BEING a progressive in George Bush's America is a daily heartbreak. Caring about social justice, responsible foreign policy, and good government in Tom DeLay and Bill Frist's America means waking up to newspaper headlines each morning to find something else in which you believe under vicious attack. In short, being liberal, moderate or even reasonably conservative in today's America is an ongoing, all-consuming, utterly exhausting struggle to believe that this too shall pass. But may we never be so fatigued that we cannot muster real indignation and shame when our political leaders cross the line from callousness to outright cruelty.
The House votes this week on eight budget cuts packaged into a single bill by the body's Budget Committee. Among the programs getting the axe are food stamps for an estimated 30,000 people, and free or reduced school lunches for 40,000 children. Ironically, the bill will be harshest on those in the process of actually moving towards independence and off welfare, because such families have incomes that just barely exceed the basic threshold coupled with higher expenses for child care and out-of-pocket health insurance. Another provision in the bill denies foster care payments to relatives who take in children removed from their parents' homes by court order, a bitter mockery of the "family values" that swept these legislators into office.
In defending the cuts, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, pulled a tough love face, claiming, "The fact is our country is going broke. We're spending money that we don't have and passing it on to our kids, and at some point somebody's got to say: enough's enough." Hearing representatives like Boehner insist that they are the voice of authority on when "enough is enough" is a little like listening to alcoholic who tells you he knows when he can cut himself off. A brief rundown, if you will, of the major GOP accomplishments of the past four years:
6,376 pet pork projects in this year's highway bill: $24 billion. The tab for Iraq: $211.5 billion and counting. The tax cut packages for the wealthiest Americans over the last four years: $1.9 trillion. The fifth tax cut for which Boehner and other Republican leaders are currently pushing: $70 billion.
Sparing our kids the burden of picking up the tab for $844 million (over five years) that would be spent on cheap lunches for their hungriest classmates: priceless.
Glibness -- and massively inconceivable sums of money -- aside, it is well beyond time to say that enough is enough. Government spending is wildly out of control, and Boehner is right that it is unethical to pass down these crippling deficits to future generations. What's more unethical, however, is to claim that taking free milk away from kindergarteners represents a major achievement in curbing that spending while pork barrel dollars, the price tag for a mismanaged war and extremist annual tax cuts careen past the trillion mark.
Certainly we can make allowances for differences in ideology. Conservatives control the House, Senate and presidency not by fiat but by democratic election, and obviously the bootstraps themes of individualism and the pro-business, trickle-down rhetoric resonated with enough Americans to give the GOP the legislative and executive majority it currently enjoys. But it is near impossible to believe that a majority of Americans, even among those opposed to what they perceive as frivolous government spending, sent their elected officials to Congress to literally take food out of the mouths of the neediest and most vulnerable of our nation's citizens.
If this bill passes, American children will go hungry. Dress it up in political sound bites, couch it however you want, but if this bill passes, American children will not have enough food to eat. Once we scratch these kids off the fiscal priority list, it ceases to matter how rich this nation is -- we will have become utterly bankrupt of what has made us great.
Katie Cristol's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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