House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) told Christian Broadcast Network earlier this week that the House GOP’s budget, which he wrote, was driven by his Catholic faith. “A person’s faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private,” Ryan said, and Catholic principles are what led him to cut programs for the poor so as to keep people from becoming “dependent on government.”

As ThinkProgress noted Tuesday, Ryan’s budget seems to ignore Catholic social teaching that calls for protecting the poor and improving access to food, jobs, health care, housing, and the social safety net. And now religious leaders are making the same case. The founder of the PICO National Network, the largest national coalition of religious congregations, slammed Ryan’s claim of adherence to Catholic teaching as “the height of hypocrisy” in a release circulated Wednesday:

“It’s the height of hypocrisy for Rep. Ryan to claim that his approach to the budget is shaped by Catholic teaching and values,” said Fr. John Baumann, S.J., founder of PICO National Network. [...] “A central moral measure of any budget proposal is how it affects “the least of these” (Matthew 25). The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.”

“By these measures,” the release says, “the Ryan budget is a severe failure,” noting that it cuts Medicare, Medicaid, Pell Grants, food stamps, and “other programs that help vulnerable working families make it through tough times and live better lives,” while giving massive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and corporations. Overall, 62 percent of Ryan’s budget cuts come from programs that benefit the poor. “The mission of the Church is to ‘bring good news to the poor’ and to protect the vulnerable, not to justify the impoverishment of the very young, the very old and the sick in order to enrich the wealthy,” the release says.

This isn’t the first time religious leaders have criticized the House GOP budget. When Ryan released the budget in March, Bishop Gene Robinson called it an “immoral disaster” that “robs the poor,” and Father Thomas Kelly, a constituent of Ryan’s, said he was “outraged” that Ryan defended the budget “on moral grounds.” Last year’s Ryan budget faced similar criticism, as religious leaders blasted it for adhering more closely to the policies of anti-religion, anti-government author Ayn Rand than to the teachings of the Bible.

When House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) released his latest “Path to Prosperity” budget last month, it was immediately admonished as an “immoral disaster” that “robs the poor” by Catholic religious leaders.

That echoed the backlash Ryan received last year, but it hasn’t stopped him from attempting to use Catholic social teaching to support his budget. “A person’s faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private,” Ryan told the Christian Broadcast Network, before saying the Catholic principles of subsidiarity and the preferential option for the poor guided his plan:

Those principles are very very important, and the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenants of Catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life, help people get out of poverty out onto life of independence.

Watch it, courtesy of the Christian Broadcast Network:

Though Timothy Dolan, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, gave some mild praise to Ryan’s “attention to the poor” in 2011, the budget seems to contradict the Catholic Church’s voting guide and standards on how to address domestic poverty. In “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” a voting guide produced by the USCCB, the Church outlines a specific message on welfare policy, saying it “should reduce poverty and dependency, strengthen family life, and help families leave poverty through work, training, and assistance with child care, health care, housing, and transportation. It should also provide a safety net for those who cannot work.” Later, it defines an even more specific approach to food assistance and nutrition policy:

A first priority for agriculture policy should be food security for all. Because no one should face hunger in a land of plenty, Food Stamps, the Special Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and other nutrition programs need to be strong and effective.

Ryan’s budget, however, does just the opposite. More than 60 percent of its cuts come from programs that help the poor. It would kick millions out of SNAP, (the federal food stamp program) and would gut the Women, Infant, and Children nutrition program. Food stamps lifted millions of women and children out of poverty in 2009, while tax credits and other programs benefiting low-income families (which could be cut by Ryan’s plan to end such credits) kept millions of women and children out of poverty. And it guts Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, ignoring the Church’s teachings on health care.

Ryan’s belief that those programs create dependency on the government have also been proven false. Far from creating dependency, social welfare programs are shrinking as the economy continues its recovery.

Meanwhile, Ryan’s belief in subsidiarity — the idea that programs for the poor should be handled by local actors — denies reality when it comes to social welfare programs. State and local governments don’t have the capacity to manage welfare programs like Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and WIC, all of which address areas the Church says should be protected. Neither do local charities or churches. During the Great Recession, as the number of impoverished Americans ballooned, donations fell and churches and local charities were often stretched beyond their means, left unable to help many of the most vulnerable members of their communities.

Ryan’s budget ignores that the Catholic Church’s teachings regarding the poor often align closely with those of progressives. Pope Benedict XVI, in fact, has called for greater governmental attention to the poor and redistribution of wealth to address rising income inequality. Ryan’s views, however, adhere more closely to author Ayn Rand, who denounced religion, opposed governmental aid to the poor and middle class, and, despite his supposed adherence to Catholic social teaching, was Ryan’s inspiration to enter politics.

Poverty in the United States has grown considerably over the last 15 years, with extreme poverty rates doubling. And according to a report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of working Americans below the poverty line — known as the working poor — rose to a two-decade high in 2010:

The number of working Americans earning so little they lived in poverty reached 7.2 percent of the labor force in 2010, the highest level in at least two decades, the government said on Friday.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 7.6 percent of women among the working poor, compared to 6.7 percent of men. In 2009, the working poor rate was 7 percent.

The number of workers in poverty would be even higher were it not for government safety net programs that have reduced poverty rates during the recession. Food stamps, for instance, have lifted millions of working families out of poverty, reducing the poverty rate by 8 percent in 2009. Tax credits that help low-income families, like the Earned Income and Child tax credits, kept nearly 5 million women and children out of poverty in 2010. Other policies, like scheduled minimum wage increases at the state level, will benefit 1.4 million workers in 2012, and several states are considering boosting the minimum wage this year.

Republicans, meanwhile, have targeted many of those programs for budget cuts. The House GOP budget cuts millions off of the federal food stamp program and could, theoretically, end the working family tax credits to pay for tax cuts for the richest Americans. The GOP has also opposed minimum wage increases, even though the current federal minimum would need to be raised by more than $2 an hour to match its 1968 buying power.

Congressional Republicans have targeted the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, for budget cuts, and have attempted to paint it as a program rife with fraud and abuse that is on an unsustainable path. While their argument ignores a host of facts, including that food stamp fraud is at an all-time low, it also ignores the economic benefits that the program brings to millions of low-income families.

According to a new study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food stamps substantially reduced the poverty rate in 2009, the last year data is available, the New York Times reports:

The food stamp program…reduced the poverty rate by nearly 8 percent in 2009, the most recent year included in the study, a significant impact for a social program whose effects often go unnoticed by policy makers. [...]

The study, which examined nine years of data, tried to measure the program’s effects on people whose incomes remained below the poverty threshold. The program lifted the average poor person’s income up about six percent closer to the line over the length of the study, making poverty less severe. When the benefits were included in the income of families with children, the result was that children below the threshold moved about 11 percent closer to the line.

The USDA study aligns closely with a similar one released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which found that food stamps reduced the number of Americans living in extreme poverty in 2011 from 1.46 million to just over 800,000. SNAP’s effects on children are even bigger — the program cut the number living in extreme poverty by half, according to CBPP.

Republicans, however, have made no secret of their wish to gut the program. The House GOP budget would either cut millions of Americans off of food assistance or would substantially reduce the already-modest amount each family receives. The program, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) continues to argue, is unsustainable. In reality, the growth in SNAP was due almost entirely to the effects of the Great Recession. Its enrollment has dropped as the economy has improved, and it is scheduled to continue shrinking over the next 10 years.

The government programs that comprise America’s social safety net have had a profound effect on working families and the unemployed, particularly throughout the Great Recession and the slow economic recovery that has followed. But tax credits, which often go overlooked in discussions on how to prevent poverty, also have a huge impact on working families.

Many working families are now being led by single mothers or women who are primary breadwinners, and according to an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, two primary tax credits are responsible for keeping millions of women and girls out of poverty each year. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which benefits low-income workers, kept an estimated 3.4 million women above the poverty line in 2010. Add in the Child Tax Credit (CTC), and the number of women who avoided poverty swells to nearly 5 million, CBPP found:

The numbers rise when you include a second federal income tax credit — the less well-known CTC, which provides up to $1,000 per child for working families: together, the CTC and EITC kept 4.9 million women and girls above the poverty line in 2010, including more than 800,000 just by the Recovery Act’s expansions of both credits.

As CBPP’s Arloc Sherman noted, research shows that the EITC continues to help women even after they retire. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the EITC helps boost Social Security retirement benefits for women, since those benefits are based on prior income history.

Unfortunately, the newly-adopted House GOP budget could end many tax breaks in order to finance a massive tax cut for the rich, though Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) refuses to say which breaks would be eliminated. If the GOP and Ryan continue their history of targeting programs that benefit the poor to pay for tax breaks for the rich, however, beneficial tax credits like the EITC and CTC could be at risk.

Families that depend on government assistance face countless threats, but a new study from the Urban Institute shows just how devastating budget cuts could be to America’s poorest families.

According to the report, as of 2009, low-income children received 70 percent of government funding for children — a respectable portion of overall federal spending dedicated to the needs of those under 18. But while the straight numbers look good for poor kids, those children’s future prospects are frightening.

The Urban Institute “estimate[s] that low-income children receive 99 percent of housing expenditures, 98 percent of expenditures on nutrition, 97 percent of health expenditures, and 94 percent of expenditures on social services.” So, of course, cutting the budgets for these areas would disproportionately affect children:

If these services sound familiar, it’s because many are the same programs that Republicans have aimed to cut in their most recent budget proposals — specifically, housing, nutrition, and health.

Millions of children have been kept out of extreme poverty by programs like food stamps, and the overall poverty rates would have been twice as high in 2010 without the social safety net. Surely, the opposite effect would occur with any cuts to welfare, social security, medicaid, or the other programs that keep these kids afloat.

Today, House Republicans held a hearing to examine “skyrocketing fraud” in the food stamp program (i.e. SNAP), despite the fact that fraud and improper payments in the program have plunged to an all-time low. As House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said, “while the need for the SNAP program is at an historic high, fraud within the program is at an all-time low…Given this strong track record, I am concerned that the true purpose of this hearing may be to discredit the entire program in order to justify draconian cuts.”

Food stamps have been key to alleviating poverty during the Great Recession. In 2010, the program kept more than 5 million Americans from falling below the poverty line. Plus, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted today, food stamps reduced the number of children living in extreme poverty — defined as less than $2 per day, before government aid — by half in 2011:

Counting SNAP benefits as income reduces the number of households in extreme poverty in 2011 from 1.46 million to nearly 800,000, the study found. And it reduces the number of children in extreme poverty in 2011 by half — from 2.8 million to 1.4 million…Other studies have also documented SNAP’s powerful poverty-fighting impact. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which counts SNAP as income, SNAP kept more than 5 million people out of poverty in 2010.

Food stamps are more critical now than ever, since extreme poverty in the U.S. has doubled in the last 15 years. Overall, the poverty rate in 2010 would have been twice as high as it was were if not for the social safety net.