Joe Conason: Washington’s Deeper Immorality

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/washingtons_deeper_immorality_20110617/

Washington’s Deeper Immorality

Posted on Jun 17, 2011

By Joe Conason



While the well-deserved departure of Anthony Weiner draws rapt attention in our tabloid nation, the depredations of less colorful but more powerful politicians go unnoticed, so long as no genitalia are involved.

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By cutting $650 million from WIC, according to the experts at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the subcommittee will deprive hundreds of thousands of indigent women and children of program services, which include healthy foods, nutrition counseling and referrals to health care providers when necessary. The exact number of victims will depend on how fast food prices go up. But there will surely be many more infants and children who must cope with the ill effects of low birth weight and anemia, and all the other ills arising from bad nutrition in this wealthy and verdant nation.

As usual, the mean impulse to save money by punishing the poor is shortsighted, since the obvious result is a growing population that is either crippled at birth or ruined in youth, requiring expensive hospitalization, special education or, eventually, prison cells. And as usual, the justifications for stupid policy are based on botched data and false argument, such as the Republican claim that WIC is wasting 40 percent of its budget on administrative costs, when the actual number is 9 percent.

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Slashing WIC is only one aspect of the broad assault on the poor mounted by Republicans in Congress since they regained power. Just last week, House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp, R- Mich., and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, proposed radical changes in unemployment insurance that would snatch $31 billion in benefits from families whose breadwinner has been jobless for six months or more.

Their bill would permit states to stop paying any benefits to those families—and to use the money instead for other purposes, like reducing business taxes. If passed, that legislation will further reduce economic demand and drive more families into poverty.

And then there are the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cuts in the 2012 Republican budget, which would reduce spending on food stamps by more than $120 billion over the coming decade. If you’ve lost your job, after all, why should you or your children expect to eat?

Yes, Weiner is gone from Washington, and good riddance. Will we now scrutinize the far deeper immorality that reigns there?

But, thanks, Joe.

I can't think about this stuff often ... i'd go insane. :(

he's right about the rest.