GOP's borrow-spend remedy: Robin Hood in reverse

Author: Tom Teepen

Published: November 6, 2005

Congressional Republicans have figured out a nifty way to begin lifting the nation out of the budget hole their borrow-and-spend spree has left us in: take from the poor and give to the rich.

Finally embarrassed by their profligacy, and positioning themselves as reborn deficit hawks for the congressional elections next year, the party's run-amok social and religious conservatives are beginning to harken to the GOP's traditional fiscal conservatives.

But will either wing reconsider President Bush's tax cuts of recent years? Of course not. They are dogma, and never mind that thanks to them, households with incomes of $1 million or more this year are benefiting by an average $103,000, as the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Center calculates it.

What is more, Congress is moving toward still more tax cuts that would cost the Treasury $70 billion during the next five years. Some 97 percent of the benefits will go to households earning more than $200,000 annually. The capital gains and dividend cuts will do little to enhance the portfolios of the poor, what with the poor usually not having portfolios.

The Iraq War, natural disasters, avian flu _ the idea of actually paying for any of those challenges affronts conservative doctrine. How, then, are ends ever to meet?

The House has spotted payees who are unlikely to squawk and won't be paid any attention if they do.

So the House would add co-pays for children covered by Medicaid, the primary health coverage for the poor, and increase the co-pays for their prescriptions. Medicaid over all would be cut by $30 billion over 10 years, with more of the cost passed on to higher medical and prescription payments.

The House would cut the food stamp budget by $844 million, withholding help from about 300,000, including 70,000 legal _ repeat: legal _ immigrants, many of them elderly. Welcome to America, guys.

And over 5 years, $5 billion would be taken from enforcement for child-support payments, a "saving" that would result in the loss of an estimated $7.9 billion in support for children, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The list of course goes on. And on, with our nation's most vulnerable losing a little help here, being forced to pony up a bit more for it there. The Senate's version is tilted against them less steeply but over all is only a little better. Unwisely, it logs savings in part by increasing student-loan costs, guaranteeing a less broadly educated citizenry for the future.

The recently enacted highway bill has more pork than an industrial hog farm, but with elections looming there is no enthusiasm in Congress for passing up any of the home-district goodies. Bush is pushing to make his tax cuts permanent instead of letting them lapse as they were originally set to do.

Between 2001 and '04, the number living in poverty increased from 11.7 percent of the population to 12.7 percent. The income disparities between the well-off and the poor _ indeed, between the rich and everybody else _ have widened. A record 45.8 percent of us have no health insurance.

Robin Hood must be absolutely spinning in his grave.