Think Tank Examines Budget Proposal’s Impact on Maine
WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 – Maine will have to raise its taxes or accept cuts in social programs if President Bush’s budget recommendation for fiscal year 2007 is fully implemented, the independent Center on Budget Policy and Priorities warned Thursday. Bush’s proposal would cut $7.5 billion nationwide from state and local grants.
The center released a report on program cuts that outlined what effect the budget would have on various social safety net programs in each of the 50 states.
The $7.5 billion in reduced federal grants to states and localities would represent almost half the total proposed cuts in domestic discretionary spending, the center said.
The report was compiled from materials from the President’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), including computer predictions on the budget’s impact over the next five years that was apparently erroneously released. For the last 25 years, the center, which calls itself nonpartisan, has done research on how national and state fiscal policies affect low-income people.
“When President Bush gave me guidance on what the 2007 budget should look like, he directed me to focus on national priorities and tighten our belts elsewhere,” OMB Director Joshua B. Bolten said in a statement earlier this month. “Congress substantially delivered on the President’s spending restraint goals last year, and after speaking with members at this week’s congressional hearings, I’m optimistic we can again provide a significant level of savings for American taxpayers.”
OMB also had some things to say about the center, which is not popular in Republican circles.
“This is a liberal think tank that opposes every effort to control domestic spending,” OMB spokesman Scott Millburn said in a statement. “It has made these same false predictions in the past that it knows have been proven wrong. For example, two years ago, it stated that the President’s budget would require deep reductions in programs for veterans, low-income mothers and children and special education. Instead, the President’s subsequent budgets have increased funding for all of these programs.”
The President’s proposed budget would cut $183 billion in domestic discretionary spending nationwide over the next five years, according to the center. Discretionary spending is for programs that are not mandated by law. These include many social programs like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, educational subsidies, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and job training under the Department of Labor.
Under the Bush proposals, the center said, Maine would sustain cuts, for example, of almost $42 million in elementary and secondary school aid and $25 million in heating assistance for low-income families over the five years, among other scaled-back social programs.
“To me this budget is incomprehensible because when I was growing up in the ’60s and frankly all through the rest of the 20 th century, I think people in both parties wanted to reduce poverty,” Rep. Tom Allen (D-1 st ) said. “This is a budget that will increase poverty, and it will diminish opportunity.”
Allen sits on the House Budget Committee. He said the President’s cuts in education, jobs, health care and other social programs would hurt the poor and not help reduce the federal deficit.
“There is no consistent policy in this budget other than taking money and opportunity away from low and middle-income Americans to protect his tax cuts for the wealthy,”
Allen said. “He’s made promises that can’t be kept. He can’t reduce the deficit without raising taxes. He’s nibbling away at these domestic programs. The trouble is they are large enough to do great damage to children and families but too small to help in any material way with the total budget deficit because Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense and interest on the national debt are the more important factors in the budget.”
According to the report, Maine would lose $41.7 million from 2007 through 2011 for K-12 educational funding, including $25.9 million from special education. The state would lose $6.5 million in grants for vocational and adult education programs next year, and nearly $35 million over the five years. Cuts in education could also keep some 400 to 500 children from participating in Head Start programs in the state in 2011, the report said.
Mainers would lose $5.9 million in grants for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children over the next five years, which could lead to 1,400 people not getting assistance from the program, assuming that the cuts are implemented in part by cutting back on enrollment, according to the center’s report.
While the President’s budget would increase home energy grants for low-income people, which aids many families in Maine, by $601 million at the national level this year, the center’s report says that over the next five years the program’s total spending would drop by $1.9 billion, including a cut of $25 million for Maine.
Robert Greenstein, the center’s executive director, noted that legislation supported by Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe would move $1 billion of next year’s spending for the program to this year. The center supports this move, he said, but added that this would deepen next year’s proposed spending reduction.
Rep. Allen said he favors leaving social programs intact and instead ending the recent tax cuts for the wealthy.
“The upper-income tax cuts for people earning over $380,000 a year simply cannot responsibly be continued,” he said, “because we have to invest in education, environmental protection and energy conservation if we’re going to compete in the global economy and give people a fighting chance to make themselves a better life.”
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