More for war while the poor freeze

More for war while the poor freeze
By Kéllia Ramares
Online Journal Associate Editor
Oct 24, 2007, 01:24


George W. Bush's notion of fiscal responsibility is to spend as much as he can get away with on the military, give away as much tax money as he can in the form of tax cuts for the ultra-rich and contracts for his friends in industry, and then to balance the budget on the backs of poor and middle-class Americans. In the process, the man who claims to lead a "global war on terror" terrorizes millions of people in the United States.

His latest act of fiscal terror on the American people is to threaten a veto of the Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bill as too expensive. This bill provides funding for many programs that are important to the well-being of America's poor and middle class. LIHEAP, the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program is among them. Right now, 38 million low-income American households are eligible for assistance to pay their energy bills. But LIHEAP can help only 16 percent of those households. In contrast to budgets for American weapons of mass destruction, LIHEAP's budget has increased by only $300 million since it started in 1981.

The White House is proposing a 44 percent cut from FY 2006 in LIHEAP funding levels, a cut that will mean reducing individual grants of assistance and dropping 1.1 million households from the program altogether.

Mark Wolfe, executive director of NEADA, the National Energy Assistance Directors' Association, the primary educational and policy organization for the state and tribal directors of the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), said in a phone interview with me that more and more people are seeking help with their energy bills.

"It's not just the very, very poor anymore. Now what we're finding {is} these families making $25-35,000 a year -- families that you kind of think of as working families -- coming in and asking for assistance because the bills have gotten just so high. The real problem that we're facing is that energy prices are going up. They're continuing to go up. The era of cheap energy is over."

more...

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2564.shtml

This sure makes us look a lot like North Korea, doesn't it?

We have our own little crazy bastard. Except for the wild hair, there's little difference.

Left cold, literally.

had nothing to do with getting them there, pro or con. Rich people don't like poor people