Good Questions About "Morality in the Budget"

The Bishops of the US have declared that the US budget is a "moral" document.  Jeff Mirus doesn't quibble with that statement, but asks some very good questions about how the Bishops (and the Gummint) applies those "morals."

...Does government’s “caring for the poor” help the poor grow toward greater self-reliance, especially within their families and communities, or does it create and sustain a dependent class?...How does omnipresent government affect the general perception of the need for a citizenry that worships God and organizes itself into churches to do God’s will?...

...How does government today define the family, and what does it mean for government to “strengthen” the family?...Will the purpose of strengthening the family through tax policy be invariably undercut by other laws which destroy the proper understanding of the family, consistently and even convulsively weakening the social order?...

...Are the rewards of progressive tax rates worth the costs?...More broadly, are complex tax laws worth the cost of a specialized class of professionals to deal with them, not to mention the cost of a huge number of required government employees?...

....By “common good”, of course, is meant “government programs and services”. To what degree do government programs and services, especially at the Federal level, actually enhance the common good in ways commensurate with their costs (or in comparison with the ways in which the same programs diminish the common good)? How many vital, successful and irreplaceable services can be enumerated beyond necessary basics such as law enforcement, national defense, and disaster relief? Does our government (or the American voters as a group) even know what the common good is?...

... does excessive reliance on government actually undermine the common good? Is there something fundamentally wrong with a social order in which one in every six persons is a government employee?...

We're sure that every one of the US Bishops has seriously debated all those points with their top-level staffers and concluded--without question or doubt--that the current direction of Gummint is just fine.

Not.

Those questions have been pursued by the likes of J. Schall, S.J., Deneen (of Notre Dame), and Solzhenitsyn.  Which US Bishop has read any--or all--of the works of these people?  Hmmmmmm?