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[Ed. Note: The governor also proposed cutting the time shelters held lost animals down to 3 days before they were destroyed]
As for cuts to the state's food stamp program, these will deprive the state of tens of millions of dollars in federal funds. In fact, nearly $1 billion more in federal money would be coming to California if the state didn't have some of the most stringent food stamp eligibility requirements in the country. Meanness, it turns out, doesn't come cheap.
Meanwhile, back at Fanatics' HQ in Washington, the brutal realities of three years of declining federal revenues are reflected in the president's 2005 budget. The administration is planning to place a drop in the revenue bucket by cutting $1.6 billion from the housing budget, which will keep local agencies from issuing housing vouchers to over 250,000 low-income families. Another drop is to be added by forcing veterans to pay more than twice as much for their prescription drugs. Indeed, the 2005 budget cuts funding for veterans by $13.5 billion over five years. And just as SARS, Mad Cow, and a deadly Asian bird flu are topping the news, the administration is scaling back funding for the National Institutes of Health. All to help finance the president's tax cuts. These measures barely make a difference to the budget deficit, but each one makes a world of difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
And in states, cities, and towns across the country, the consequences of Bush's reckless tax cutting have been disastrous as local governments are finding out the true meaning of trickle-down economics. Faced with a cumulative shortfall of $200 billion, states have resorted to desperate measures like deferring employee salary payments, cutting health care coverage and child care assistance to low-income working families, cutting back K-12 education, instituting double- digit increases in college tuition, borrowing against future revenues from the tobacco settlement, and raising fees for divorce filings, assuming, no doubt correctly, that a $50 increase won't reduce the number of divorces.
Alabama provides a startling case in point. Seeing no other option, the conservative Republican governor, Bob Riley, proposed a $1.2 billion tax increase to begin to bridge a deficit canyon and guarantee some protection for the state's millions of poor citizens. The antitax fanatics waged a relentless and well-funded campaign against it, the voters defeated it, and now Alabama's schools are unable to afford textbooks or computers, state troopers work a four-day work week, and five thousand inmates have been set free from the state's prisons.
In George Bush's home state of Texas, meanwhile, the nationwide collapse in public health insurance programs, especially those protecting children, has meant that 160,000 Texas children lost their health care coverage. The state has also been forced to cut back on Medicaid for pregnant women. Punishing the weak and vulnerable simply because they lack the resources to fight back is not the American way. But, thus far, responsibility for the pain these very real cuts are inflicting on millions of Americans has not been laid where it belongs: on the welcome mat at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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