[Mb-civic] Shameless. Absolutely Shameless.

[Mha Atma Khalsa]

Daily Kos - Nov 4, 2005
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/4/18564/6327

Shameless. Absolutely Shameless.

by Hunter

This is just sick.

The Senate approved sweeping deficit-reduction
legislation last night that
would save about $35 billion over the next five years
by cutting federal
spending on prescription drugs, agriculture supports
and student loans,
while clamping down on fraud in the Medicaid program.
[...]

The focus now shifts to the House, where the Budget
Committee voted
21 to 16 yesterday to approve a more extensive bill
saving nearly $54
billion through 2010 with cuts to Medicaid, food
stamps, student loans,
agriculture subsidies and child support enforcement.
The House bill would
allow states to impose premiums and co-payments on
poor Medicaid
recipients for the first time.

So, hey, it's tough times in America. To pay for
Katrina, and the Iraq
War, and these massive deficits, we all need to pull
our weight, right?
Tough economic conditions mean tough choices, we all
have to accept some
sacrifices.

Well, not really. Because there's a more fundamental
reason for these 35
billion dollar cuts. It's because the next budget item
to be taken up will
be another 70 billion dollar tax cut.

As AMERICAblog previously pointed out, yesterday's
WaPo article by
the same author marks the House version as even more
biting:

The food stamp cuts in the House measure would knock
nearly 300,000
people off nutritional assistance programs, including
70,000 legal
immigrants, according to the nonpartisan Congressional
Budget Office.

About 40,000 children would lose eligibility for free
or reduced-price
school lunches, the CBO estimated. [...]

A separate House measure would scale back federal
administrative aid to
state child-support enforcement programs, saving the
federal government
nearly $5 billion over five years but potentially
cutting child-support
collections even more. [...]

Still another House provision would roll back a
court-ordered expansion of
foster care support, denying foster care payments to
relatives who take in
children removed from their parents' homes by court
order. That provision
would reduce the coverage of foster care payments to
about 4,000 children
a month and cut $397 million from the program through
2010, the CBO said.

So I'm not sure exactly how much more evidence is
required towards the
point that Republicans simply want poor children to go
to hell.

When I was somewhere around twelve years old, I
remember vividly going
with my mother, on one singular
wait-in-the-car-and-don't-talk-to-anyone
occassion, to the food bank of a local church to pick
up two heaping bags
of groceries. An expected paycheck didn't come, then
another, and so a
family of six living hand to mouth under the best of
times suddenly found
themselves completely without, for a week.

Even though our own Catholic church offered the same
relief, my mother
went to the Lutheran church a few blocks from our
house, so that those we
went to church with wouldn't know or ever hear that
our family needed to
beg for a week's groceries. And no matter what came,
we never but never
took any government help. There was pride, and then
there was pride.

So given all that - just a single week of falling off
an edge that lurks
just beyond the refrigerator door of millions of
families in this nation
-- I'll never understand the Republican fascination
with screwing the poor
at every opportunity. Countless numbers of American
middle class families
are one month, one week, or one very bad day away from
being poor,
indebted, or homeless, or at the very least not having
enough food for the
kids during one particular week. While my Catholic
family was indeed,
sigh, unalterably Republican, watching the Reagan
years it didn't take
much to demonstrate just how much Republicans loathed
the middle class --
the average folks who had paychecks, not trusts, and
whose most sizable
long-term investments consisted of the savings account
at their bank, not
stock market portfolios.

And I'm not talking "ignored", or "were indifferent
to", but absolute
hatred.  The idea that some poor person, somewhere,
might be sucking a
dime too many out of the system is largely used as the
reason to carve,
gut and bury whatever safety-net welfare programs the
party sets its eyes
on. Rather screw a thousand people, than to have the
children of some
undeserving "welfare queen" get milk today.

But God Help Us All if we don't pass, in the middle of
all of this
apparently urgent pain, yet another business-humping,
morality-
punching tax cut for the folks with greens fees to
pay.

Even some Republicans are recognizing that there's
going to be some
political hell to be paid, in reconciling the Senate
and far more
draconian House measures, and there are going to be a
great many good
people in America squeezing that intramural fight for
all it's worth, as
yet another demonstration of how Republicans would
rather dump your
grandmother in a ditch by the side of the road than
give up a day of
shoe-shopping or withstand the Satanic Fucking
Communism of having to pay
that extra one percent here or there.

Whatever. My tolerance for these pretenders of
morality has been pegged at
zero for a decade. I can't wait to hear the Fox News
spin on how those
nasty children on Medicare or those bastards taking
advantage of the
school lunch program are hurting the God given
economic competitiveness of
the investor class.

Update by kos: This was large a party line vote
(52-47) except for the
following:

Democrats voting for it:

Landrieu (LA)
Nelson (NE)

Republicans voting against it:

Chafee (RI)
Coleman (MN)
Collins (ME)
DeWine (OH)
Snowe (ME)

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