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February 11, 2005 Pick your poison If you read the paper this week, you saw the headlines: "Poor to pay price of US deficit." "Bush's budget axe to fall on poor."That is, if you were reading the paper in England. Here in the land of the free press, the headlines about the President's budget proposals were more decorous, all about "program cuts" and "domestic programs" and the "deficit debate," all words to make the eyes glaze over and the brain go yearning for the latest Martha Stewart news. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that "we may finally get some federal spending restraint," and really, who can be against restraint? (I'll tell you who: hedonists.) These are the buzzwords of journalists afraid to be accused of taking sides, and they end up serving as a smokescreen for an unprecedented sea change in how the government is run, and for whom. The Bush budget is not, no matter how much the White House wants to spin it that way, some sort of even-handed "share the pain" exercise. It is a long-planned all-out assault on everything from school financial aid to environmental cleanup funds, all in the name of, as the President put it, "setting priorities." Really, it's phase two of the war on the War on Poverty. Phase one was the Bush tax cuts, which sucked hundreds of billions of dollars a year out the federal treasury an dumped them largely into the bank accounts of the wealthiest Americans, turning a largely balanced budget into one deep in debt. (Phase 1a was the war in Iraq, which dumped an extra helping of red ink onto the mess.) Much as the Social Security "crisis" has given the Bushites an excuse to push their private-stock-fund scheme, the tax-cut-spawned deficit has allowed them to tackle the social spending that has been the holy grail of conservative ideologues at least since Ronald Reagan. "This is about the worst budget we've seen in 20 years," says Deborah Weinstein of the Coalition on Human Needs, one of the first groups to issue a detailed analysis of the Bush budget. "For programs that have to be appropriated annually, the President is saying that he'll simply freeze those dollars for five years, and that is unprecedented. And since defense and homeland security fits in that category, that means everything else, including education and housing assistance and many other things, will have to be cut increasingly from year to year." Weinstein estimates that over the next five years, defense and security spending will gobble up an extra $65 billion of the pie, forcing $65 billion in cuts elsewhere. To put that in more human terms, let's say you're part of the huge swath of American society that has trouble making ends meet, and relies on federal government programs to help make it to the end of the month. (Hands up, everyone who this applies to. No, not you, home-mortgage-deduction takers - your program doesn't count as federal "spending.") Here's some of what you can look forward to if the Bush budget becomes law: Better take your vitamins and wrap your children in bubble wrap, because your health coverage is about to get scaled back dramatically, with the Bush budget slicing about $45 billion from Medicaid spending over the next ten years. Of course, it's possible that states will all suddenly learn how to do more with less and provide quality health care for all eligible at cheaper costs - or they could just cut back on doctors and make everyone wait longer to be treated. Care to guess which is more likely?
Most of these programs - plus the laundry list of others targeted for cuts, from job training to WIC nutrition subsidies to Perkins grants for college students, the last of which would be eliminated entirely - are known as "discretionary spending," because Congress gets to allocate them each year. For other programs, known as "entitlements" (because you're entitled to them just by showing a low enough income), are harder to cut, but that's not stopping the budget-cutters. For example, Medicaid is an entitlement for most of the millions who rely on it for their health care, but not for those who are classified as "optional" recipients. These people, not destitute enough to be guaranteed Medicaid but still poor enough to need it - as the health-care advocacy group Families USA notes, "a 73-year-old widow with arthritis, diabetes, and hypertension who lives in a nursing home and has an annual income of only $6,800 is called an 'optional' beneficiary under current law" - are fair game by the rules of discretionary spending, so they're on the chopping block. Likewise, people enrolled in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program - TANF, the successor to welfare - have long been automatically eligible for food stamps, since anyone poor enough to qualify for TANF is easily poor enough to get food stamps. Food stamps are an entitlement, and a popular one at that - even hard-core work-firsters have a hard time denying people their daily bread, and besides anything that helps boost bread sales tends to cheer elected officials from farm states. Under the Bush proposal, though, anyone getting only job training or child care, and not cash benefits, would no longer automatically get food stamps. Instead, they'd have to apply separately for them, which some will do, but not all - a sort of "survival of the most persistent" that has become a familiar feature of welfare programs in the post-Clinton era. But surely, even a Republican-controlled Congress wouldn't roll over for this sort of slash-and-burn approach to government spending, right? Right? Actually, says Weinstein, "the things that are in the offing from both the House and Senate budget committees seem as though they may go even farther in terms of putting a stranglehold on entitlements." For months now, the talk has been that Congressional leaders were considering something called "budget reconciliation," which sounds harmless (except for maybe being terminally boring), but which could lead to the greatest shift in government policy in a generation. Here's the way it works. In the normal budget process, each committee proposes its own budget for each program under its jurisdiction. Under budget reconciliation, the House and Senate budget committees usurp that control, passing a single, overarching set of spending limits for each department, and then leaving it up to the committee to decide what to cut. It's in many ways similar to the Bush budget freezes - every dollar in new spending must come with a dollar in cuts - with the added incentive that if Congress doesn't come up with the cuts, the White House can. Think Prop 13 for America - something that sounds like simple budget management, but ends up forcing huge slashes in popular programs as a result. Or a better comparison might be Colorado's Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which since 1992 has been gradually choking schools and city services out of existence in that state, as lawmakers are forced to choose how to meet spending limits without recourse to raising taxes. The good news - if it can be considered good news - is that Bush's budget proposals are so wide-ranging that they're generating a lot of opposition from unlikely corners - those farm-state elected officials, say, or governors and mayors who are fearful of having to bear the brunt of filling in the gaps left by shrinking federal programs. The bad news is that with the stars aligned like this, going to be very hard to stop all the cuts. Would you rather have access to a doctor, or a roof over your head? Cast your votes now.
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