There is a great conflict brewing in Washington, D.C. over the specifics of what will be cut from the nation’s budget—both for the remainder of the current fiscal year and the year after. The Obama Administration has submitted its budget, which includes significant reductions in numerous domestic programs and even “zeroes out,” or completely eliminates funding for, several others. One of the primary targets, singled out in his State of the Union address, was Community Services Block Grants, which provide funds supporting and supplementing a plethora of economic enhancement programs.
I agree that we have an outsize national debt and historically high annual deficits. And we cannot continue down the same path. But the devil is in the details, and when the details mean draconian reductions in the programs which serve the nation’s least economically secure, we ought to re-think our approach.
Some D.C. politicians are quite judgmental concerning the “worth” of the beneficiaries of many social programs. The problem is that the recipients of the services funded by these endangered programs are real people who need real help. In Boone, Hamilton, Hendricks and Marion Counties in 2010, CAGI served more than 41,000 households totaling more than 97,000 people received this assistance. More than 12% of those people were age 55 or older; some 46% of them were below 18 years of age. Consequently, greater than half of the recipients were youth or elderly.
More than 35% of the households had incomes of less than 50% of the federal poverty guideline. Close to 74% had incomes less than 100% of the guideline. Before you assume that the guidelines are lax, a single-person household can earn a maximum of $16,245 (the equivalent of gross earnings of $7.81/hour). And these recipients work—almost 46% of the households reported employment income. Nearly 44% of the households reported Social Security, VA or other pension/retirement sources of income. So an overwhelming majority of these households either worked to earn income or were receiving pension/retirement or disability benefits. Almost 9% of the households served reported unemployment compensation as all or part of their annual earnings, so they worked in the relatively recent past. Many of those are new clients who lost jobs during the recession and have come to CAGI for the first time.
The people who will be impacted locally by the proposed cuts to these programs fit a far different profile than the one to which they are assigned by many. The data says they are primarily young and under the care of adults, and working if they are not receiving fixed income from some form of retirement plan. And that the annual income of almost three-quarters of these households was below the federal poverty guidelines.
The budget reduction proposals will, in Central Indiana, eviscerate the resources of those struggling the hardest to make ends meet. While everyone must “share the pain,” let’s not permit the weight to fall disproportionately upon those least able to shoulder the burden.
We spend $ billions a day on wars in the Middle East. We spend $1 billion to purchase a single new stealth fighter airplane. There are corporate tax exemptions and deductions riddling the tax code which provide higher profits to companies. Wall Street still hands out multi-billion-dollar bonuses every year. Let’s target these expenditures rather than remove the already-fragile underpinnings supporting the clients CAGI serves.
