Written by TOM QUINER, Des Moines Register opinion-editorial

True or false: “The House budget would decimate our country.”

This is the assertion of the “Nuns on the Bus” tour as reported by Rekha Basu in her June 20 column, “ ‘Nuns on the Bus’ Possess Credibility That Few of Us Have.”

Let’s take a closer look:

The Senate won’t go near the issue. Members have refused to submit their own budget for three years because they fear the political backlash. So they have no credibility on the subject through sheer cowardice.

President Barack Obama’s budget is the single aspect of his presidency that garners bipartisan support. Every single member of both parties rejected it. So the president has no credibility on the subject either. In fact, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says his budget would decimate our country.

How so? Debt.

The CBO says Obama’s proposed spending increases are “unsustainable.” Even more, it warns that the president’s approach increases the probability of a sudden fiscal crisis.

The Obama approach jeopardizes our long-term ability to pay for America’s social safety net. The budget office reports that Obamacare made health care cost containment worse, not better. It says mandatory federal spending on health care will increase from 5.4 percent of gross domestic product to 10.4 percent of GDP over the next 25 years.

It gets even worse. Today, the federal government’s payment on interest alone accounts for 1.4 percent of our entire economy. Under Obama’s long-term budget, interest payments will escalate to 9.5 percent by 2037.

I could drown you in more morbid budget minutiae from the CBO. But why ruin your coffee this fine morning?

Let us simply say that if you care about the poor, the Obama budget is going to devastate them, because we simply cannot afford to sustain our safety net at current levels because of raw debt.

So, next to a busload of nuns, who has any credibility when it comes to the federal government’s budget? I’d guess most folks would say U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

Ryan has come under fire from the left because of his bold and politically brave budget that addresses our nation’s structural deficit.

Where Obama grows our budget an average of 4.5 percent per year with excessive top-down government spending, Ryan’s budget reflects a more sustainable 3 percent growth. And Ryan block-grants more funds to the states to fight poverty, as did former President Bill Clinton with his successful approach to welfare reform. Unlike Obama’s thinking, the Clinton/Ryan approach believes the needy can best be served with spending directed from the state level rather than Washington.

The big-government, top-down approach produced some unexpected and damaging consequences beginning in the 1960s, especially in the African-American community. Children fare best when they grow up with a married mom and dad by every standard.

• Back in 1960, 61 percent of black adults were married.

• By 2008, that number was down to 32 percent.

• In 1960, just 2 percent of black children had a parent who had never been married.

• By 2008, the number was up to 41 percent.

To receive a welfare check, a poor mother had to demonstrate that she’s single, she’s not working and has no savings.

Using this approach, family life splintered. This is a complex issue with multiple causes, of course, and yet the trillions of dollars we’ve spent on the social safety net has barely made a dent in the poverty rate, with 46.2 million Americans still living below the poverty level today, a record number.

It’s not as if we’re scrimping in our efforts to serve the needy. Ron Haskins, co-director of the Center on Children and Families of the left-leaning Brookings Institution, recently testified before the Senate Finance Committee. He reported that the federal government has tripled per-person spending on poverty since 1980.

When you add in what we spend at the state and local levels, taxpayers are spending about $23,700 per person living in poverty via a multitude of programs, with minimal improvement in the poverty rate.

Some programs work quite well. Here in Iowa, for example, the state is well-served by our network of community action agencies, to name but one successful component of our safety net. The question comes down to “how” and “how much.”

Honorable people can disagree.

Like Ryan and the nuns on the bus, I am a faithful Catholic who embraces our church’s social justice teachings. I honor these nuns for the good work they are doing in serving the needy.

I also honor Ryan for the courage to address the complexity of our nation’s budget with intelligence, innovative thinking and great compassion.

He demonstrates a quality I greatly admire: leadership.

TOM QUINER of Des Moines is owner of Breakthrough Marketing and publisher of www.QuinersDiner.com on politics and religion.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120626/OPINION01/306260051/0/sports0204/