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.

Key Findings:

Assistance provided through public programs:

• reduces the number of poor Americans by 27 million people, including 14 million elderly people and nearly 5 million children;
• reduces the severity of poverty for those who remain poor, by increasing their average disposable income from 29 percent to 57 percent of the poverty line; and
• reduces the ranks of the uninsured by tens of millions.

Supplemental Security Income:

SSI assists people who are aged (age 65 or over), disabled, or blind and who have very low incomes and very limited resources.

In 2005, the SSI benefit for an individual who lives alone and has no other income is $579 a month, or 73 percent of the poverty line. Some states supplement the SSI benefit with an additional payment that brings beneficiaries closer to — or, in a small number of instances, just above — the poverty line.

If an SSI beneficiary receives income from other sources or lives with other people, his or her SSI benefit may be reduced. In 2003, the average SSI benefit received by a person with a disability was about $433 a month. Close to 30 percent of all SSI recipients have no other income and receive the full SSI benefit. Another 35 percent have a small Social Security benefit and receive a modest SSI benefit to supplement that income.

The SSI eligibility criteria are stringent. SSI’s definition of “disability” is the same as that used in Social Security. A person must have a physical or mental impairment that will last at least 12 months or is expected to result in death. In addition, the person must prove that he or she is not able to engage in any “substantial gainful activity” as a result of the impairment.

The definition is stricter than definitions commonly used in private disability insurance. It also is stricter than definitions used in many public employee benefit systems for federal, state, or local employees.

In addition, people with countable assets of more than $2,000 for an individual and $3,000 for a couple are ineligible for SSI.

KEY FINDINGS

• South Carolina’s proposal to replace its Medicaid program with a system of private accounts would reduce health coverage for vulnerable state residents and raise their out-of-pocket health care costs significantly.
• The funds provided by the state for health care would be particularly inadequate for people with above-average health care needs, such as those with disabilities, chronic diseases, or other serious illnesses.
• The proposal rests on key untested assumptions, such as the belief that a system of managed care plans and provider networks will rapidly emerge in the state to serve Medicaid beneficiaries.