Out of balance/House asks the poor to pay

Published: April 5, 2005

Having passed four big tax cuts in four years, President Bush and members of Congress are waking up to the unpleasant prospect of federal deficits as far as the experts can project. Drafting a budget outline for next year, Republican leaders in the House have hit on a simple solution: Make poor people pay. Their budget resolution would require deep cuts to projected spending on Medicaid and Food Stamps, and derive as much as one-quarter of its overall savings from antipoverty programs.

This week House and Senate negotiators will sit down to compare budget proposals and work out a compromise. They should stick to the Senate's more balanced approach. Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota has emerged as a Republican voice of moderation on the major health and urban-development programs; Democratic Sen. Mark Dayton has already expressed his unhappiness that Congress would cut spending on the poor while cutting taxes for the wealthy. We hope both Minnesotans tell the conferees that the lopsided House blueprint will not be acceptable in the Senate.

To be sure, budget writers are operating under intense pressure. The Congressional Budget Office projects cumulative federal deficits of well more than $1 trillion in the next five years, and still the White House is pressing for more tax cuts. But that doesn't excuse the House approach. Of roughly $70 billion in savings on "mandatory" items -- programs where spending is driven by eligibility formulas -- nearly half the House cuts over the next five years would fall on programs that serve the poor. Although the House document is fuzzy on details, it appears that committees would have to make very large reductions in Food Stamps, Medicaid, child care subsidies and the Earned Income Tax Credit, now the government's biggest program for the working poor.

If these antipoverty programs were unnecessary or overfunded, such cuts might be justified in a time of overall federal belt-tightening. But just the opposite is true. The nation's poverty rate has been rising for three consecutive years and is likely to climb again this year. The number of uninsured Americans has reached a record high of 45 million, and it would be even higher if Medicaid weren't picking up thousands of families who've lost employer-based coverage.

These cuts might also be justified if Congress were spreading the pain fairly. But it is not. The very same budget resolution that cuts health insurance for poor children and reduces tax credits for working-poor adults also extends tax cuts for dividend and capital-gains income, measures that will confer three-quarters of their benefits on taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year, according to the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute.

For House Republicans, the political price of these budget cuts would be small: Most come from districts where the poverty vote is tiny. We hope their Senate colleagues can show them the larger price in children's well-being and economic justice.