Read more from President Sweeney.

President Bush must share Grover Norquist’s goal “to cut government in half…to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”  Bush’s ultra-right backers such as Norquist, who heads Americans for Tax Reform, have long shared a dream: to wipe out government as we know it, replace it with for-profit enterprise and abandon the people who (generally for brief periods) must rely on government help for survival.

The president isn’t just cutting survival programs for low-income and working families—he’s destroying the guarantees that form their foundation.

A handful of government programs—the so-called “entitlements” Bush and others are demonizing these days—were designed to provide basic life-saving assistance to people who are poor enough or sick enough to require it. They are called “entitlement” programs because they guarantee no one will be turned away from help as long as they meet the eligibility guidelines set in law.  

This was America’s safety net.

The fiscal year 2006 federal budget recently passed by Republicans in Congress and signed by Bush, and the president’s newly released fiscal 2007 budget proposal, continue efforts to shred the safety net by altering the structure of these survival programs.

In addition to cutting $28 billion over 10 years from Medicaid—the federal-state health program for the poor—the 2006 budget allows states to force beneficiaries to pay for services and to reduce benefits, including crucial screening and diagnostic services for babies and children. Cash-strapped states don’t have to go through a waiver process, as has been the case with other state options for entitlement programs; they just need to file a state plan amendment. The 2006 budget also makes it harder for elderly persons to qualify for Medicaid nursing home care, clawing back money they may have transferred years earlier—say, to a son or daughter trying to buy a home.  And legal aid lawyers who work with low-income seniors will tell you that nursing homes can and do kick out people who can’t pay the tab for care—even people who have nowhere else to go but to a homeless shelter.

Then there’s Medicare. The 2003 Medicare prescription drug law included an accounting trick that creates a false funding crisis designed to prompt Capitol Hill to cut spending.  President Bush is exploiting this provision to impose across-the-board Medicare spending cuts—a size triple-E foot in the door to ending Medicare’s promise of stable benefits and access to care.  Current law already opens the door to the demise of eligibility and benefit levels based solely on age by imposing the first-ever income test on Medicare, subjecting seniors making more than $80,000 annually to higher Part B premiums.  Maybe that looks reasonable on the surface, but Bush’s new budget would keep that amount from growing with inflation.  In a decade, that $80,000 will look like a lot less money than it does today, and the higher premiums will hit twice as many seniors.

And, of course, there’s Social Security. The president and his allies tried to privatize it last year and failed miserably. They’re at it again. Unlike last year, the president put money in his fiscal 2007 budget to begin funding privatization, the ultimate end to a government guarantee of benefits.

Most years when we fight budget cuts, we take on one-year changes.  Now we’re fighting efforts to demolish the survival programs for all time.