SolidNandz

This is your life
2005-02-09 15:05:20 (UTC)

Cut, Cut, Cut, Cut, Cut; Go Bush Go!

Seems our President is at his old tricks once again, cutting
budgets, effecting who other than the poor. Check out this
article by Julia Scott @ Salon.com


Feb. 9, 2005 | When President Bush released his "lean"
budget for 2006 Monday, middle-class and low-income
Americans had no idea just how right he was. They can expect
nothing but lean times ahead. Lean times for those who
depend on Medicaid, child-care assistance or clean water.
Lean times for those who rely on food stamps or federal
supplements to utility bills. Lean times for those who would
like to see their local community build a new baseball field.

Cuts to such social programs are projected to create a
savings of $137 billion over 10 years. Such predictions,
however, are not always aligned with reality. The Christian
Science Monitor noted that in last year's budget, "Instead
of a projected $5 billion in savings, the administration
reaped only about $300 million from the cuts." What's more,
according to calculations by the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, a nonprofit group concerned with low-income
individuals and families, total spending on social programs
amounts to only a fraction of what Bush's tax cuts piled
onto the federal deficit. "In 2005," declares the center,
"the cost of tax cuts enacted over the past four years will
be over three times the cost of all domestic program
increases enacted over this period."

While Bush continues to skim off the top of the Social
Security trust fund to pay for various initiatives and
reduce the debt (while warning of its imminent bankruptcy),
he has requested an additional $19.2 billion for the
Pentagon, for a total of $419 billion -- and that excludes
the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Compare those numbers to the money being cut for essential
social services and it's obvious where this administration's
priorities lie: The total budget for the Food Stamp Program
alone could fit into the defense budget 13 times. Here are
some details about proposed cuts to other programs millions
of Americans rely on.

CUT:
$57 million from the Food Stamp Program
Bush's food stamp cuts will take food out of the mouths of
300,000 families. These are all working families -- so much
for the lazy mother myth -- who do not receive cash
assistance from TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families), a funding source for individual state programs,
such as welfare, child care, domestic violence counseling,
and transportation. "That's 300,000 very poor people who
don't have enough money for food," says Stacy Dean, director
of Food Stamp Policy at the Center for Budget and Policy
Priorities.

To qualify for food stamps, a person has to have an income
of 130 percent below the poverty line -- $2,043 a month or,
for a family of four, $24,000 a year. Currently, about 20
percent of food stamps are awarded to elderly or disabled
people and 80 percent to children of families who can't
afford to put food on the table. It's the hundreds of
thousands of families whose monthly incomes may exceed
$2,043 that will bear the burden of the food stamp cuts. And
they are precisely "the wrong group of people to be
targeting," says Dean, "particularly in a budget that gives
millions of dollars in tax cuts."

CUT:
$200 million from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program
Right now, 5 million families -- mostly low-income families
with elderly and disabled members -- benefit from the
Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which supplements
their heating bills in cold weather. These new cuts are
bound to make their winters very cold indeed.

Established in 1982, the program has been under the knife
since 2001 -- the 2005 level of funding was lower than any
of the previous five years -- and the 2006 budget calls for
an 8.4 percent reduction to $2 billion. Fuel money is doled
out according to climate, so this cut will
disproportionately affect northern states. Many poor people
can't afford to properly insulate their homes, and, to make
matters worse, the prices of heating oil, propane and
natural gas are all increasing -- a trend not likely to
reverse anytime soon. What's more, according to a fairly
recent energy study, next to not paying their rent, people's
inability to pay their utility bills is the main cause of
homelessness.

"While we worry about the allocation of billions of dollars
here in Congress," says Vermont Sen.r Jim Jeffords, "some
people must decide between buying food and heating their homes."

CUT:
$361 million from the Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund
The Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund is the country's
largest source of federal funding to upgrade sewage systems.
It has distributed nearly $50 billion to states since 1988
to repair old sewer plants and keep raw sewage out of rivers
and lakes. Bush wants to cut $361 million from the program
this year, leaving states with $730 million. That's in
addition to the $250 million slashed from the fund last year
because of the budget crisis.

"The administration's solution to making our water pure is
to provide less money to municipalities and allow them to
dump more," says Wesley Warren, deputy director for advocacy
at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He adds that every
canceled or delayed cleanup project adds gallons of
untreated sewage to our waterways.

This cut also comes on the heels of reports that the EPA has
been considering "sewage blending," whereby treatment plants
mix raw sewage together with fully treated wastewater during
storms and declare it potable. This practice -- a veritable
fount of waterborne diseases, according to environmentalists
-- is necessitated by the dire need for sewage upgrades in
low-income areas throughout the nation.

CUT:
Community Development Block Grant programs
In the past, the Department of Housing and Urban Development
dished out Community Development Block Grant programs to
cities to help low-income residents. Cities could then cash
in the grants -- a key part of their efforts to keep folks
off the streets -- on affordable housing, redevelopment and
social services like job training and day care. The new Bush
budget boots the community grant program out of HUD and puts
it under the aegis of the Department of Commerce. Not a good
thing. Last year, HUD backed the program with $4.7 billion;
Commerce, now, will give it $3.7 billion. The outcome for
cities, says Bart Peterson, Indianapolis mayor, and a vice
president for the National League of Cities, is "dramatic
reductions." When it comes to many community improvements,
he says, "there really isn't another source of funding other
than raising local taxes. So you either go without, or you
raise local taxes. My guess is that most cities will go
without."

CUT:
Upward Bound, Talent Search and GEAR UP
College preparatory programs Upward Bound, Talent Search and
Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate
Programs (GEAR UP) provide funding to schools and
organizations that help low- and moderate-income students
get into college. Each program has particular requirements:
Upward Bound programs offer math, lab science, composition,
literature and foreign language instruction, whereas Talent
Search emphasizes counseling, mentoring and bringing
dropouts back to school. The Clinton-administration
initiative GEAR UP requires applicants to partner with
institutes of higher education and follow a group of
students from middle school through high school graduation.

The Bush budget would scrap these programs entirely. Given
the high number of students served -- the American Council
on Education estimates that together Upward Bound, Talent
Search and GEAR UP provided services to 700,000 students in
2004 -- schools and supporting organizations would have to
scramble to keep their college prep programs afloat. ACE
assistant director for Ggovernment relations Chris Simmons
says: "If these types of programs disappear, there's going
to be a hole to fill. Institutions will have to make up the
gap with their own funds, or they're going to have to turn
to private resources. These programs really reach into
non-English-speaking communities, where college is not part
of the life that [students] or their families have
experienced … institutions are going to have to try to make
up the difference to reach those students."

If institutions can't make up the difference, it's the
low-income students who will get left behind.

CUT:
$48 million from the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
Program
In his State of the Union speeches, President Bush loves to
imagine a shiny future where people drive hydrogen cars,
watch TV by wind power and take baths in water heated by the
sun. Renewable energy is always good for 15 seconds of
bipartisan applause. But after this budget cut, we defy you
to find one Congress member (or TV viewer) who believes the
president will actually make good on his Tom Swiftian fantasies.

Carol Werner, executive director of the Environmental and
Energy Study Institute, points out the gap between the
president's words and deeds, and says that the new budget
"provides significant cuts in renewable energy, energy
efficiency, clean air and climate change." Adds the
Sustainable Energy Coalition, an advocacy group: "With this
request, the administration is continuing its policy of
slowly bleeding the budgets for most of its core renewable
energy and energy efficiency programs … a policy that
ignores the consumer job creation, national security and
rural economic development benefits of sustainable energy
technologies."

CUT:
The stateside Land and Water Conservation Fund
This $91 million slash in the Department of Interior budget
literally eliminates federal matching funds for building and
maintaining public playgrounds, soccer fields, bike trails
and walking paths. Once again, it's folks without expendable
incomes, those who can't pack up the Jeep Grand Cherokee to
travel to our nation's charismatic national parks, who lose
out. These cuts to "close-to-home" recreation areas, says
Rindy O'Brien of the advocacy group Americans for Our
Heritage and Recreation, unfairly hit people in poor states
like North Dakota and Mississippi, where, say, new baseball
diamonds or public swimming pools have a much harder time
getting built without federal matching funds. "The Bush
administration has always been good in making sure there's
money for conservation that benefits private land owners,"
says O'Brien. "But when it comes to new public places to
fish or hunt, well, there's no place to go." And with
Americans' waistlines getting wider every moment, you'd
think the feds would want to grant people more places to
walk or swim in their own backyards. "Not so with this
administration," says O'Brien.


Please, inform yourself and inform others.

THIS IS YOUR LIFE

NC




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