from dailykos

Shameless. Absolutely Shameless.
by Hunter
Fri Nov 04, 2005 at 04:56:04 PM PDT

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 measure 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)