Squeezing the Poor for Votes
NY
Times, Editorials/Op-Ed, February 18, 2004
Opinion
Destructive fine print is showing through the budgetary bandwagon President
Bush has designed for his re-election drive. It turns out that hundreds
of thousands of poor and low-income families will lose child care and
housing assistance if the administration's ballyhooed spending cuts
take effect. In trying to campaign as a late-blooming fiscal disciplinarian,
the president is making a show of marking 128 programs — count
'em, G.O.P. budget hawks, 128 — for elimination or cutbacks in
many vital social service areas. As if they are at the heart of the
administration's rolling deficits, which threaten the nation's economic
future.
The savings from the draconian budget theatrics would total no more
than $4.9 billion. This is less than 1 percent of the record $521 billion
deficit Mr. Bush helped create with tax cuts weighted toward the affluent
(whose top 1 percent will net a $45 billion boon in this year alone).
The real costs of such shabby budget politics would affect programs
like housing vouchers. These would be cut $1.7 billion below what's
needed to maintain the two million people getting help. Depending on
localities' responses, this cut could mean the denial of vouchers to
250,000 of the impoverished, elderly and disabled. [our emphasis]
Likewise, after all the bipartisan dedication to steering people from
welfare to workfare, the White House would demonstrate election-year
toughness by cutting child care aid for the working poor, who need it
most. The proposed cuts would mean a minimal drop of 200,000, and probably
365,000, in the number of children receiving child care aid in the next
five years. In cutting these indispensable programs, Mr. Bush is trying
to tell voters that down is up — that the deficit problem is rooted
on the ledger's spending side, not the revenue side, which he has systematically
choked by trillions across the decade. Government data actually indicates
that spending as a share of the economy has not rocketed and remains
relatively low, while the Bush tax cuts increasingly drive the grim
deficit outlook.
Congress should be the first to recognize and dismiss the president's
budget as an arrant campaign pamphlet. It would leave profligate Republicans
picking on the poor in a desperate attempt to stand for fiscal responsibility.