***** CALL YOUR SENATORS NOW!! ***** 1-800-426-8073 *****

NASTY DEAL TO CUT LOW-INCOME PROGRAMS NOW FACING FINAL VOTE:
CALL YOUR SENATORS NOW!!

House and Senate leaders in Congress have agreed upon nearly $40 billion in cuts over 5 years. Although early reports suggested that the agreement left out most cuts hurting low-income people initially proposed by the House, that is NOT the case. Many harmful cuts in Medicaid, child support, foster care, SSI, TANF, and student loans remain in the agreement.

The agreement now stands or falls on the final vote in the Senate.

The House voted to approve these cuts (212-206) after an all-night session and virtually no time for members to look at the 774 page bill. Here's how your member voted: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005/roll670.xml These provisions are substantially worse than the bill the Senate initially approved. The Senate is expected to take up the agreement sometime Monday or Tuesday. Your calls to your Senators are urgently needed.

While calls to all Senators are very important, it is urgently important that these Senators hear from their constituents:
Chafee (RI), Coleman (MN), Collins (ME), DeWine (OH), Landrieu (LA), Nelson (NE), Smith (OR), Snowe (ME), Specter (PA)

Please use the toll-free number: 800-426-8073. Ask to be connected to your Senators, and tell them:

Please vote NO on the budget reconciliation conference report (S. 1932). It hurts low-income children, families, the elderly and disabled. Do not allow these one-sided sacrifices to be inflicted on low-income Americans while Congress is preparing to give still more tax breaks to the rich.

Here are some of the cuts in this nasty deal:

Medicaid: Low-income families will have to pay more than they can afford for medical care under Medicaid and face shrinking benefits.

SSI: People with disabilities will have to wait as long as a year to receive the back SSI benefits they are owed because the government has taken so long to approve their application.
Child Support: Children will be deprived of $2.9 billion over 5 years/$8.4 billion over 10 years in child support not collected because of cuts in enforcement.

Foster Care: Grandparents or other relatives in certain states will lose foster care assistance.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: The agreement assumes that work requirements will be made more harsh and expects states to fail – and so estimates that states will pay penalties to the federal government. The Congressional Budget Office expects that states will in turn create harsher penalties for poor families, causing more to lose benefits.

Child Care: CBO estimates that it will cost $12.5 billion in new funding to pay for the harsher work requirements and to keep up with the costs of providing existing child care. The budget deal only provides $1 billion – a gap of $11.5 billion. That means 255,000 fewer children will receive child care in 2010 compared to this year.

Student Loans: Cut $12.7 billion over 5 years.

For more information about the conference agreement, see this paper by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: http://www.cbpp.org/12-18-05bud3.htm

Although the deal is somewhat better than the bill originally passed in the House, the agreement is much closer to the $50 billion House version that made substantial cuts to low-income services than the $35 billion Senate version. Unlike the bill passed by the House November 18, the final deal does not make cuts to food stamps.

Thanks so much to the American Friends Service Committee for donating the toll-free number. AFSC welcomes groups to circulate and use the toll-free number in support of the non-partisan budget goals towards which CHN always works and without linking the alert to a website soliciting donations or actions which may be used to support partisan lobbying or work.

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