Preferential Option for the Iceberg

Social Security & Medicare slipping closer to insolvency, reports the Chicago Tribune. How do liberal bishops and Lefty Catholic academics wish to solve the problem? By attacking the only guy whose plan is to steer away from the oncoming debt iceberg rather than steaming into it full boor. The liberal plan is to hit the iceberg but reserve three seats in each lifeboat for the folks in steerage. "He hates the poor!" they cry about the only serious proposal to save everyone.

I am so dang tired of the Left acting as if it owns Catholic social teaching -- especially "solidarity," which is about each soul's personal commitment to the dignity of all others in society. It is the exact opposite of creating class and race warfare.

Even on their own terms, exactly what are the Democrats doing for the poor? Obamacare is funded by gutting Medicare: so we destroy the safety net so Sandra Fluke doesn't have to pay for The Pill out of pocket?  In the House they voted unanimously against the President's budget and the Democrats in the House and Senate have neither proposed nor passed a budget in three years. So where are the similar letters of outrage that the Dems do not have the backs of the poor since they are neither bothering to care for them by budgeting for their programs not ceasing to spend money we don't have, which is, as the Pope says in Light of the World, a refusal to live in reality and an insistence that the world's poor shoulder the burden of our refusal to live within our means?

Moreover, have any of these folks actually read the Ryan plan? Because if they had, they would know it doesn't call for any specific cuts. It budgets money in blocks and then leaves it to the Appropriations Committee to fund specific programs. And it cuts no dollars to programs for the poor, it simply slows the rate of increase.

This goes beyond partisanship; this is old-timers unable to think anew in a new situation. These academics and these bishops simply eye a program or two they like and resolutely refuse to focus on the impending collapse of the entire economy. (Die, Boomers, Die! We are tired of fighting your generation's fights.)