White House Budget: Devastating For Kids
This morning, the White House released its FY 2018 budget, cutting $274 billion out of critical anti-poverty programs, including massive cuts to SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as “food stamps”). This budget violates the fundamental social contract we have as a nation to help provide for the basic human needs of our most vulnerable residents.
It takes away food, shelter and heat for the poor, children, seniors and people with disabilities. Cuts to child care benefits and work training and education programs make it harder for low-income families to find and keep good jobs. Any alleged “savings” only pass the buck, pushing a massive “cost sharing” burden onto states, cities and small towns, many of which are already struggling to keep financially afloat.
This budget is especially devastating for our nation’s children.
For example, this budget would:
Make it harder for hungry kids to eat, including:
· Cutting SNAP, the program that helps low-income families purchase food items, by $193 billion over 10 years. (Nearly 20 million children rely on SNAP.)
· Implementing “cost sharing” for SNAP, shifting financial burden onto state budgets which could create an incentive to lower benefits for those most in need.
· Imposing new red tape around SNAP by limiting “categorical eligibility,” which allows families to receive SNAP if they’ve already qualified for other anti-poverty programs.
· Eliminating 21st Century Learning Centers, taking away programs where kids get meals after school or in the summer months.
Make it harder for children to get medical care, including:
· Cutting Medicaid, the government’s health care plan for the poor and disabled. (Half of Medicaid’s beneficiaries are children.)
· Allowing states to bypass the federal requirement that insurers must cover people with pre-existing health conditions and roll back Medicaid coverage for those in need.
· Cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
Make it harder for families to survive hard times, including:
· Cutting the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), which supplies low-income families with cash assistance and child care services.
· Cutting the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps low-income working families with children.
· Eliminating other programs that help families get back on their feet, including job training programs, housing assistance, heating assistance and more.
This is just a partial list. Taken individually, each of these cuts would be a hard blow to low-income families. Taken together, they are devastating.
Living in poverty has serious negative consequences for children. Poverty is linked to lower graduation rates and higher risk of disease. Poverty makes it harder to get into college and negatively impacts brain development. Instead of supporting the programs that can shield children from the devastating consequences of poverty, this budget pushes children back onto an increasingly uneven playing field.
To build a stronger country, we must reject policies that make life harder for kids in need and support those which provide a path out of poverty. We will work closely with Congress to make sure these cuts do not make it into any future budgets or legislative proposals.
