“Making The Poor, And The U.S. Poorer Still”: It’s Both Unjust And Economically Unsound For Congress To Cut Benefits To The Poor
Congress may take up legislation this week to cut food stamps. The Senate passed a bill in June mandating $4 billion in cuts over 10 years; the House version, passed in September, imposes nearly $40 billion in reductions. A conference committee has been charged with resolving these differences. Somehow, this negotiation is occurring amid the worst poverty levels in two decades, a weak overall economy and rapidly falling budget deficits. Under these circumstances, it would be economically and morally unsound to carry out the cuts.
Nearly 20 percent of Americans are officially poor or near poor. The Census Bureau reports that 15 percent of the population — nearly 47 million people — lives in poverty, including 22 percent of children. For an individual, this means annual income of $12,000 or less. For a family of four, the poverty threshold is $24,000 or less. Consider what living on those amounts would mean.
Roughly 18 million other people are near poor, living within 130 percent of the poverty line, according to census data. For individuals, this means earning $15,000 or less. These people often weave in and out of official poverty, depending on the month.
Most Americans living in poverty experience hunger or the pervasive fear of it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that 49 million Americans, including 16 million children, lived in food-insecure households last year. That means that at some point in 2012, these households did not have enough food or were uncertain of having enough. That is as if all of California, Oregon and Washington were experiencing hunger or were afraid of it. There are serious social, economic and health consequences; for instance, diabetes, obesity and other chronic conditions afflict Americans who don’t have access to adequate nutrition.
Total federal spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), this country’s main hunger prevention program, was $82.5 billion in fiscal 2013. To some that sounds like a lot, but it’s a small fraction of a $3.5 trillion budget and $16 trillion economy. This is evident when per-capita benefits are studied: The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act temporarily raised the weekly SNAP benefit by $25 to $33 for a family of four. But that temporary increase was allowed to expire this fall, so the SNAP benefit is back to the lower figure, or less than $1.40 per person per meal. These are small amounts relative to grocery costs, and even then only those with incomes below 130 percent of the poverty line are eligible for the aid.
It is hard to reconcile traditional American values of hard work and generosity with the levels of poverty and fear of hunger in our country, especially because large shares of those suffering this plight work. Nearly 11 million working Americans had annual income below the poverty line last year.
The working poor or near poor are also disadvantaged by our tax system. When a low-wage worker gets a raise or his or her spouse joins the workforce, food stamps are cut back. The family’s Medicaid eligibility is in jeopardy, and earned-income tax credit refunds are reduced or eliminated. A November 2012 Congressional Budget Office analysis concluded that the marginal tax rate imposed on increased income for such workers can be as much as 95 cents on every additional dollar earned. This is counterproductive.
Food stamps aren’t just a question of social justice; they are also a matter of economic policy. SNAP spending was increased in 2009 as part of the stimulus legislation to help rescue the economy. Like other elements of that legislation, the idea was to put money into the pockets of financially distressed Americans who would immediately spend it. The CBO reported that this legislation was largely effective in protecting the economy. More broadly, investments such as SNAP equip the poor and near poor to succeed economically. Good nutrition — as well as health care, education and secure housing — is a requisite for productivity, helping unemployed or marginally employed workers move into better jobs. This also allows them to build a better life for their children.
We believe that it would be both unjust and economically unsound for Congress to cut benefits to the poor and near poor. It has been a generation since our country last had a robust conversation about combating poverty. Now is the time to reinvigorate that conversation, not cut needed benefits.
“Giving Republicans A Pass”: Media Mantra, It’s Congress That’s Historically Unproductive, Not The GOP
As the calendar races towards 2014, and Congressional members log their final few days in session while facing daunting deadlines for a long list of pressing and unfinished initiatives, the press has been busy chronicling the futility, assigning collective blame, and giving the president permanent failing marks.
According to historians, 2013 is on track to become the least productive single legislative year in modern American history. And it’s not even close. In 1995, 88 laws were passed, setting the previous low-water mark. This year, it’s doubtful 70 will make it to the president’s desk. (And lots of the bills that have passed are ceremonial or rather trivial in nature.) The press is not happy about the trend.
“The paltry number of bills Congress has passed into law this year paints a vivid picture of just how bad the gridlock has been for lawmakers,” announced NBC. The Wall Street Journal noted this year’s session has been “long on partisanship, indecision and brinkmanship.” USA Today bemoaned the inability “to find common ground.” And the Los Angeles Times pointed to “partisan dysfunction” as the main Congressional culprit.
See? “Congress” remains in the grips of “gridlock” and “brinkmanship.” Congress just can’t find “common ground” and suffers from serious “dysfunction.”
So that’s why immigration reform, the farm bill, a budget deal, unemployment benefit extensions, workplace discrimination legislation, and the defense spending bill haven’t been passed or dealt with yet? And that’s why the government was shutdown for 16 days in October?
Bipartisan gridlock!
Wrong. The current Congress obliterated all previous records for diminished output because the Republican Party, and especially those in the Republican-run House, purposefully bottled up as many initiatives as possible and unleashed “procedural sabotage.” (They even obstructed disaster relief aid for victim of Hurricane Sandy.)
Yet eager to maintain a political symmetry in which both sides are equally responsible for so little getting accomplished, the press gives Republicans a pass for their purposeful dysfunction.
By the way, are you also experiencing media flashbacks to the government shutdown, which the Republican Party proudly engineered by reneging on a budget deal they had agreed to with the last-minute demand that Obama essentially repeal his signature legislative accomplishment of his first term, the Affordable Care Act? Back then, the one-sided shutdown maneuver was nearly universally portrayed as bipartisan “Washington dysfunction at its absolute worst” (ABC News), a “partisan logjam” (Wall Street Journal), and a “fiscal stalemate” (The Hill).
Yet today, even as some Republican members brag about how little they’ve allowed Congress to accomplish, even as a plurality of voters says the GOP’s top priority is to cause trouble for the president, while a majority blame Republicans for the lack of productivity in Washington, the press still prefers to portray the Capitol Hill standstill as bipartisan “gridlock.”
Because, of course, both sides are always to blame.
But they’re not. Look at the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. In a rare example of fleeting bipartisanship, the bill to prohibit most employers from discriminating based on sexual orientation was approved by the Senate 64-32 last month. In the House, there are more than enough votes from both parties to pass ENDA into law, but Speaker of the House John Boehner will not allow a vote.
The same goes for immigration reform. It passed by an even larger margin in the Senate (68-32), and likely enjoys even more bipartisan support in the House. But again, Boehner won’t allow members to vote on the bill. He won’t even allow the House to enter into negotiations with the Senate to try to hammer out a final bill.
So how is it “gridlock” when a bipartisan, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a clear bipartisan majority in the House support a bill but aren’t allowed to vote on its final passage?
Politically, the sabotage strategy works for Republicans. At least in the short term. Note that Obama’s standing among Hispanic voters has dropped precipitously this year. Analysts assume that’s because Obama hasn’t delivered on his promise to pass immigration reform. That may also be because so little of the news coverage stresses the poignant fact that the bipartisan votes are there to pass immigration reform, it’s just that Republican leaders in the House won’t allow the “yes” vote to take place. They won’t allow Obama to take credit for passing a popular law.
And yes, it really did become a scorched-earth situation this year; a nearly across-the-board effort to sabotage Obama’s every move. Republicans aren’t just denying the president the ability to sign meaningful bills into law. The unprecedented minority strategy includes hardcore attempts to block his cabinet picks, executive branch appointments, and judicial nominees. And specifically, blocking judicial nominees who Republicans agree are completely qualified to sit on the federal bench.
But still unsure what to call the Republican brand of anarchy, the press continues to play dumb about the magnitude of the planned interference. For instance, amidst the sabotage, the New York Times reported that while judicial nominations remain an issue of deep contention, “Among senators of both parties, there is agreement that a president should be granted deference in picking members of his cabinet and top executive branch positions.”
False.
Last November, Republicans launched an unprecedented, preemptive campaign to make sure Susan Rice was not picked as Obama’s next Secretary of State. Then they engineered an unprecedented campaign to try to stop Republican Chuck Hagel from becoming Secretary of Defense. And as late as July, two of Obama’s nominated cabinet picks still hadn’t received votes in the Senate, thanks to determined obstruction.
So no, contrary to the Times reporting there is no widespread agreement that presidents should be able to pick their cabinet members and top executive branch positions. There used to be. Then Republicans ripped up that pact. The Times and others just won’t say so as they blame both sides for a do-nothing Congress.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, December 9, 2013
“It’s Every Man For Himself”: How To Stick It To The Poor, A Congressional Strategy
The 113th Congress has stuck it to the poor at pretty much every opportunity. In fact, if you take all their past and future plans into account, it looks like they have accomplished that rare feat: To close in on enacting an overarching, radical agenda without control of the Senate or the presidency. How did they do it? Probably by escaping scrutiny through a piecemeal approach to legislation, a president who is willing to meet them halfway, and one diabolic word: Sequester.
Let’s drill down into each piece:
1. Kick ’em to the curb
Congress will basically start kicking poor people out of their homes early next year. The idea is, if you can’t pay for your home without government assistance, you don’t deserve to live in one. In this spirit, budget cuts due to sequestration will take rental assistance vouchers away from 140,000 low-income families by the beginning of next year, making housing more expensive as agencies raise costs to offset the budget cuts. All in all, about 3 million disabled seniors and families will be affected. The savings?: $2 billion, which is pretty much what the government shutdown cost in back pay to federal workers.
If you’re lucky enough to keep your home, don’t expect to heat it. Sequester cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) meant that 300,000 low-income families in 2013 were denied government support for energy costs.
2. Take the food out of their mouths. Literally.
The recent reduction in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits has affected more than 47 million Americans and is the largest wholesale cut in the program since Congress passed the first Food Stamps Act in 1964.
The cuts to Food Stamps were implemented on November 1. Yet, Congress won’t let the program rest there — House Republicans are pushing to take $39 billion from SNAP over the next decade. If their plan succeeds, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 3.8 million low-income individuals would lose their benefits in 2014 with 2.8 million more getting kicked off the program each year. SNAP is one of the three most effective anti-poverty programs the government has, keeping 4 million people out of poverty last year alone. So the initial and further cuts make a lot of sense — if you despise the poor.
And don’t worry, other cuts to food programs ensure both the oldest and youngest among us won’t be spared. Cuts to Meals on Wheels will cost poor seniors 4 to 18 million meals next year. Meanwhile, the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC), which provides health-care referrals and nutrition to poor pregnant and postpartum women and children up to age 5, has grappled with $500 million in cuts this year and faces even deeper ones next. Fair’s fair, though.
3. Dim their kids’ future
There’s nothing that will make our economic future brighter than under-educating our children, right? That’s why, again as a result of sequestration, Head Start literally had to kick preschoolers out of their classrooms this March and removed 57,000 children from the program this September (70,000 kids total will be affected). If this weren’t enough, more than half of public schools have fired personnel due to the ominous cuts — and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said sequestration “has been one of the good things that has happened.” Given that 40 percent of children who don’t receive early childhood education are more likely to become a parent as a teenager, 25 percent are more likely to drop out of school, and 70 percent are more likely to be arrested for a violent crime, this is definitely the definition of a “good thing.”
4. Erase the road map for employment
The United States has one of the stingiest unemployment programs in the developed world and it is getting even stingier. People who have been out of work for 27 weeks or more — 40 percent of the unemployed — have already begun and will continue to lose a large portion of their benefits between January and March. Eight percent of this year’s sequestration cuts are coming from unemployment insurance. The logic here is that the program discourages people from looking for work, so why fund something that just makes the unemployed lazier? The evidence, however, proves that government assistance fuels the job searches of these 4.4 million Americans. Yet by the end of December, about 1.3 million will lose their extended jobless benefits if Congress doesn’t renew the program. And cuts to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF, or welfare) means there will be even less of a safety net to fall back on.
5. Make ’em work till they drop
President Obama put Social Security cuts in his budget for fiscal year 2014, and Republicans are thrilled. Switching to a new formula called Chained CPI would lead to benefit cuts of $230 billion in the next 10 years. Apparently, it’s Social Security that’s driving up the debt, as Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said. The irony here, according to The New York Times’s Paul Krugman, is that while debt can indirectly make us poor if deficits drive up interest rates and discourage productive investment (they haven’t), investment is low because the economy is so weak, partly from cutbacks in public spending and investment — the cuts, such as this one, that supposedly protect Americans from a future of excessive debt. Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Tom Harkin (Iowa) have been fighting an uphill battle to boost Social Security benefits. But carry on, Congress. What you’re doing really makes sense here.
In just a few short decades, we’ve gone from LBJ’s Great Society, where many of these ideas originated, to this Congress’s attacks on the poor. According to the Census Bureau, safety net programs keep tens of millions of Americans out of poverty each year. But that’s just not the federal government’s priority anymore. This Congress’s message: It’s every man for himself.
By: Samantha Paige Rosen, The Week December 9, 2013
“Five Days Of Togetherness”: Congress’ Holiday To-Do List Will Never Be Finished
The House of Representatives is back in session this week and facing a laundry list of issues that were not dealt with in the first 11 months of the year. The House plans to be in session for two weeks, sending members home for the rest of the year on Friday, Dec. 13. Friday the 13th; that seems like a bad omen. And it may, indeed, be a very unlucky day for the nation if the House really does adjourn for the year.
The Senate, on the other hand, is not back in session until Dec. 9 and plans to stay in town until Dec. 20. For everyone keeping track, that means the two chambers will only be in town at the same time for five “working” days.
If the Congress had been doing its job all year, this scheduling mismatch might not be such a problem. But it hasn’t. Not a single regular appropriations bill funding a government department or agency for the coming fiscal year has passed the Senate. The House has passed four of 12 required spending bills. Even if there was no other business to do, Congress could not complete the remaining work to fund government for the rest of fiscal year 2014 in a single week of “togetherness” in Washington.
And there is other business to do. The conference of the House and Senate Budget Committees, the result of the deal that ended the government shutdown, has apparently made progress in the last week, but hopes are not high for any real solution to the long-term budget problems facing the nation. A narrow agreement to set spending limits that will replace sequestration with other revenue or cuts for the next two years may be better than nothing … or it may not. The devil is always in the details and we don’t know the details yet. The deadline for those negotiations to conclude is also Friday the 13th, but that deadline has no real teeth since the current continuing resolution to keep the government funded doesn’t expire until Jan. 15 of next year.
The bill setting policy for the Department of Defense, a bill that has been successfully passed and signed into law every year for more than 50 years, has not been passed by the Senate. The House finished its work in June. This bill was on the Senate floor when Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., brought up the resolution that finally granted the Senate majority the so-called “nuclear option,” changing Senate procedure to allow most executive branch and judicial nominations to be resolved with a simple majority vote.
And speaking of confirmations, that brings up another deadline. The Senate needs to confirm a new chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System by Jan. 31, 2014, the expiration of Chairman Ben Bernanke’s term.
But that’s not all Congress has on its “must pass” list. The current farm bill extension expired on Sept. 30, but that doesn’t have much impact. Nutrition programs continue, crop insurance never expires. But on Jan. 1, taxpayers meet the dreaded “dairy cliff.” This is when the administration, because of 60-year old laws aggies refuse to repeal, will have to take us back to 1950s era dairy policy and guarantee milk producers artificially high prices resulting in as much as $8 per gallon milk on a grocery store shelf near you. (Of course, another alternative is that Congress could simply repeal the outdated law and allow the market to set milk prices. But we know that is too logical of an action for this Congress to take).
The fiscal cliff deal made a permanent fix for the encroaching alternative minimum tax, but another hardy perennial, the Medicare doctor payment fix, was left out. This would reduce the payments to doctors under Medicare. While it was adopted as a budget control measure, it’s been legislatively “fixed” each year. That issue looms.
Also, there’s the tax extenders package. That’s the cat and dog mix of various special interest tax breaks benefitting everyone from NASCAR track owners to liquor distillers that gets tacked on to moving pieces of legislation every year. Except this year there doesn’t seem to be moving legislation to hitch the caboose to.
Remember, the House and the Senate currently plan to be together in Washington for only five days in December. Perhaps they will have a burst of efficiency and effectiveness by Dec. 20, but I’m not holding my breath.
By: Ryan Alexander, U. S. News and World Report, December 3, 2013
“Hell Bent On Another Crisis”: Will Congress Ever Grasp That The Debt Crisis Is Fake?
As the American people tried to celebrate last year’s holiday season while mourning the loss of 26 lives in Newtown, Connecticut, Congress and the White House were duking it out over the “fiscal cliff.”
Our leaders reached a temporary solution on New Year’s Day that averted some of the self-imposed toxic mix of mandated tax increases and discretionary spending cuts that threatened to trigger a new recession. In the end, they couldn’t agree on a comprehensive deal, so the sequester went into effect two months later with relatively little fanfare.
We’re still living with those $80 billion across-the-board cuts, which slashed research spending, kicked nearly 60,000 kids out of Head Start and forced Meals on Wheels to provide less help for the elderly and others in need.
Now they’re at it again. After October’s government shutdown, a new congressional committee got a Friday, December 13 deadline to reach an agreement on a budget for the 2014 fiscal year — which began more than two months ago. Come January 15, federal spending authority will run out again and we could begin 2014 with another shutdown.
On the surface, the conflict between President Barack Obama and the Republican Party is over how to cut yearly federal deficits, which pile up over time and increase the national debt. Republicans cite a “debt crisis” and construct economic doomsday scenarios to justify their insistence that Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security should be cut.
Obama says no — we need more revenue, and it needs to come from the very wealthy and corporations who don’t pay their fair share in taxes. Besides, the deficit is already much smaller – thanks to the ongoing sequester and two provisions in that New Year’s fiscal deal: a payroll tax cut for all workers and the end of the Bush-era tax cuts for the very richest Americans.
There are a couple of things wrong with this picture. To begin with, while the government is indeed operating at a deficit (albeit a much lower one) and as a consequence piling up debt, there is no debt “crisis.”
According to leading economists like Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, deficit spending can improve ailing economies, and we should actually have more of it until ours fully recovers from the deepest crisis we’ve seen since the Great Depression.
Secondly, Republicans don’t really care about deficits and debt. After all, they created both — largely through tax cuts for the wealthy and unpaid-for wars during the George W. Bush administration. Their whole argument is a smokescreen for their core agenda — massive wealth transfers from the poor and what’s left of the middle class to the rich — through regressive tax policies and dismantling the safety net.
This isn’t new. It’s been the Republican agenda for at least 30 years.
In 2011, Republicans brought the country to the brink of default for the first time in history by insisting that a raise in the debt ceiling (historically bipartisan and routine) be offset by program cuts. This year, they shut down the government because they didn’t get their way.
Obama has said that strategy won’t work again, and the current need to once again raise the amount the government can borrow is non-negotiable. And he has upped the ante with a new demand that any future cuts be offset by tax increases on the wealthiest and corporations.
We don’t yet know if the latest standoff will trigger a new round of cuts to programs low-income Americans depend on most. Right now the House is asking for a $40 billion cut in food stamps over the next decade, and Medicare and Social Security are always on their hit list.
What we do know is that Republicans seem bent on causing one “crisis” after another, and the country loses in the bargain.
By: Martha Burk, Director of the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women’s Organizations; Published in The Bill Moyers Blog, December 4, 2013
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