The other half of the budget bill

February 2, 2006

Congressional Republicans were oh-so-clever in how they approached the federal budget this year. As we’ve talked about before, the GOP split the budget bill in half — tax cuts in one part, spending cuts in the other, and call the whole thing a “deficit reduction” package that just so happens to increase the deficit.

The budget took a few twists and turns, but to make a long story short, the House passed the spending cuts yesterday and will send the whole package to the president’s desk.

The House yesterday narrowly approved a contentious budget-cutting package that would save nearly $40 billion over five years by imposing substantial changes on programs including Medicaid, welfare, child support and student lending.

The final vote was 216-214, with every Dem and 13 Republicans voting against it.

It’s hard to pick out which part of the bill was the worst. Take your pick; you can choose from a) the harsh cuts that will hurt low-income families and students relying on loans to go to college; b) the fact that the Republicans cut taxes far more than they cut spending, leading to yet another increase in the deficit; or c) the spending cuts will hurt real people, but will have a negligible affect on the budget itself, removing less than one-half of 1% from the estimated $14.3 trillion in federal spending over the next five years.

Your Republican Congress at work.

I read this, CB, while listening on the Diane Rehm show about Medicare and HSA’s — yakkety-yak. Then a pediatrician called in and ennumerated the kids he’s known who’ve died as a result of lack of healthcare. It kind of put the arguments about whether and how we cut taxes and cut healthcare and create smoke-mirror budgets into perspective. Wake me when the revolution starts?

(But hey, the Dems and 13 Repubs voted against it…)

  • It is so sad that these bible ponding politicians don’t give a damn about ordinary people yet these same ordinary people vote for them because they pound the bible and yell about gay marriage and abortion. Wake the fuck up! These people will destroy you and all they care about is your vote. NOTHING ELSE

  • It’s hard to pick out which part of the bill was the worst.

    Well, here’s my vote: the fact that the measure stealth-reauthorizes Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the landmark 1996 legislation that “ended welfare as we knew it.”

    Unlike many liberals, I believe that TANF was essentially a good piece of legislation. Its predecessor, the New Deal-era Aid to Families with Dependent Children, was never intended to be what it turned into: a guarantee of lifetime welfare that actually created disincentives to work and self-advancement. I disagreed with TANF’s restrictions on education and training as allowable “work activities” and thought some of its other provisions–particularly the ban on assistance to legal immigrants–were punitive and counter-productive. But the way the bill was structured, allowing states to largely set their own rules in response to local conditions and needs and creating rewards for states that put people to work, was sound.

    The Republicans tried to reauthorize TANF to make it more top-down and ideologically driven for years, but could never get the votes. Since it expired in 2002, the legislation was temporarily extended 13 times, for three months each, which I think is a kind of record. Finally, they threw it into the budget reconciliation bill–the favorite trick of the DeLayites to pass things they know can’t win on the merits.

    Simply put, this is going to crush thousands of low-income working people who will now be forced into the low-wage labor market without the childcare funding they need to take care of their kids; the bill allocates a piddling $200 million in new childcare money, or about $40 per family per month for every family that now will be forced to work.

    At best, this will lead to a lot of people who get jobs, get off assistance–and then lose their jobs because of problems with informal childcare arrangements. They’ll go back on, get another crap job at minimum wage, and then the whole cycle will repeat.

    When it comes to making policy for working Americans, the ideologues of the right are incoherent at best and punitive at (more likely) worst. Many advocates sincerely believe that this whole system is now very deliberately being set up to fail.

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