On EWTN's The World Over with Raymond Arroyo, Congressman Paul Ryan discusses the morality of the federal budget and addresses the latest concerns of the U.S. bishops.

Highlights

To avert a debt crisis, stop borrowing and spending money we don’t have

It’s important to remember that 40 cents of every dollar today that is spent by the government is borrowed money, and it’s getting worse. The President is proposing a budget that accelerates our debt crisis. The people who get hurt the first and the worst in a debt crisis are the poor, the sick and the elderly, the people who need government the most. We’re preventing a debt crisis with our budget by bringing spending to sustainable levels.

Reforming safety net programs to lift individuals out of poverty

These programs aren’t working the way they should. One in six Americans are in poverty today. We have the highest poverty rates since we’ve measured poverty the way we measure it. It’s not working. And so what we want to do is put the kind of reforms in these programs – using subsidiarity, solidarity, local control, ideas that worked when we tried them in some other areas in the 1990’s. We want to reform these programs with the idea of getting people out of poverty onto lives of self sufficiency.

Tackling the root causes, rather than the symptoms, of poverty

Poverty rates today are so high, yet we’re throwing so much money at these programs. Why don’t we fix these programs so that they actually work to break the cycle of poverty? And if we keep growing the government in debt, we will crowd out the civil society – those charities, churches, institutions in our local communities that do the most to actually have a human touch to help people in need. That’s what we want to empower, that’s what we want to improve on.

Path to Prosperity promotes economic opportunity and upward mobility

Our job training reforms are designed to get people off of welfare into job training so that they can get a new skill and get a career and get onto lives of self sufficiency. What we’re trying to go back to is the American Idea, an opportunity society, economic growth, job creation, upward mobility and a safety net that is there for people who truly cannot help themselves and a safety net that helps get people who are down on their luck back on their feet and not trapped in the lives of dependency, or as the Blessed John Paul the Second said, a “social assistance state.” A social assistance state erodes a person of their humanity; we want the dignity of the human person to be advanced, by helping people get jobs, get work, and make a better future for themselves and their families.

Preventing a debt crisis and advancing the common good

These are matters for prudential judgment. People of good will can have differences of opinions on these kinds of issues. There’s plenty of room to disagree on how best to advance the common good, advance these principles, the Social Magisterium, that’s for the laity, those of us that serve in public life, to determine these things.

I cannot claim exclusive justification for my political philosophy and point of view and economics using the Social Magisterium any more than a liberal can for theirs. We have differences of opinion on how best to apply these principles, to the problems and the policies of the day. It’s not as if we’re talking about violating a core principle like life or religious liberty or something like that. These are economic judgments, where we have differences of opinions, and I go back to my old mentor Jack Kemp who said, “You can’t help poor people if America becomes poor.” If we have a debt crisis, people in this country who need government the most, they’re the ones who get hurt the first and the worst. Just look at what’s going on in Europe; we’re trying to prevent that from happening.