Dylan Matthews at the Washington Post tells us the new pope opposed government spending cuts in 2002, when he was Argentina's spiritual leader and the country defaulted on its debt.That suggests he doesn't think much of the current campaign to slash government spending in the U.S. Writes Matthews:
Argentine bishops, including Francis, had long criticized the laissez-faire policies of Carlos Menem, who was president from 1989 to 1999. “The bishops were critical of the economic model as a generator of poverty and unemployment, notwithstanding the stability it had brought to the country,” (scholar Thomas) Trebat wrote.
And when the debt crisis hit in 2002, the church called in strong terms for a debt restructuring to take place which privileged social programs above debt repayment. They argued that the true problems in the Argentinian economy were, in their words, “social exclusion, a growing gap between rich and poor, insecurity, corruption, social and family violence, serious deļ¬ciencies in the educational system and in public health, the negative consequences of globalization and the tyranny of the markets.”
Trebat thinks this influenced the eventual outcome of the crisis, wherein the country’s creditors accepted a less devastating austerity package than many expected. “Civil society, of which the Church is a part, has a clear role to play in demanding that debt service not take precedence over human development once reasonable efforts have been expended to pay the debt,” he concludes.
Trebat studied the whole church’s response, rather than just Francis’s, but comments by the new pope suggest he held similar views. Allen quotes a later speech in which then-Cardinal Bergoglio declared, “We live, apparently, in the most unequal part of the world, which has grown the most yet reduced misery the least. The unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers.”Are you Fix the Debt CEOs listening?
