CBPP: James Honey: Protecting Public Assistance in Deficit Reduction

Source:Center On Budget & Policy Priorities fellow James Honey.

"At some point, the President and Congress will likely agree on a deficit package that includes both up-front savings and a target for more savings that they would achieve in 2013 by changing tax and spending policies.

The package also will likely include a backstop mechanism that’s designed to ensure that the 2013 savings come to fruition even if the President and Congress fail to agree on those policy changes.

In designing that mechanism (e.g., automatic across-the-board spending cuts), policymakers will face a decision that’s received little attention of late — whether to continue a quarter-century tradition of protecting low-income programs or to break faith with that tradition and risk serious harm to the poorest and most vulnerable Americans.

Ever since the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings (GRH) law, with its annual deficit targets and its across-the-board spending cuts (or “sequestration”) to enforce them, policymakers have exempted low-income mandatory (or entitlement) programs whenever they’ve included backstop mechanisms of that kind in deficit-reduction packages.  That tradition includes both versions of GRH (1985 and 1987), the pay-as-you-go laws of 1990 and 2009, and the sequestration mechanism of last year’s Budget Control Act.  Most of these laws were enacted on a bipartisan basis.

Were policymakers to ignore this tradition, at risk would be such key safety net programs for the nation’s most vulnerable families and individuals as Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Security Income for poor seniors and people with disabilities, child care assistance, free and reduced-price school meals for low-income children, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Subjecting these programs to a backstop mechanism would impose enormous hardship on people already living on the margins, far below the poverty line, and it would likely result in increases in homelessness, hunger, and the number of people who can't access needed health care.  The effects on poor young children could be long-lasting.

The crafting of a backstop mechanism, and what’s in it, is part of a larger question: who should bear the burden of deficit reduction?

In the plan by its co-chairs, former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson, the President’s fiscal commission concluded that any deficit reduction plan should “protect the truly disadvantaged.”  Similarly, a blue-ribbon private commission chaired by former Office of Management and Budget Director Alice Rivlin and former Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici proposed a plan that avoided cuts in low-income mandatory programs other than Medicaid.  The plan produced in July 2011 by the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Six did the same.

Those who believe that deficit reduction should not increase poverty, inequality, the ranks of the uninsured, or other hardships for our most vulnerable citizens should honor the Bowles-Simpson principle to that effect.  Policymakers should not overturn more than 25 years of precedent, and instead should maintain the historic exemption for low-income entitlement programs from automatic cuts under a backstop mechanism." 

From the Center On Budget & Policy Priorities

I agree with James Honey that we shouldn't gut programs for low-income Americans, especially when economic times are tough (like right now) simply for deficit reduction. But the idea that there are no savings in any of these programs that can be achieved, that could be used for deficit reduction, is at best far-fetched and worst, simply partisan. 

You lower poverty and unemployment in America, you would automatically reduce the deficit, because you would have fewer Americans on public assistance. The way to do that, while at the same time putting people to work and back in school, is to have work and educational requirements, that could come with childcare assistance, for everyone whose not eligible to retire yet and physically and mentally able to work full-time, to go to work and back to school, while retaining their public assistance benefits, as they're working their way off of those programs, with work and education. 

Salon: Irin Carmon: 'The Latest War on Single Moms'

Source:Salon Magazine- left to right: Mr. Nanny State & Flip Flopper. Or perhaps these two distinguished gentlemen go by different names.

"The United States offers the worst support structure for single parents among all comparable countries -- and if anything like House Speaker John Boehner’s Plan B carries the day, it’s about to get worse.

Republicans used to love the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, because they incentivized paid labor and used the tax code instead of cash assistance or programs to help low-income parents, most visibly single mothers. But that was before the cry against the 47 percent, a substantial portion of whom didn’t pay taxes because of such credits.

In the Washington Post, Jamelle Bouie points to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showing that the two tax credits for low-income families will be slashed under Plan B: “A mother with two children who works full time at the minimum wage of $7.25 and earns $14,500 a year would lose $1,560 of her Child Tax Credit, which would plummet from $1,725 to $165.”

This comes, of course, a few months after the party’s nominee answered a question about gun violence by complaining about single mothers, and about a year after the supposed intellectual force of the party, Newt Gingrich, offered the following plan for reducing child poverty: employing young children as janitors at school. For a substantial amount of time in between, the leading candidate among Republican primary voters, Rick Santorum, was the guy who, as a Senate candidate in 1994, had suggested forced paternity tests for welfare recipients and said single mothers were “breeding criminals.” He added then, "We are seeing it. We are seeing the fabric of this country fall apart, and it's falling apart because of single moms."

Republicans used to love the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, because they incentivized paid labor and used the tax code instead of cash assistance or programs to help low-income parents, most visibly single mothers. But that was before the cry against the 47 percent, a substantial portion of whom didn’t pay taxes because of such credits.

In the Washington Post, Jamelle Bouie points to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showing that the two tax credits for low-income families will be slashed under Plan B: “A mother with two children who works full time at the minimum wage of $7.25 and earns $14,500 a year would lose $1,560 of her Child Tax Credit, which would plummet from $1,725 to $165.”

This comes, of course, a few months after the party’s nominee answered a question about gun violence by complaining about single mothers, and about a year after the supposed intellectual force of the party, Newt Gingrich, offered the following plan for reducing child poverty: employing young children as janitors at school. For a substantial amount of time in between, the leading candidate among Republican primary voters, Rick Santorum, was the guy who, as a Senate candidate in 1994, had suggested forced paternity tests for welfare recipients and said single mothers were “breeding criminals.” He added then, "We are seeing it. We are seeing the fabric of this country fall apart, and it's falling apart because of single moms."

It's excellent timing, then, for Legal Momentum to release a comprehensive report comparing the U.S.' policies on single-parent families (which most often means single mothers) and their children, with those of other countries. Republicans love to talk about the negative outcomes documented among such children, but their proposed solution tends to be rhetoric about how women should just get married or -- more recently -- trying to cut the scant benefits that are keeping the poorest of these families afloat, from Head Start to food stamps to the aforementioned tax credits.

This is usually when someone brings up Sweden. But it’s not just Sweden: The comparison countries include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. When put in this relatively diverse and similarly wealthy company, the authors write, “We find that U.S. single-parent families are the worst off. They have the highest poverty rate. They have the highest rate of no health care coverage. They face the stingiest income support system. They lack the paid-time-off-from-work entitlements that in comparison countries make it easier for single parents to balance caregiving and job holding. They must wait longer than single parents in comparison countries for early childhood education to begin. They have a low rate of child support receipt.” 

Partly as a result of “welfare reform” policies, they note, “U.S. single parents have both above average employment rates,” including, often, full-time and year-round work, “and above average poverty rates.” How does that happen? Single mothers pushed into the workforce disproportionately end up in low-wage jobs, and a diminishing pool of them at that. (Over 80 percent of single parents in the U.S. are single mothers, less than half of whom have never been married.) The recession’s lasting impacts have meant a decline in employment rates for single mothers -- from 73 percent in 2007 to 66 percent in 2011 -- even as the last remaining benefits are being haggled down in Congress. Single mothers also tend to make substantially less than single or married men with the same education, thanks to discrimination, occupational segregation and the historic devaluing of jobs women tend to do.

The study takes a broad view of government policies affecting the most vulnerable families: It's about affordable daycare and paid family leave, but it's also about access to health insurance, subsidized or free early education for 3- to 5-year-olds, and child allowance program, payments many countries adopted to encourage fertility, something conservatives supposedly want too. (The earned income tax credit and additional child tax credit were meant to have a similar impact, but those were different days.)

Getting fathers to step up is increasingly popular to talk about in the U.S., but when that doesn't happen, this country is not among several countries offering "advanced maintenance programs," in which the government guarantees child support payments, up to a point, and then tries to collect from the deadbeat parent.

These are all concrete ways that other countries are protecting low-income families, including children who might be trapped in a cycle of poverty -- but they cost a lot more than demonizing single mothers." 

From Salon