Charlotte
Sister Simone Campbell is a Catholic nun and liberal activist who has earned a lot of media coverage this year for criticizing the Paul Ryan budget while riding around the country in a bus. Tonight at the Democratic National Convention, Campbell will be speaking from the podium against the Ryan budget.
But how does Campbell, a Catholic who says she believes abortion is the taking of an innocent life, weigh her budget concerns against her opposition to abortion? It turns out there’s not a dilemma because, as Campbell told me this afternoon at the Charlotte Convention Center, she doesn’t know if she support laws protecting the lives of unborn children.
TWS: On the legal question, do you think there should be penalties against abortion doctors? I mean, should it be illegal to perform abortions? CAMPBELL: That’s beyond my pay grade. I don’t know.
“The fact is my vast preference is that all women would have the support to carry their babies to term,” Campbell continued. “One of the things I find so horrifying in the Romney-Ryan budget is that they want to take those supports away. And then they claim they’re pro-life. That just drives me nuts!”
So Campbell knows that the Romney-Ryan budget is "horrifying" because it spends less on social welfare programs than Obama, but she's agnostic about passing laws to stop abortions. According to one study, striking down Roe v. Wade would lead to 180,000 fewer abortions per year in the United States.
I also asked Campbell how she knows how much money needs to be spent on food stamps to make a budget moral. Is the $83 billion President Obama wants to spend in 2013 enough? Why is it immoral to spend a few billion less in 2013? Campbell didn't give a clear answer.
“The issue is who they want to leave out," she said. "That’s the problem. They want to argue dollar signs."
"Tonight," Campbell said, "I’m going to talk about the man who’s stuggling to put food on his table, and 'he’s working so he doesn’t need foodstamps.' His family would go hungry without foodstamps."
The budget document authored by Paul Ryan points out that spending on food stamps has skyrocked from $18 billion in 2001 to more than $80 billion today and argues that the program must be reformed to make it sustainable:
As recently as 2007, SNAP was projected to cost slightly less than $400 billion over ten years. Currently, the ten year projection has risen to almost $772 billion. Much of this is due to the recession, but not all of it: Enrollment grew from 17.3 million recipients in 2001, to 23.8 million in 2004, to 28.2 million in 2008, to 46.6 million today. According the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “The historical relationship between unemployment and SNAP caseloads diverged in the middle of the decade … As the unemployment rate fell 1.4 percentage points between 2003 and 2007, SNAP caseloads increased by 22 percent." ... This unsustainable cost growth is the result of the same flawed structure that has fueled unsustainable growth in Medicaid. State governments receive federal dollars in proportion to how many people they enroll in the program, which gives them an incentive to add more individuals to the rolls. State governments have little incentive to make sure that able-bodied adults on SNAP are working, looking for work, or enrolled in job training programs.