SENATE SPENDING SHAM

Creaking, whining and banging into a Christmas recess that should be a relief to the public, Congress this week produced a proposed spending bill that cuts funding for the poor, the sick, for the elderly and for students to help pay for more tax cuts. The reconciliation measure is a failure in numerous ways and Maine’s senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, have properly come out against it.

Vulnerable groups would have had a hard enough time with the original Senate version of this measure, but that was before health insurance lobbyists got their Medicare slush fund ($5.4 billion over five years) put back in and PhRMA booted drug rebates ($3.9 billion). Along with the cuts to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, child support, Medicaid and student loans, the measure slices away at crucial programs to help the poor attend jobs or classes and to get medical care. It is $41.6 billion in savings to help offset tax cuts the White House has ordered Congress to provide.

Some of those tax cuts, such as extending the exemption to the alternative minimum tax, are needed and some spending could certainly be trimmed. But Congress cannot think that it has passed a fair bill when it maintains its Medicare stabilization fund – essentially money to entice providers of Medicare drug coverage, which did not need enticing, and then charges impoverished Americans more when their children need medical attention.

Similarly on TANF, new rules demand more work hours from recipients but increased funding for child care that has long been promoted by Sen. Snowe – money that would allow those recipients to make work affordable – is nowhere to be seen. Maine’s valuable and successful Parents as Scholars program, which allows TANF recipients to get an education so they can stay off assistance, would be jeopardized because many of its participants would no longer be counted as working. TANF’s child-support enforcement would be cut by $1.5 billion, losing custodial parents still more.

Maine’s senators have been on record as opposing many of these cuts; now their votes are needed to oppose this collection of punishments. Their strong opposition should tell other moderate senators that this bill moves the nation in the wrong direction.