Fitzsimon File

State lawmakers planning on cutting taxes in next summer’s legislative session ought to read the details of the federal budget agreement that is now just a House vote away from heading to President Bush to sign.

The plan cuts $40 billion from programs that serve the poor and the middle class. The cuts affect student loans, child support enforcement, Medicare and Medicaid, and childcare.

The legislation makes major changes to the major program public assistance program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), forcing states to impose new work requirements on recipients or lose federal funding. The Congressional Budget office says the states will have to spend more than $8 billion to meet the new mandates.

The plan also includes an $11 billion shortfall in childcare costs. Budget officials say states need $12 billion in childcare money to meet the new work requirements, but only one billion was allocated. North Carolina currently has 35,000 kids on the waiting list for a childcare subsidy and several counties are struggling to keep providing the subsidy to children currently receiving it.

The legislation increases the co-payments the state may charge for Medicaid services up to as much as ten percent of the cost of the medical service, putting some services out of the reach of poor families.  States would also be allowed to scale back coverage for some current recipients.  

North Carolina lawmakers could choose not to enact these Medicaid changes and they should, but that will mean spending more state dollars to make up the difference.

You would think that child support enforcement would be immune from budget cuts. You’d be wrong. The budget cuts funding for state child support enforcements efforts by almost $5 billion over the next ten years. That means less money for North Carolina to track down parents who are not paying and less money to collect and distribute child support owed to families. 

State lawmakers can continue these services at current levels too, but again only if state dollars are used to replace the cut in federal funding. 

It is a blizzard of numbers and there are plenty more, but Congress has chosen to cut human services to help pay for more tax cuts that go primarily to the wealthy. State lawmakers need to do three things in response.

Find the state resources to make up for the cuts in North Carolina, as human service programs are still reeling from cuts made by the General Assembly in recent years.

Avoid the politically tempting tax cuts on the state level that will make it virtually impossible to protect programs that serve the poor and would result in thousands of people in the state going without health care, affordable housing, and help taking care of their children.

Finally, ask the members of the state’s congressional delegation who supported this budget to come to Raleigh and explain why tax cuts are more important than student loans and helping a single mother who is not receiving her child support check. 

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2005 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.