Providing political cover is not a part of the brief of a President of the USCCB. Keeping the bishops united is. It is vital that in the coming days, Archbishop Dolan explain how this letter to Ryan was not intended to frustrate the positions already articulated by the USCCB.

I echo this request. It would go a long way towards helping secular media understand the nuance of Dolan’s position. Ryan and Boehner should not be given a free pass to misrepresent the words of religious leaders for political gain.

Update: Jonathan Cohn offers an alternate reading of Dolan’s letter, expressing doubt that the Archbishop intended such a strict firewall between praising Ryan’s letter and endorsing his plan.

“The president of an organization as dedicated to social justice as the Bishops claim to be should oppose the Republican budget, loudly and without hesitation. He should not be praising the budget’s architect, no matter what that architect said about Catholic values.”

While I don’t believe Dolan intended that suggestion, he should have anticipated how his personal praise of Ryan could be interpreted and used more caution to avoid the appearance of a split between him and the position of his brother bishops

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Archbishop Dolan Tells Ryan: I’ll Believe It When I See It

Last month Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) sent a letter about his budget proposal to Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop (USCCB).

The Archbishop’s response arrived yesterday, and if Ryan was looking for an endorsement, he certainly didn’t get it. While Dolan’s message is full of kind words about the broad moral principles Ryan spoke about in his initial letter, it’s noticeably absent of any compliments towards Ryan’s actual proposal. Instead, Dolan refers Ryan back to the letter sent on behalf of the USCCB from fellow bishops Blaire and Hubbard–a letter that raised specific objections to Ryan’s dismantling of Medicare, Medicaid and cuts to nutrition, education and housing programs.

Dolan’s letter shows a keen awareness that there is a sharp difference between what Ryan claims his budget will do, and what it does in practice:

A singularly significant part of our duty as pastors is to insist that the cries of the poor are heard, and that the much needed reform leading to financial discipline that is recognized by all never adds further burdens upon those who are poor and most vulnerable, nor distracts us from our country’s historic consideration of the needs of the world’s suffering people…I appreciate your assurance that your budget would be attentive to such considerations and would protect those at risk in the processes and programs of such a transition. While appreciating these assurances, our duty as pastors will motivate our close attention to the manner in which they become a reality.

It’s a good sign that Ryan is thinking about the moral implications of his budget proposal, it’s an even better one that the bishops intend to keep him honest.

Photo from photoactionusa-Flickr

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Corporations or Kids?

When we describe the budget as a moral document, we mean that it necessarily involves crucial choices about where to spend our resources. These choices reflect our moral priorities as a nation.

This ad by the non-profit Vote Kids, running in the presidential campaign states of Iowa and New Hampshire does a great job of boiling that point down to its fundamentals.

Good on them for stressing this point that cuts through the conventional wisdom about spending and debt. Candidates should be morally obliged to explain why we “can’t afford” programs that protect children and families even as we lavish tax breaks on corporations and the rich.

Politicians who support draconian budget cuts are fond of saying that it’s wrong to burden our children with debt. I’d love to hear how they reconcile such concerns with their zeal to destroy programs that help America’s youth prepare for a healthy and prosperous future.

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