By Lindsay McLaughlin
ILWU Legislative Director
A national budget speaks to the values and priorities a president holds for the American people. It is a clear outline of his agenda and a document that should capture the hopes and aspirations of the American people. But the budget George W. Bush has proposed captures only the hopes and dreams of the wealthy. For everyone else he offers only despair and nightmares.
Bush’s wish is that his billions of dollars in tax cuts for the super-rich must be made permanent. To achieve that goal, he is playing reverse Robin Hood, slashing critical programs for workers, veterans, school children, the sick, the poor and the disabled.
It appears that Bush is listening to Grover Norquist, the right-wing Republican leader who has a habit of dictating to the Republican Party what its priorities should be. He expressed his views of government spending on the needy in unmistakable terms.
“We must cut government in half to get it down to the size where we can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” he said.
Programs that target low-income families to provide food assistance to pregnant women, infants and young children, programs for early childhood education and child care, and home energy and rental assistance would all be subject to substantial cuts by 2010. These cuts could significantly reduce the number of low-income people who are served by these programs. According to figures provided by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, by 2010 about 670,000 fewer women, infants and children would be served under the Special Supplemental Nutrition program for women, infants and children; 300,000 fewer children in low-income working families would be provided child care; 370,000 fewer families and elderly and disabled individuals would receive rental assistance and vouchers; and nearly 120,000 fewer children would be served through Head Start.
Bush’s budget cuts and shifts at least $60 billion in Medicaid costs to the states over 10 years. This level of cuts will certainly push states to eliminate coverage for a substantial number of low-income people, increasing the ranks of the uninsured.
What kind of country would tolerate this kind of cruel policy? What kind of compassionate conservative would offer new tax cuts to the wealthy, spend a billion dollars a week on a war and at the same time tell poor women and children to suck it up and tighten their belts?
The budget is a slap in the face to the very U.S. troops Bush implores us to support in his war in Iraq. It requires veterans to pay $250 to enroll in health services and doubles their co-payments for prescription drugs. It provides for a paltry 1.7 percent increase in spending, far from the 14 percent increase the Veterans Affairs Department needs to sustain its services for the increasing number of veterans.
Bush’s budget contains significant cuts to education for the first time in 10 years, at a time when our schools are struggling to meet the requirements of his own No Child Left Behind program. The cuts eliminate funding for education technology, school counselors, alcohol abuse reduction and dozens of other education initiatives.
As Americans look for job opportunities in a country that continues to outsource jobs and continues to see its industrial job base eroded by free trade agreements, the Bush budget reduces job re-training opportunities. Hidden within the Bush budget are massive cuts to job training and employment service programs of nearly $280 million.
The Bush budget block grants critical job training programs. Currently, there is a separate funding stream for each of the training these training programs: Adult Training, Dislocated Worker Training, Dislo-cated Worker Training, and the Employment Service. The Bush budget combines (or block grants) the adult, youth and dislocated worker programs. Historically, Congress tends to cut overall funding when different programs are combined. This risky scheme jeopardizes critical training resources just as workers look to gain new skills to compete in an increasingly tight job market. Dislocated workers will be hurt the most, as there no longer would be dedicated funding guaranteed to help them find new jobs. At-risk teens also will find fewer sources of job opportunities.
The Bush budget eliminates the Employment Service, the very program that connects unemployed workers with jobs. This comes at a time when millions of workers continue to struggle to find jobs. Last year, the Employment Service served over 15 million workers.
The Bush budget proposes massive cuts for the Department of Labor, the federal agency charged with enforcing the laws and programs that protect the American worker. The Department of Labor budget is cut by $435 million, a reduction of 3.6 percent. These reduced resources mean less job protection for American workers.
Every year, Bush has proposed eliminating funding for the Migrant and Seasonal farm workers training program. This critical program provides job training and referrals for farm workers who are employed in an industry characterized by chronic, seasonal unemployment and underemployment.
The Bush budget cuts U.S. commitment to raising international labor standards. American workers can’t be expected to compete with workers earning substandard wages and benefits. However, the Bush administration would cut to $12 million funding for programs to raise wages and benefits for workers in other countries. This cut will further increase the outsourcing of good American jobs.
On the issue of homeland security, Bush’s budget fails to protect us. The budget includes NO specific amount for port security grants, which were funded at $150 million in 2005 (about 10 percent of what the Coast Guard estimated would be necessary in 2005 to meet the requirements of the Maritime Transportation Security Act). For 2006, the budget proposes to combine ports with other non-aviation targeted infrastructure projects such as energy infrastructure.
This budget is possibly the most dishonest of all budgets submitted to Congress. It does not include the costs of the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor does it reflect the transition cost of Bush’s Social Security privatization scheme, estimated at several trillion dollars.
The U.S. taxpayer is being sent a bill for a war in Iraq that costs well over a billion dollars a week! The Bush administration has requested another $82 billion in supplemental spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as some aid to help countries devastated by the Asian tsunami. This funding request is classified as “emergency spending” and not part of the budget. About $61 billion is for the Iraq war. Congress is expected to approve Bush’s request. Upon approval, total spending for the Iraq war will reach nearly $210 billion, including military, reconstruction funding and other Iraq war-related expenditures.
When Bush dragged the country into this war, his minions told Congress not to worry—Iraq can finance its reconstruction from revenues from the oil. Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense, said in sworn Congressional testimony, “The oil revenues of Iraq could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years. We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”
In the two years of occupation so far, the oil revenues have not been dedicated to the reconstruction of Iraqi infrastructure that the U.S. destroyed, and probably never will. The U.S. taxpayers are stuck with that bill. Bush’s plan to “save” Social Security is to create private investment accounts, but the enormous costs of this change are not in his budget. Economists Peter Diamond and Peter Orszag have estimated that the general revenue transfers required to finance the transition costs would be $2 trillion.
Bush’s plan would divert payroll taxes from traditional Social Security and put it in private accounts for the benefit of Wall Street financiers. The $2 trillion dollar diversion would destabilize the system so much it would assure the bankruptcy of not just retirement fund, but the fund to support disabled workers and the widows and orphans of workers who die young. Diamond, an Institute Professor at MIT and Orszag, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, have written extensively on solving long-term solvency issues concerning the Social Security system. They contend that “it is unwise and unnecessary to destroy the program in order to save it.”
Finally, the Bush’s budget sets a new record deficit of $427 billion. This wipes out the $5.6 trillion surplus Bush inherited from President Clinton just four years ago. The budget pretends to reduce the deficit in half over five years, but it doesn’t even start.
Bush’s plan for reducing the deficit is to take from the poor and needy and to give as much as possible to the rich and greedy. Bush has shown his true heart in this budget proposal and it is the same as Grover Norquist’s. He wants to weaken the American worker and the poor so much that they can be dragged into a bathtub and drowned.
Call your Senator and member of Congress today at 202-225-3121 and express outrage over the President’s Budget.
