Coalition of progressive groups urge White House and Congress to protect poor in budget�talks

A coalition of national religious, civil rights, charitable, economic research, and low-income advocacy organizations, including the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Center for American Progress, the Center for Community Change, NAACP, and the Coalition on Human Needs, have written to Congressional and White House negotiators, urging that they "honor the precedent set by previous deficit reduction negotiations that have reduced the deficit without increasing poverty."

From the letter:

We write to urge you to follow a key bedrock principle included in prior bipartisan deficit reduction efforts and espoused by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson: protect programs for low-income families and individuals and make sure that deficit reduction is achieved in a way that does not increase poverty.

Any agreement on deficit reduction should neither cut low-income assistance programs directly nor subject these programs to cuts under automatic enforcement mechanisms. Cuts to programs that help low-income people meet their basic needs or provide them with opportunity to obtain decent education and employment would inevitably increase poverty and hardship.

The major bipartisan deficit reduction packages of recent decades have adhered to the principle we espouse here. In fact, all deficit reduction packages enacted in the 1990s reduced poverty and helped the disadvantaged even as they shrank deficits. In addition, every automatic budget cut mechanism of the past quarter-century has exempted core low-income assistance programs from any automatic across-the-board cuts triggered when budget targets or fiscal restraint rules were missed or violated. The 1985 and 1987 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings laws, the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act, the 1993 deficit reduction package, the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, and the 2010 pay-as-you-go law all exempted core low-income programs from automatic cuts.

The United States already has higher levels of poverty and inequality than most other Western nations.  We agree that we must address future deficits and put our nation on a sustainable fiscal course. But that need not?and should not?entail increasing poverty and hardship or inequality, as various past deficit reduction packages demonstrate.

You could argue that the Simpson-Bowles recommendations on Social Security?the most successful anti-poverty program in the nation's history?did not necessarily protect programs for all low-income individuals, but yes, even the catfood commission didn't advise cutting the deficit on the backs of the nation's poor. As no deficit cutting efforts in the past have.

What is particularly concerning for these groups is an idea floated by the White House to implement "a debt trigger that would employ across-the-board spending cuts and reductions in tax credits and deductions if debt benchmarks were not reached." Across-the-board spending cuts could include both anti-poverty programs and entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, unless they are expressly held out of the agreement, as this coalition is advocating.

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/IrgrzMsNLzw/-Coalition-of-progressive-groups-urge-White-House-and-Congress-to-protect-poor-in-budget talks

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