The morality of cutting the budget

PBS actually runs a weekly program about religion and morality. I do not know how big the audience for the program is, although I think American Idol is safe atop the Nielsens. This week, the program examined the current debate about whether or not to cut spending while raising the debt ceiling and offered the view that cutting spending was immoral. Various religious figures discussed how social justice requires that spending not be reduced and how to do so would be antithetical to Christian values.

The show was a great example of the idiocy of the left. It was not just an example of pro-government thinking, it expanded the position to be one required by religious teachings. But the entire position is based upon a lie.

Let's start with the lie. There is no one who could ever validly contend that all government spending is sacrosanct. There clearly are times where spending levels on particular programs are too high and need to be reduced. There are also times when particular programs need to be abolished as unnecessary. In the entire program, not even a single word was devoted by PBS to examining if either of these points are applicable to the present dispute. Can it be that providing free health care to families making $80,000 per year is something that is unnecessary? Certainly! Does the government really have to subsidize farmers who grow corn for ethanol at a point when the prices for corn are sky high? Not at all! Neither of these are even remotely "ethical" or "moral" issues, but one would never know this from the PBS program. Or how about a new weapons system to better kill the enemies of the USA; is cutting back on that program a moral question, one which requires that the expenditures continue?

The real point is that the level of expenditures is one that requires the exercise of prudent judgment by the Congress. Prudence, not morality, is what is at issue.

Second, the PBS program also assumed that all social spending is morally required. If the government provides assistance to folks in the form of food stamps, the program just assumed that it would never be moral to reduce that expenditure. But who could deny that there could be a need to make a trade off between being able to continue to assist most of the folks currently on food stamps while removing those who are best able to feed themselves on the one hand, and on the other hand continuing to support everyone now receiving assistance even though that policy will soon lead to bankruptcy for the country and the inability to help anyone. The answer to this choice is indeed a moral question, but one that the PBS show answered by assuming that there is only one possible answer. Of course, following a course that leads to mass starvation after the bankruptcy of the country is not moral and not even those social justice advocates who spoke on the program would likely support it if they had been asked about it.

The real point here is that PBS just ignored the real issues in the debate. Congress has a civil and moral duty to follow the course that is most likely to lead to prosperity and success for the entire country. That means that at certain times Congress has the responsibility to make the "hard choices" to take benefits away from those who can fend for themselves in order to remove the burder from the rest of America and allow the country to thrive.