Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, has a piece out discussing Catholicism and the budget:
Asked about rising government debt, Pope Benedict XVI has said: "[W]e are living at the expense of future generations … in untruth. We live on the basis of appearances, and the huge debts are meanwhile treated as something that we are simply entitled to." It is immoral for governments to make promises they cannot fulfill.
Budgetary discipline is a moral imperative....The dignity of the human person, said Blessed Pope John Paul II, is compromised when bureaucratic ways of thinking — which he dubbed the "welfare state" or "social assistance state" — dominate our lives with heartless regulations and impersonal rationing. This is why our budget repeals the new health care law with its taxpayer funding of abortions, government control over the health care sector and panel of bureaucrats empowered to ration Medicare.