ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 27, 1996 TAG: 9612270037
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
PRESIDENT Clinton says the top priority in his second term will be to balance the federal budget. That's a defensible position in itself. But how the budget is balanced matters a lot.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank, has figured that programs for the poor, which account for 23 percent of entitlement expenditures, have born 93 percent of spending cuts in the past two years. This record reflects politicians' preference for cutting funding for the poor rather than for the middle class. But it shouldn't be a guide for future spending cuts.
If anything, funding for anti-poverty efforts needs to be restored and raised, even as spending growth in other areas is trimmed. Welfare reform in particular should never have been regarded, at least in the short term, as a budget-balancing device. Moving people from dependence to work is a worthy and overdue endeavor. But it costs more (for child care, for example) than does simply sending welfare checks.
Meantime, the second Clinton administration mustn't abandon efforts to address perhaps America's greatest problem: the widening gap between rich and poor. Those lacking education and job skills are falling further and further behind, and the impact is spreading to children. Today, one of four kids - in Virginia, nearly 100,000 children under the age of 6 - are living in poverty. In many cases, their parents are finding that full-time work fails to raise a family above the poverty line. Which is to say there is need for more, not less, public investment in education and skills-building.
Budget-balancers in the administration and Congress should look first to trimming spending growth in programs that, because they aren't adequately means-tested, benefit the middle classes and the affluent. These include the politically thorny Medicare and Social Security. Likewise, budget-balancers should go after subsidies to big business, and should cut more from the post-Cold War military. The beneficiaries of these programs are, in general, more influential than the lowest-income Americans, but that shouldn't protect them from sharing in necessary sacrifices.
Let the budget-balancers focus on cutting bureaucracy, reforming entitlements, shifting federal dollars from current consumption to investments in the future - and give the poor a break.
LENGTH: Short : 46 linesby CNB