Key Findings

• A proposed TABOR amendment in Kansas would not help the state's economy. It would undermine education, transportation, public safety, and other services important to economic development.
• Business leaders in Colorado, the only state with a TABOR, say it endangers economic growth.
• Differences between Colorado's economic growth rate and that of Kansas are attributable to differences in the states' geographies, populations and economic bases that long predate TABOR.
• Since TABOR's enactment, Colorado's economic growth rate has not improved relative to that of its Rocky Mountain neighbors.

Key Findings

• To reach its budget targets, the House of Representatives has already approved appropriations bills that cut domestic programs an average of 2.8 percent or $11 billion below the 2005 funding level, adjusted only for inflation.
• Chairman Nussle of the House Budget Committee is proposing that domestic appropriated programs (and defense and international programs as well) be cut an additional two percent.
• If the additional two-percent cut is applied across the board, many domestic programs would undergo substantial reductions from the combination of the cuts made in the appropriations bills the House has already passed and the additional across-the-board cut. This analysis portrays the cuts that would result in a number of programs, including Community Development Block Grants, Head Start, EPA clean water grants, Title 1 education for the disadvantaged, special education for people with disabilities, and Section 8 tenant-based housing vouchers.

Key Findings:

• The amount of rental assistance provided to evacuees is insufficient for some families to secure housing.
• For many families receiving rental assistance under FEMA's Individuals and Households Program, housing will remain unstable because the duration of assistance is uncertain.
• Some families will need relocation and housing search assistance, as well as direct payments to owners through rental vouchers, to secure stable housing.

Key Findings

• Some $375 billion in cuts over ten years— or nearly 40 percent of the cuts in the RSC package — would come from programs that assist people with low incomes.  The package includes large cuts in Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and help to the world’s most poverty-stricken nations to fight AIDS and other diseases.
• The package also would squeeze millions of middle-class households; for most elderly couples, premiums and co-payments under Medicare would be raised an average of $1,700 in 2006 and about $10,000 over five years.
• The RSC package also includes large reductions in grants to help local governments improve “first responders” capabilities, in funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and in funding for environmental protection and energy conservation, among other areas.
• While including these cuts, the package would not delay or scale back any tax cuts or close any tax shelters.  It would leave fully in place tax cuts that now average $103,000 a year for people with incomes over $1 million a year, and would allow two new tax cuts exclusively for high-income households to take effect January 1.

Key Findings

Kansas state expenditures would have been $890 million, or 19 percent, lower in FY 2005 if a TABOR had been in effect since 1993. Large cuts would have been required to accommodate the TABOR limits, potentially including:

• Cutting 10,000 K-12 teachers

• Increasing the average pupil-teacher ratio from 15 to 23

• Eliminating the HealthWave insurance program for low-income children

• Increasing university tuition by an average of $1,400

• Incarcerating 1,300 fewer inmates

Key Findings

• Taken together, the two planned reconciliation bills — one cutting programs, the other cutting taxes — would increase the deficit by more than $35 billion over five years.
• Never before has Congress split reconciliation into two separate bills when the overall effect of reconciliation would be to increase deficits, rather than reduce them.
• The separation into two bills may be intended, in part, to divert attention from the fact that the cuts of almost $35 billion in programs such as Medicaid, Food Stamps, and student loans would be used not to reduce the deficit, but to offset partially the $70 billion in tax cuts.
• A significant part of the budget cuts would come in programs serving low- and moderate-income Americans, while the benefits of the tax cuts are likely to go overwhelmingly to the best-off taxpayers.