According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is probably going to have to dip into an emergency fund to meet it’s obligations this year. And it will have to start turning people away next year unless the sequester is turned off or money is shifted into the program. The CBPP also estimates that state and local housing authorities will have to deny about 140,000 families housing assistance next year.
These cuts, which housing agencies have already begun to implement (primarily by failing to reissue vouchers to families on waiting lists when other families leave the program), will fall heavily on vulnerable people. Half of the households in the voucher program include seniors or people with disabilities, while most of the rest are families with children. These households typically have incomes well below the poverty line and cannot afford housing without assistance. Some who will go without assistance face extreme hardship, such as living in homeless shelters.
The cuts come at a time when the number of low-income families in need of housing assistance has been rising substantially, there are long waiting lists for vouchers in almost every community, and homelessness remains a persistent problem.
Since many communities accord priority in issuing vouchers to people who are homeless or at imminent risk of homelessness, these cuts in housing vouchers will exacerbate homelessness. They will do so at the same time that sequestration also will force cuts in the federal grants that communities use to assist homeless people. For instance, funding for Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG), which help support emergency shelters and temporary financial and other types of assistance for at-risk people to avert homelessness or enable them to move from shelters into permanent housing, could fall by 34 percent in 2013.[2] As a result, more individuals and families will become homeless, and they will remain homeless longer.
Overall, sequestration will cut more than $2 billion in 2013 from housing assistance and community-development programs administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). While cuts in housing vouchers and homeless assistance will probably have the largest impact on low-income families in the near term, sequestration will also contribute to further losses of public housing, impede the development of affordable housing for low-income seniors and people with disabilities, cause more low-income children to be exposed to lead-based paint in older rental housing, and cut counseling services for families at risk of foreclosure.
Meanwhile, oncologists are turning away Medicare patients who need chemotherapy.
“If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York. “The drugs we’re going to lose money on we’re not going to administer right now.”
After an emergency meeting Tuesday, Vacirca’s clinics decided that they would no longer see one-third of their 16,000 Medicare patients.
“A lot of us are in disbelief that this is happening,” he said. “It’s a choice between seeing these patients and staying in business.”
To her credit, Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) has introduced a bill that would partially rectify this situation.
Robert Reich offers us a random selection of the effects of sequestration:
A tiny sampling: Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is bracing for a cut of about $51 million in its $685 million of annual federal research grants and contracts. The public schools of Syracuse, N.Y., will lose more than $1 million. The housing authority of Joliet, Ill., will take a hit of nearly $900,000. Northrop Grumman Information Systems just issued layoff notices to 26 employees at its plant in Lawton, Okla. Unemployment benefits are being cut in Pennsylvania and Utah…
…the Salt Lake Community Action Program recently closed a food pantry in Murray, Utah, serving more than 1,000 needy people every month. The Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium is closing a center that gives alcohol and drug treatment to native Alaskans.
Some 1,700 poor families in and around Sacramento, Calif., are likely to lose housing vouchers that pay part of their rents. More than 180 students are likely to be dropped from a Head Start program run by the Cincinnati-Hamilton County (Ohio) Community Action Agency.
He goes on to point out that many government workers are being furloughed, meaning that they only work four days a week. It’s better than being fired, but it comes with a 20% pay cut.
All of this, and I mean ALL of it, must be kept in mind as part of the context of the president’s Chained CPI offer. Now, the man I respect most on budget issues is Robert Greenstein. He offers a sensible assessment of the pros and cons of Chained CPI and ultimately comes to this conclusion:
So, what should policymakers do? The chained CPI is worth considering — but only if two crucial conditions are met.
First, policymakers must accompany the chained CPI with a strong set of measures both to substantially ease the impact on very old people (through an upward benefit adjustment after people have received Social Security for a specified number of years) and to shield low-income people to the greatest extent possible. These measures to protect very old and low-income people should be regarded as an integral, essential component of the chained CPI proposal. Without these measures, the chained CPI should be a non-starter.To be clear, no set of protections can fully shield the very old or the poor. That leads me to the second condition: even with a package of protections, policymakers should not adopt the chained CPI unless it is part of a larger package that shrinks deficits enough to stabilize the debt over the coming decade and does so in a balanced and fair manner.
I’m deeply concerned about the effects of ten years of sequestration budget cuts on an array of vital programs and investments, as well as about the House-passed budget’s stunning cuts in low-income programs, which would greatly increase poverty and destitution and likely produce levels of suffering that we haven’t seen in decades. Instead, we need a balanced deficit-reduction approach that stabilizes the debt without skewering our most vulnerable fellow citizens or compromising the nation’s future by shorting critical investments — one that replaces sequestration and includes substantial revenue from scaling back wasteful, inefficient, or low-priority tax deductions, exclusions, and other “tax expenditures.”
If including a chained CPI proposal with the necessary protections for very old and low-income people can enable such a balanced plan to become law, we should be open to it.
Progressives who strongly dislike the chained CPI proposal should consider whether there is any chance that congressional Republicans will agree to raise revenues by curbing tax expenditures without some significant entitlement changes. And if (as I believe) there is no real chance, what’s preferable: the chained CPI with protections for the very old and the poor, or measures such as converting Medicare to premium support, raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67 and risking having some 65- and 66-year-olds go uninsured, and cutting Medicaid deeply and making ours more of a two-tier health care system based on income?
Having said this, I am concerned that Republican leaders will adopt the cynical approach of labeling the chained CPI an “Obama proposal” that they are willing to accept but only as part of a package that raises little or no revenue and, thus, does not force them to make any sizable compromises of their own.
The President has shown his willingness to make substantial concessions to reach an agreement. Will Republicans do the same?
Greenstein’s analysis is what I am adopting as my own. It may be more popular in progressive circles to adopt a hard-line position on Chained CPI, but I can’t see a less harmful way to entice the Republicans to stop the bleeding being caused by the sequester. If they won’t come to the table on this, then it’s back to the drawing board.
