In Good Company The family-centered economy

Feb 15, 2011

President Obama’s 3.7 trillion dollar budget happened to be released at the same time Conservative politicians and activists gathered in Washington, DC for the annual Conservative Political Action Committee convention this month.

The President’s debt-expansive approach could not be more at odds with the incoming Congress’ taste for budget-cutting as a remedy for prolonged recession. Everyone is gearing up for a battle of ideas over how our nation is going to spend its money.

There’s not a Catholic position, per se, on budget issues — your view on tax cuts doesn’t put you afoul of the Church either way — but something seems missing from both the President’s budget and what’s widely held to be the most important speech at CPAC this year.

The family.

As John Mueller demonstrates in “Redeeming Economics,” the family (defined as a mother and father and their dependent children) is the engine of the economy. To oversimplify an elegant argument, it is not strict utilitarian calculation that causes people to act as they do, but “the weighing of persons,” Mueller says.

We work and distribute our goods for the benefit of those we love: family first, then neighbors, communities and institutions.

An economy which breaks down the family, loosening the bonds between persons, is sowing its own destruction.

Some facts:
• 2010 marked the first year the Social Security program began paying out more benefits than it is taking in revenues, so it is on course for bankruptcy.
• The independent Tax Foundation found that in 2004, 60% of American households were receiving more benefits from the government than they were paying in taxes. That number will rise this year to 70%.
• This means only 3 out of 10 families in this country will be supporting themselves — and they’ll be supporting or supplementing all the rest of us, too. On our present course, that number is likely to shrink to two or even one.
• The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects current spending levels will drive our debt to the equivalent of 90% of our economy — 90% of GDP — by 2020.

No one reputable — not on the Left and not on the Right — is such a social Darwinist as to be against a safety net for the support of citizens genuinely in need: the frail, the handicapped and victims of sudden disasters. 

But when the government gets so large that it supports 70% (and rising) of our citizens, do we not have to ask ourselves whether the economy itself has become what the Catechism calls a “structure of sin?”

Does bureaucratic control of so much of the economy change the moral dynamic of our people? Are we shifting the bonds of attachment such that we look to the government instead of shouldering responsibilities that rightly rest on us — even coming to feel it’s unjust that we should have to provide for ourselves and our families? 

Does the entitlement culture support or undermine a culture of love and responsibility? Is it building or destroying families?

We could put similar questions to Governor Mitch Daniels, who gave a cracker-jack speech at the recent CPAC convention, one which put him on the short list of GOP presidential contenders for 2012.

Referring to our nation’s burgeoning debt as the “new Red Menace,” Daniels noted the connection between debt and freedom:

“We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic. No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be.”

Daniels sees the battle to get the budget under control as the struggle of our time and famously asks the “social conservatives” to put their battles for life and marriage aside for a later time.

What does Daniels think the economy is ordered towards, if not the support of the two-parent family — proven over long centuries to be the most reliable motor of economic growth and human flourishing?

His desire to separate economic questions from any consideration of the family and its needs undermines his project as it undermines the President’s.

An economy not ordered towards the flourishing of the family is sowing its own destruction.

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