The two reports below warn of the
ongoing destruction of essential government services. This information is
especially relevant to those of us who live “below the salt,” a
late medieval term for the 99 Percent. The first report describes
the sequester's impacts on several vital programs. The second tells how a
local transit authority – forced by anti-transit voters to
radically downsize its operations – nevertheless managed to save a
fraction of its weekend and nighttime bus service. Those who fear they might be potential victims
are urged to contact the appropriate local agencies for more
information.
***
How Sequester's Sword Slashes Programs for Lower-Income People
ASKING
THE POLITICIANS who perpetrated
the sequester to acknowledge the devastating wounds they've inflicted on
the people of the United States is like investigating a murder in a bad
neighborhood:
nobody knows nuttin' – and what's more, nobody seems to give a
damn.
The best
you'll get out of the elected officials who wielded the sword
of sequestration – the Congressmen and the president who collaborated to put the
service-slashing scheme together and impose it on the nation – is a spin-doctored variant of what street cops and
prosecutors used to call the “SODDI” defense: “some other dude
did it.” The Democrats blame the Republicans who are busy blaming
the Democrats, each trying to hide the fact both parties are
equally guilty.
But the politicians' game of hot potato
and its accompaniment of journalistic jeering is no help to the
millions of lower-and-middle-income people who now wait in fear to learn how
badly they'll be hurt.
So here's a summary of just a few of
the sequester's real-world consequences.
The sequester sword inflicts a $3.7
billion gash
on the Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to
one estimate,
at least 145,900 people are thus condemned to permanent homelessness.
The members of least 417, 400 households will suffer other negative
effects.
Part of the sequester-lacerated HUD
budget is the housing-choice program more commonly known as Section
Eight. It is a remnant of the many federal New Deal and Great Society
programs that have been on bipartisan target lists since the Clinton
Administration years, 1993-2001. (That's when the Democrats abandoned
their longtime role as advocates for lower income people and joined
with the Republicans in an ongoing campaign to shrink or eliminate
social service expenditures.)
The money now routinely taken from all
such services is typically diverted into various forms of so-called
“corporate welfare” – taxpayer dollars doled out mostly to
raise executive salaries and stockholder dividends at profit-making
enterprises. Corporations that serve the world's largest and most
expensive military establishment are especially favored by this
upward redistribution of the nation's wealth.
But Section Eight – probably because
of support from the powerful real estate industry – has somehow
remained marginally functional despite decades of efforts to shut it
down. Its vouchers provide access to privately owned, open-market
housing. The associated subsidies ensure recipients' out-of-pocket
expenditures for rent don't exceed 30 percent of their income.
Most of the applicants' needs are
urgent. Many are disabled. Some are homeless or in danger of becoming
so. But the sequester, by indiscriminately shrinking the Section Eight
budget, imposes additional limits on the number of people it can
serve.
Like other HUD programs, Section Eight
is administered by local housing authorities. Sequestration's
impact on the Tacoma Housing Authority, which serves a seaport city
of about 200,000 persons, is typical.
Michael Mirra, THA's executive
director, said the sequester downsized the group's $45 million annual
budget by $2 million or 4 percent. It is, he acknowledged, a painful
blow. But he and his colleagues, always attentive to political
circumstances, had anticipated the cuts. Thus they reduced Section
Eight expenditures accordingly, applying a policy Mirra describes as
“thinning the soup, so we did not have to take any chairs away from
the dinner table.”
Even so, the waiting list for Section
Eight housing in Tacoma, already four or five years from application
to approval, now becomes much longer.
Other local casualties of
sequestration, Mirra said, include homeless college students and
lower income people who were awaiting aid for first-time home
purchases. The students were to have been participants in a new
program that would have found them housing but was shut down by
sequester's denial of funds.
Another cutback imposed by
the sequester, this of $6.3 million, has forced the nearby King County Housing Authority to
suspend some of its Section Eight operations.
King County includes Seattle, which has
its own housing authority. Excluding the people in Seattle, the
county's population – that is, the number of persons potentially
served by KCHA – is 1.3 million.
The sequester also slashes a number of
education-related programs. These include work-study jobs and other
forms of aid for college students as well as well as
Head Start programs for pre-school children.
Though elderly and disabled people
had been reassured Medicare was protected from sequestration, the
reassurance may prove to have been misleading. Reimbursements to
doctors, hospitals, health-insurance plans and drug companies are to
be downsized by $2 billion over the next ten years. Whether these
costs will be passed on to recipients is unknown at present, but the
history of the health insurance business suggests they probably will
be. An Associated Press analysis out of Washington D.C. says Medicare
Advantage enrollees will be especially hard hit if the
providers thus raise premiums, fees and prices.
Statewide, the sequester is hacking
$1.05 million from nutrition assistance that provides meals for Washington seniors – some of whom would
otherwise starve. It is the sort of cutback Rep. Alan Grayson says
will kill people. Grayson, a Florida Democrat who is one of
sequestration's few Congressional critics, calls it “a
self-immolation,” adding it “will cause a lot of pain, a lot of
hunger, a lot of disease, a lot of death.”
How severely will the shrunken funding
wound Tacoma seniors? As of Friday, the relevant local officials
didn't seem to know.
Nevertheless there's no doubt cuts
similar to all those described above now afflict anyone who depends
on federally funded programs. As is often the case, the
circumstances in Washington state are a microcosm of what's happening
throughout the nation.
Meanwhile Grayson is not the
sequester's only outspoken adversary. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the
feisty Democrat from Massachusetts, has denounced it as
“irresponsible” and “just plain stupid.”
But it remains to be seen whether
Grayson, Warren and their few like-minded colleagues can convince the
bipartisan House and Senate majorities to sheath their metaphorical
swords and undo the real-world damage they've already done.
*****
PERHAPS IN RESPONSE to increasingly
bitter criticism by advocacy groups for lower-income people, the
Pierce Transit Board of Commissioners
has effectively defied its anti-transit constituents
and discarded an already approved plan to abolish all weekend
and nighttime bus service.
Or perhaps – as an inside source
implied last week – it was just too embarrassing to too many
powerful people to think of a city as big and economically
significant as Tacoma without any weekend or night-time buses.
In any case, the service reduction that
goes into effect in September will be on the order of 25 percent
rather than the 34 percent mandated by the board in January. Revoking
its January decision, the besieged agency now says it will retain
minimal night and weekend service.
Even in their new and slightly revised
form, the cutbacks will further shrink already radically-diminished
bus service for the approximately 600,000 people who live in Pierce
Transit's 292-square-mile service district. The area includes the
seaport city of Tacoma, population about 200,000, which plays
a significant role in the global economy.
Pierce Transit's downsizing, by nearly
70 percent since 2009, is mandated by local voters who damn
public transport as welfare, denounce its users as bums and condemn
its unionized employees as parasites.
But for once the “human decency”
meme that emerged in reaction to last November's vote
against transit and transit-users seems to have been paramount
amongst the commissioners' considerations. The agency thus
reshuffled its budgetary tarot cards and came up with an
additional $6.2 million – $5.5 million from maintenance funds –
to maintain (very limited) weekend and night-time bus operations.
“The risk,” said Pierce Transit's
Lars Erickson, “is that we may have (unforeseen) maintenance
problems.” The board is willing to gamble, the publicist says,
“because we understand the effects of cutting weekend and nighttime service.”
Nevertheless, Tacoma and its
surrounding suburbs will still suffer from what – for a
municipality of its size and economic importance – is probably most
inadequate public transport in the industrial world.
At least one board member, Derek Young,
says he fears Pierce Transit is “in a death spiral,” with
the ongoing service reductions resulting in revenue losses and enough
additional political antagonism to eventually terminate the agency's
operations. Some transit opponents have already admitted this is
precisely their intent.
In this context, the Polly Anna
spin Pierce Transit attempts to put on the cutbacks – “extensive
system redesign project, robust public outreach since 2009” –
seems especially ironic.
The initial downsizing of the agency's
operations, in 2009, was due to Washington state's notoriously
regressive tax structure.
As a consequence, the state's transit
authorities are funded almost entirely by sales tax revenue, which
slumped radically during the Bush-Obama recession and has remained
low ever since. In response, Pierce Transit reduced service by eight
percent. It re-routed several bus lines and shortened operating hours
but otherwise preserved pre-recession schedules.
In 2011, hoping to restore these cuts
and expand existing service to accommodate growing ridership, the
commissioners asked voters to approve a sales-tax increase of .03
percent, three cents on a $10 purchase.
But the far-right majority that
dominates the suburbs, energized as they were by the success of the
Tea Party, launched a nasty campaign based on spurious claims that
transit is not a civil necessity but rather a means of placating
lower-income people, pampering minorities and funding the Democratic
Party via the Amalgamated Transit Union.
The transit opponents also tried to
portray the agency as an exceptionally glaring example of government
spending run amok – a bureaucracy that squandered taxpayer dollars
at every opportunity.
Efforts at rebuttal – for example
telling the story of how insightful planning gave Pierce Transit the
first natural-gas-powered buses on the planet and locked in fuel
prices that in today's market are equivalent to buying diesel at 71
cents per gallon – were either ignored or shouted down.
Thus the agency's 2011 special-election
ballot measure, though narrowly approved in Tacoma proper, was
overwhelming defeated in the suburbs, which contain about two-thirds
of the population of the Pierce Transit service area.
The directors resubmitted the
three-cents-on-$10 tax-hike to the voters in 2012, hoping the
progressive majority expected to turn out for the November general
election would at last rescue the system.
As expected, the transit opponents'
responded with the same hateful rhetoric they had employed the
previous year. But they became even more stridently anti-union after
the agency's bus drivers and other workers represented by ATU Local
587 voted to give up their 2011-2014
raises and cost-of-living increases in a last-ditch effort to help
save bus service.
The second vote thus went the same way
as the first.
While
the voters within the Tacoma city limits again approved the tax hike,
an overwhelming number of suburbanites again voted against it. And
even the Tacoma outcome was gravely disappointing to transit
supporters. An unprecedented two-percent under-vote – about 15,400
ballots cast by people who declined to vote on
the transit measure –
suggests the presence of a decisive anti-transit plurality even
inside the city limits.
Hence the Pierce Transit board's
unannounced but obvious decision to abandon – at least for the
foreseeable future – any further ventures in electoral politics.
LB/4 March 2013
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