New Food Stamp Cuts on the Horizon Again

Another session of Congress. Another chapter in the perils to SNAP (the food stamp program), as Congress tries again to pass a new Farm Bill.

Last week, the Senate Agriculture Committee finished a bill that cuts the program by $4.1 billion over the next 10 years. This is slightly less than last year’s proposed cut, but only because the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate has changed.

The House Agriculture Committee boosted its food stamp cuts to approximately $21 billion* over the same 10-year period. This $4.5 billion increase over last year reflects substantive changes in the proposed legislation.

Senate Agriculture Committee’s Cut

The Senate Agriculture Committee decided again to impose a restriction on a provision commonly known as “heat and eat.”

As things stand now, states can give households the maximum allowance for household utility costs if they receive any benefit from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

In some, but not all cases, this entitles them to a larger food stamp benefit because it reduces their adjusted income.

The Senate Agriculture Committee’s bill would restrict “heat and eat” to households that receive more than $10 a year from LIHEAP — directly or as a payment to their utility company.

CBO earlier estimated that this change would reduce benefits for nearly 500,000 households by an average of $90 a month.

Since then, sequestration has cut LIHEAP funding by nearly $270.8 million — this on top of cuts totaling $1.6 billion since Fiscal Year 2010.

So the 15 states and the District of Columbia that now use the “heat and eat” option will be hard put to protect all beneficiaries from benefits cuts, but not as hard put as under the House Agriculture Committee’s bill.

House Agriculture Committee’s Cuts

Last year, the House Agriculture Committee’s Farm Bill adopted the same “heat and eat” restriction as the Senate’s.

Its new bill raises the minimum LIHEAP benefit required to $20 in any given year. This would increase the number of households affected to about 850,000, according to CBO estimates reported by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Most of House Agriculture’s food stamp savings, however, come from a restriction it would again impose on an option known as categorical eligibility.

At this point, states can, in some cases, use the same gross income and asset limits for food stamp eligibility as they use for programs they fund out of their Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant or funds they spend to meet their maintenance-of-effort requirement.

The alternative cut-offs may be used for households that receive any TANF-funded benefit or service, as well as those that receive cash assistance from the Supplemental Security Income program or a state general assistance program.

They enable some low-income people — mainly working families and seniors — to receive food stamp benefits although the standard gross income and/or asset limit would disqualify them.

These are hardly people who don’t need food assistance, as CBPP explains.

A working family may have a gross income higher than 130% of the federal poverty line, but far less than the FPL after allowable costs are deducted.

A senior may have somewhat more than $3,250 in retirement savings to supplement a Social Security benefit that leaves him/her well below the FPL, as would be the case for a former minimum wage worker.

So-called broad-based categorical eligibility, i.e., eligibility based on receipt of any TANF benefit, enables people like these to receive food stamps.

All but 10 states use it to ease the standard, very restrictive asset maximum — $2,000, except for seniors. Fourteen states and the District use it to allow a somewhat higher gross income as well.

The House Agriculture Committee eliminates broad-based categorical eligibility by restricting cat-el to households that receive cash assistance from TANF or one of the other aforementioned programs.

CBO has estimated that 1.8 million fewer low-income people would receive food stamp benefits. The Office of Management and Budget put the figure at 3 million.

CBO also estimates that 210,000 children wouldn’t get free school meals any more because their eligibility depends on their family’s participation in the food stamp program.

So they’d be doubly deprived — as would their parents, who’d have to pay for all their kids meals, as well as their own.

The House Agriculture Committee’s bill also cuts funding for the nutrition education program that’s part of SNAP.

The $274 million cut would come on top of a $110 million cut Congress made in January — this to offset the costs of averting a milk price spike that would otherwise have resulted from its failure to pass a Farm Bill last year.

So families who don’t get dumped out of the food stamp program will get less help in learning how to make healthy food choices they can afford.

This is already a challenge. But it will soon get harder, even without any new “heat and eat” restriction, because earlier raids on the food stamp program will reduce benefits for all participants at the end of October.

To top off the savings, the House Agriculture Committee eliminates the bonuses USDA has been awarding states for outstanding performance and notable improvements in key aspects of program administration.

The bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures told the Committee last year that the bonuses had proved effective, noting that the payment error rate was at a record low.

But the Committee’s bill would end them anyway, just as last year’s bill would have.

So we’ve got two very different bills — and an upcoming battle royal in the House.

What the end result of all this will be is anybody’s guess.

What’s clear, however, is that House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas is spinning his bill when he says that it “won’t take a calorie off the plate of anyone who needs help.”

Even the Senate Ag Committee’s Farm Bill would. And it’s not nearly so bad.

* The somewhat smaller figure you may have read elsewhere is the total for all the changes that have budgetary impacts in the Nutrition title of the Farm Bill . Modest increases for The Emergency Food Assistance Program and several other items account for the difference.

Medicaid Saves Lives, Though New Study Doesn’t Show It

My mother-in-law has just been released from the hospital, where she hastily checked in with what turned out to be a case of pneumonia and a related blood infection.

Serious for anyone, but especially someone like Mom, who’s approaching her 94th birthday.

I’ve been wondering whether she’d have gone to the hospital so fast if she hadn’t had Medicaid to supplement her Medicare benefits.

Would she instead have waited to see if the cough subsided and the breathing got easier, knowing she’d have to cover a deductible — and perhaps “coinsurance,” i.e., a copay — she couldn’t afford?

I doubt this would have crossed my mind if I hadn’t been reading responses to the recently-published study of the effects of expanded Medicaid coverage in Oregon.

As you may know, the researchers compared certain health-related measures for low-income Oregon residents who’d won and lost out in a lottery the state used to expand its Medicaid program.

No seniors like Mom in either group because Oregon, like all other states, provides some Medicaid coverage for all low-income Medicare beneficiaries who’ve also got quite limited savings and other financial assets.

So the researchers were comparing two groups of people between the ages of 19 and 65 — all quite poor, some insured by Medicaid and some with no health insurance.

Not surprisingly, they found that lottery winners used health services more, including for preventive care. Prescription medications as well.

They had virtually no catastrophic out-of-pocket expenses — also significantly less occasion to borrow money or skip paying other bills to pay those for their health care.

More surprisingly perhaps, they had significantly reduced rates of depression. (Any relationship here to relief from plaguing financial worries?)

On the other hand, the researchers found no significant effects on several basic health measures — diagnosis and treatment for high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol levels.

And though Medicaid apparently increased probabilities for diabetes diagnosis and medication, it had no significant effect on a measure used for diabetics’ blood sugar control — at least, not within the study timeframe.

This relatively small, highly technical study has proved a Rorschach test of people’s views of the Affordable Care Act, as a borrowed headline on The Incidental Economist says.

ACA opponents jumped on the findings, of course. The libertarian Cato Institute immediately saw “a huge ‘Stop’ sign” in front of Medicaid expansion.

Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson found confirmation for his view that the ACA has been “oversold” as a measure to improve health — as indeed, has health insurance generally.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat concluded that the study tended to support health insurance that covers only catastrophes because more comprehensive insurance doesn’t deliver better health, as ACA supporters said it would.

ACA proponents jumped on the findings too, arguing in part that protection from medical bankruptcy is a good enough reason to expand Medicaid, as the law initially required.

That, however, as they pointed out, isn’t the only benefit the study found. Many references to what one of the researchers called the “astounding finding” on improved mental health.

Some progressives also jumped on opponents for misunderstanding — or perhaps deliberately misusing — the health measure findings.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones does a nice job here. As he explains, “significant” is used in its statistical sense, not as we commonly use it to signal something meaningful or important.

The study did find “fairly substantial improvements” for measures like high blood pressure, as Drum’s annotations of one of its tables shows. But the sample size was too small for these to meet the statistical test — a 95% confidence level.

Nearly lost in the back-and-forth on the latest paper are some findings from an earlier study by the same research team.

This one looked at several health measures, including what we might consider the most determinative — mortality rates.

Samples were large enough to get statistically significant results because the team was comparing rates in three states that had expanded their Medicaid programs with rates in three  that hadn’t.

Lo and behold, mortality rates went down in the expansion states — by 6.1%. That’s 2,840 fewer deaths a year for every 500,000 people who gained access to affordable health care through Medicaid.

Which brings me back to Mom, who might not be alive if she hadn’t gone to the hospital when she did.

And who probably wouldn’t be back in her own place now if Medicaid weren’t covering the costs of a home aide and a physical therapist to help her get more steady on her feet.

This isn’t statistically significant, but it’s pretty damn significant to me and others who love her.

House GOP Gives Low-Wage Workers “Flexibility” to Get Exploited

Just in time for Mother’s Day, House Republicans passed a bill that purportedly eases the work-family life conflicts that so many working moms (and dads) struggle with.

The bill is part of a strategy that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor developed for his caucus after the (to them) disappointing results of last year’s elections.

They’ve got an image problem, they think. For some unfathomable reason, a whole lot of voters think the Republican party cares only about the rich.

House Republicans have to show us that they’re “making life work for more Americans and their families,” as a special website Cantor created proclaims.

So he and his colleagues have decided to give working families flexibility, according to the title of the bill. “Flexibility” here refers to the ability to take time off from work without losing pay.

But not, as the proposed Healthy Families Act would. It would require most employers to provide some paid leave for personal or family health-related needs or to get help in cases of domestic violence, stalking or sexual assault.

The Working Families Flexibility Act would instead supposedly allow employees to choose compensatory time instead of overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours a week.

This means, of course, that it would apply only to workers who get paid by the hour — those at the bottom of the wage scale. They’re the least likely to have paid leave benefits. So the bill might seem a boon to them.

But it isn’t — mainly because these workers wouldn’t really have the choice the bill seems to give them.

Hypothetically, they could choose to continue getting overtime pay instead of opting for comp. time. We have to assume that many would, since $10.00 an hour — the average wage for workers without paid sick leave — is barely enough to lift a family of three above the federal poverty line.

But, as Working America argues, employers would have the upper hand. They could give workers incentives to choose comp. time, e.g., a better shift. They could pressure them.

True, the bill specifically prohibits employers from intimidating, threatening or coercing employees to accept comp. time instead of overtime pay.

But, as the National Women’s Law Center notes, we have more than enough evidence that many employers pay no mind to provisions in our labor laws that are supposed to protect low-wage workers.

Even workers who willingly chose comp. time couldn’t necessarily use it when they needed it.

An employer could legally deny a request by saying it “unduly disrupts … operations” or grant it “within a reasonable period,” rather than for the particular day(s) or hour(s) requested.

So much for taking a day off when your kid is sick — or her school declares a snow day and there’s no one else to care for her.

So much for knowing you can get a few hours off when you need to get legal protection from an abuser.

The Working Families Flexibility Act has another implication for low-wage workers. It really is, as Working America says, a “job killer” because it enables employers to get all needed work done on the cheap.

At this point, as the Fair Labor Standards Act intended, employers have a financial incentive to hire more workers — or offer some part-timers full-time jobs — when they need to get more work done because overtime is half again as costly as straight wage.

Comp. time obviously does away with the incentive.

So here you are, working mothers. You can’t be sure you’ll generally work only eight hours a day and thus have a little time to get to the grocery store, help your kids with their homework, etc.

You can’t be sure you’ll have time off when you need it — or enough time off for a major life event like childbirth because your employer can, at any time, convert all but 80 hours of your comp. time to pay.

You can’t work overtime to make ends meet. And if, like 7.6 million workers, you’ve got a part-time job, though you’d like full-time work, you’re probably stuck with the hours you’ve got.

If House Republicans hadn’t already made “flexibility” a suspect word, this bill would do it.

What We Know (and Don’t) About the Drops in DC Homelessness Rates

In my last post, I summarized the major results of the latest point-in-time, i.e., one-night, count of homeless people in the District of Columbia.

We see one-year decreases for the homeless population as a whole and for all the subgroups the District reports to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Decreases are longer-term for two overlapping groups — homeless individual men and women, i.e., those not with family members, and individuals classified as chronically homeless.

The District’s report attempts to account for the decreases. It attributes them to an expansion in permanent supportive housing capacity and its investments in homelessness prevention and rapid re-housing.

We’ve got sound evidence for the impact of PSH. The evidence for HPRP — the rapid re-housing component, in particular — is squishy.

It may help explain the one-year declines, but they’re no proof that rapid re-housing will end homelessness for the families that the Mayor — and his Director of Human Services — want to force into the program.

Permanent Supportive Housing

As I previously remarked, the steady drop in the number of chronically homeless individuals counted probably reflects the high priority that both federal and local policies have placed on moving these individuals into PSH.

The report itself provides additional evidence for this. At the time of the latest count, it says, 3,690 individuals and 983 families were in PSH units, thus not homeless for the purposes of the count.

Both these figures are higher than those reported in 2012 — by 18% and 8% respectively.

But this doesn’t mean that the District can take credit for providing housing with supportive services for all these formerly homeless people.

The DC Fiscal Policy Institute reports that the Department of Human Services expects to have 1,350 households in the PSH units it’s funding this fiscal year.

Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing

The PIT count report offers no basis for assessing the impacts of homelessness prevention and rapid re-housing.

A brief by the Community Partnership to End Homelessness says that 762 individuals and 643 families are “stably housed” because of HPRP.

But we have no timeframe for these figures. So we don’t know how long ago the beneficiaries received the one-shot or limited-time assistance — let alone anything about them, e.g., how much steady income they had.

We do, however, have data indicating that a goodly number of individuals and/or families didn’t stay stably housed after their rapid re-housing subsidies expired, presumably because they couldn’t afford to pay the full rent.

A presentation, also by the Community Partnership, says that two-thirds of rapid re-housing participants “exited” the program to “permanent destinations” (HUD-speak for permanent housing) and that 91% of them remain stably housed.

So about 39 out of every 100 households that had the limited-term rent subsidies are in some sort of unstable situation — either at-risk or literally homeless.

We don’t know how long the rest have been stably housed, though a recent statement by David Berns, the director of Human Services, suggests perhaps only one year.*

We do know, however, that some homeless families declined rapid re-housing because they were pretty sure they couldn’t pick up the full rent. So even if the stably-housed figure is fairly long-term, it would reflect some self-selection.

Why Fuss About the Rapid Re-Housing Data?

I’m nattering about the under-supported claims for the success of rapid re-housing because they have immediate policy implications.

As I recently wrote, the Mayor’s proposed amendments to the Homeless Services Reform Act would, among other things, give homeless families a choice between rapid re-housing and life on the streets.

At the time of the PIT count, 18% of homeless D.C. adults with children had no source of income whatever. Twenty-five percent were employed, but obviously not earning enough to pay market-rate rents here.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program was the most commonly reported source of income. The maximum TANF benefit for a family of three is less than a third of the monthly rent on a modest two-bedroom apartment.

How many families who’ve remained stably housed entered the rapid re-housing program with comparable incomes — and comparably doubtful near-term prospects for such significant improvement that they could afford full rent?

For the two-bedroom apartment, that would require a monthly income of nearly $4,707 — more than three times the District’s minimum wage.

Seems to me the DC Council should have a much better grasp on the putative — and prospective — success rates of rapid re-housing before it votes on the HRSA amendments.

A better grasp and a lot more input on other issues too.

* Berns says that “91 percent of those who have been re-housed … remained in stable housing after one year.” He’s apparently using the Community Partnership’s figure as if it were a percent of the whole, rather than of two-thirds.

DC Homelessness Rates Trend Downward, But Still Very High

The upsurge in homelessness in the District of Columbia seems to have abated — at least for the time being. The actual numbers, however, remain very high.

And while homelessness among individual adults is now lower than in 2008, when the recession had just set in, family homelessness is still exponentially higher.

This is the top line news for the District in the just-issued report on the results of the one-night homelessness counts by communities that belong to the Metropolitan Council of Governments.

As I always say, these point-in-time counts don’t tell us how many homeless people there are — only how many meet the restrictive definition the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development mandates.

Nevertheless, they’re all we’ve got for the District’s homeless population and the subgroups reported to HUD.

So here are the figures, with some additional calculations I’ve made to indicate change over time. I’ll deal with how the report explains the recent decreases in a followup post.

The total number of homeless people counted dropped a bit — from 6,954 last year to 6.865. This represents a decrease of 1.3%, but it’s still 16% higher than in 2008.

The number of homeless families also decreased — from 1,014 to 983 or by 3%. Even with the drop, however, the number has increased by nearly 67.5% since 2008.

The count identified 3,169 homeless family members — just 18 fewer than in 2012. Of these, 1,301 were adults and 1,868 were children with them.

The number of homeless individual men and women, i.e., those not with family members, declined for the third year in a row. The latest count identified 3,696 — 22% fewer than in 2008.

These are adults only. The count identified six homeless unaccompanied youth, i.e., kids under 18 who weren’t with a family member.

This presumably reflects major flaws in the count, since a limited survey by the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates found about six times as many who’d fit the definition the count used.

Both local and federal policies have put a high priority on moving chronically homeless individuals into permanent supportive housing.

We see the results in the number counted — 1,764, as compared to 1,870 in 2012. This is the fourth year in a row that the number has dropped.

PSH probably also helps explain the relatively small number of unsheltered homeless individuals counted — 512. This is 25% fewer than in 2012.

The count isn’t complete, of course, but the percent drop is probably fairly accurate. Figures for earlier years may not be comparable because recent PIT reports suggest greater efforts to identify the unsheltered population.

All these numbers speak to choices local policymakers have made — and some facing them right now. More on this tomorrow.

Homelessness in America: Progress, Stasis, Backsliding and Forewarnings

The National Alliance to End Homelessness recently issued its third report on homelessness, both nationwide and in each state and the District of Columbia.

As I’ve said before, NAEH relies mainly, as it must, on federal government sources. For homelessness itself, this means the limited and not altogether reliable point-in-time counts that recipients of homeless assistance grants report to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

That said, it seems reasonable to assume that the methods recipients use generally don’t change much from one year to the next. So the percent changes NAEH reports are probably fairly accurate.

What we see overall are continuing trends — not only for homelessness itself, but for factors that indicate high risks of homelessness.

Homelessness Nationwide

The total number of literally homeless people dropped by 0.4% last year — such a small decrease as to represent more or less a steady state. All told, 633,782 people were counted as homeless.

Decreases for veterans and individuals classified as chronically homeless were much larger — 7.2% and 6.8% respectively.

The number of homeless families remained virtually the same — 77,157, as compared to 77,186 in 2011. However, the rate of family homelessness rose in 27 states and the District.

And the number of homeless people in families rose by 1.4% to 239,403. NAEH translates this into an estimated 3,251 more homeless children who were with an adult.

Over the longer term, homelessness for all the individual populations counted has trended down. We see a few blips up from one year to the next, but lower figures for all since 2005, when HUD standardized point-in-time data collections.

On a less cheery note, 38.4% of the homeless people counted last year — 243,627 — had no form of shelter or housing at all, except perhaps a car, an abandoned building or some other indoor place “not meant for human habitation.”

This is virtually the same number as were counted in 2011.

The decreases in both chronic and veteran homelessness clearly reflect the priority that communities have placed on them in response to direction from HUD and, more recently, targeted funding from the Veterans Administration.

Most permanent supportive housing is for chronically homeless individuals, including veterans. Last year, there were more PSH beds than beds in emergency shelters or transitional housing — a time-limited type of housing that also includes services.

Homelessness Risk Factors

The risk factors NAEH reports fall into two related categories — income and housing costs.

On the income side, the official unemployment rate was lower in 2011 than in 2010 — down to a still high 8.9%.

This is a limited indicator, however, since it doesn’t include people employed part-time who wanted — and, in some cases, used to have — full-time work. Nor does it include people who didn’t look for work because it seemed futile.

The median household income was a bit lower in 2011 and the official poverty rate 0.6% higher, pushing the number of poor adults and children up to more than 48.4 million.

Some of them were undoubtedly beyond the risk stage.

On the housing cost side, fair market rents increased in 38 states. The nationwide FMR for a modest two-bedroom apartment, plus basic utilities rose 1.5%, making for a five-year increase of 15.1%.

More than 6.5 million households spent more than half their income for rent — 5.5% more than in 2010. And the bottom fifth on the income scale spent, on average, a mind-boggling 87% of their income.

Well over 7.4 million people in poor households were living doubled-up with friends or family members. This represents a 9.4% increase over 2010.

HUD reports tell us that doubling up is a major warning sign for future homelessness. In 2011, nearly 32% of people admitted to a shelter had been staying with friends or family immediately before.

The policy implications here seem blatantly obvious. Putting people back to work — and to work for the first time — would help reduce homelessness if the jobs paid a decent wage.

But we need much greater investments in affordable housing too — more support for construction and preservation, more funds for public housing operations and maintenance and considerably more for housing vouchers.

We see marked downturns in the rates of chronically homeless individuals and veterans. They show what could happen if our government got equally serious about the rest of the homeless population.

More Fixes Won’t Fix Sequestration’s Harms

Never let it be said that Congress can’t get anything done because bipartisanship is dead. Look at how swiftly Republicans and Democrats jointly acted when the air traffic controller furloughs started inconveniencing frequent flyers.

This isn’t the first time Congress has created a loophole in the law that mandates across-the-board cuts.

When the Agriculture Department announced that it would have to furlough the inspectors who must be in meat, poultry and egg processing plants, Congress found funding to keep the inspectors on the job.

Took part of it out of the department’s fund for grants to help more schools serve breakfast to low-income students.

I’m hardly the first to note that Congress has evinced no significant concern about other delays sequestration seems likely to cause — or those that will worsen.

Nor about other harms the cuts will cause — not merely furloughs that will create hardships for some as-yet unknown number of federal employees, but as many as 750,000 actual job losses in both the public and private sectors.

And lost benefits for jobless workers who’ve been unemployed long enough to qualify for federally-funded unemployment insurance benefits. Nineteen states have already rolled out cuts averaging $120 a week. The longer states wait, the bigger the cuts will have to be.

Some of the other cuts have also gotten considerable press coverage.

So you probably know that Head Start programs have begun paring back enrollment. Some of them already have waiting lists — a far more consequential sort of delay than some extra hours in an airport.

The U.S. Secretary of Education says that about 70,000 children won’t have the early learning opportunities and other benefits, e.g., health services, that Head Start provides.

One Head Start director warns that parents may have to quit their jobs to tend to their children — not unlikely, since unsubsidized child care can cost more than they earn.

And sequestration has taken a bite out of the block grant that helps pay for subsidized care.

Also out of federal programs that fund subsidized housing. Long waiting lists for housing assistance are already common. And the number of years applicants wait are often far longer than the number of hours fussed airline travelers waited.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 140,000 fewer households will have housing vouchers by early next year. Others, it says, may face rent increases — perhaps beyond their ability to pay.

Yet funds for homeless services will be cut too.

But I’m cherry-picking here, just as many say Congress just did. Those interested can find many other examples in the weekly reports the Coalition on Human Needs is publishing.

No one, I think, would doubt that Congress hasn’t acted to avert impacts like the aforementioned because the people affected don’t have the political clout that frequent fliers and agribusinesses do.

I think we’re looking at something more difficult to deal with than a power imbalance, however.

The air traffic controller and food safety inspector furloughs caused — or were about to cause — large, clear, nationwide impacts. In many other cases, the proverbial is only beginning to hit the fan — or more precisely, a vast number of fans.

Most of the genuine news we have about the impacts on low-income people and the programs that serve them are local — and often likelihoods rather than sure things.

This is partly because program directors, in many cases, don’t yet know what their share of the cut will be. Even those who do are mostly still figuring out how they’ll manage — and give various answers when asked.

We also don’t get a whole picture because stories tend to get written when some advocates have gotten reporters interested. And, face it, some programs have more heart-tug appeal than others.

In one respect, it’s good that we’re getting stories. In fact, this is a welcome — if unintended — side effect of the air traffic controller save.

Yet, in another respect, it’s dangerous. Because the more major media focus on a handful of programs — and the more grassroots campaigns call on Congress to save one or another — the more likely other FAA-type fixes become.

And most federal agencies, unlike FAA, don’t have a pot of money they can tap that they didn’t need to spend this year anyway.

So a reprieve for some programs will mean deeper cuts for others. Like as not they’ll be programs that benefit low-income people — especially those that don’t have an effective public voice or lend themselves so well to poignant individual stories.

House Republicans seem open to this. “The main thing,” says Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK), “is to secure $85 billion in savings. We are not wedded to where the savings come from.”

But the fundamental issue is the savings, a.k.a spending cuts. Sequestration is a singularly dumb way to address a problem that’s been blown out of all proportion, i.e., the federal deficit.

Yet, as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has testified, deep cuts at this point — even if not across-the-board — are likely to lead to less deficit reduction.

And the whole approach is unbalanced, since sequestration comes on top of $1.5 trillion in cuts and a mere $620 billion or so in additional revenues.

Congress ought to get rid of sequestration, which none of its members wanted — or thought would come to pass. And some, who will remain nameless, should back off their cuts-only/cuts-now solution to the long-term deficit.

That, I hope, will be the message that all who care about the well-being of our nation’s children, seniors and everyone in between will deliver. Because if we don’t hang together … Well, you know the rest.