Sunday, October 16, 2005
Editorial: Poor priorities
Everyone wants to help the poor, post-Katrina. But even in this, the rich play by their own rules first.
From the RoundTable blog
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Conservative policymakers want to scale back anti-poverty programs, but only to help the poor.
And they're serious! At least they profess to be.
Hurricane Katrina's woeful victims have so moved congressional Republicans, The New York Times reported, that they are set once again to consider deep spending cuts that will affect programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, the government's health-care program for the poor.
These programs obviously haven't eradicated poverty, the reasoning goes. So why expand them?
Rather, lawmakers are recommitting themselves -- and conservative true-believers surely had to think hard about this -- to the $70 billion in tax reductions they authorized last spring, the newspaper reported.
And those on top of two tax cuts to take effect in January that will benefit the wealthiest Americans.
But Congress is not acting on behalf of campaign high-rollers. No, no, no, no, no.
The tax cuts, according to soothing assurances, are sacrosanct so that the economy will keep growing, providing gainful work for the poor.
Meanwhile, momentum is building to take up the $35 billion in budget cuts that Congress had put on hold while the destruction from Katrina was fresh in the public eye. Heaven forbid that the august body seem heartless in the face of wrenching human suffering.
In fact, Rep. Jim Nussle of Iowa, chairman of the House Budget Committee, wants to cut $50 billion now, considering the cost of hurricane recovery. Someone's going to have to pay for it. Best be the poor, who won't be creating any jobs with the food stamps they get, anyway, but only using them to stretch their wages to feed their kids.
And the wages will need stretching.
President Bush, also overwhelmed with post-Katrina compassion for the poor, suspended the law that requires federally funded construction projects to pay at least the prevailing wage in an area. He's made that special provision just for the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast -- because the lower the pay, the more jobs there can be.
Some people might even be able to get two!
And they'll need them.
The rich will get richer, of course, but only so they might help the poor, which everyone wants to do now that their desperation has become so public and discomfiting.
One contradiction, though, seems so large that it threatens to overwhelm all the rest.
Conservatives judge as failures -- and, thus, targets for budget cuts -- social programs that alleviate, but do not eradicate, poverty. Tax breaks are the chosen remedy on the right.
But President Bush cut taxes in 2001. The economy grew. And so has the rate of poverty, every year since.
If this program has been tried and not only failed to eradicate poverty, but actually been accompanied by its growth, is it not time to abandon tax cuts for the wealthy as a means to help the poor? Or at least to abandon that shameful pretense?
