House GOP Finds Savings in Program for Doubly Disadvantaged Children

Well, you’ve got to hand it to House Republicans. Takes guts to go after poor children with disabilities. But that’s apparently what they have in mind.

The budget resolution they recently passed would cut funding for the Supplemental Security Income program by $3.5 billion over the next 10 years. These savings would be achieved by reducing benefits to families with more than one child enrolled in SSI.

And adding insult to injury, the Budget Committee’s report falsely claims that advocates have, in the past, supported such a proposal.

Some Basic Facts and Figures

SSI provides modest cash benefits to low-income people who are elderly, blind or otherwise severely disabled. For adults this means, among other things, “unable to do any substantial gainful activity.”

Children, of course, can’t do substantial gainful activities — unless their parents find work for them as models or actors. So the SSI standard for them is different.

They must have “a medically determinable” physical or mental disability that “result[s] in marked and severe functional limitations.” Only disabilities expected to last at least a year or to be fatal count.

Children meeting this standard can receive SSI benefits only if their families have less than $3,000 in resources, except for certain specified assets, e.g., a car, a home, a burial plot.

Benefits are modest — a maximum of $698 a month this year. Most children get less.

The benefits partly offset the additional costs parents incur when their children are severely disabled, e.g., lost income because a parent has to stay home or work less to provide care, transportation to and from doctors and therapists, out-of-pocket expenses for aids, special foods and the like.

Note the “partly” here. A recent research review found that direct and indirect costs of raising disabled children averaged $10,830 — $3,440 less than the average income support SSI provides. And not all families included in the cost average had children with disabilities severe enough to qualify for SSI.

Not surprisingly then, more than a third of children with SSI benefits live in families below the poverty line. Many more live in families that experience material hardships, e.g., food insecurity, utility cut-offs, inability to keep up with the rent.

House Budget Committee Proposal

The House Budget Committee justifies the proposed SSI cut on the basis of the benefits model “typically” used by other “welfare” programs.

Some indeed, as its report says, provide benefits on a sliding scale. The scale often weights benefits toward the neediest.

But household size is sometimes a factor. For example, the maximum food stamp benefit for a family of four is less than four times the maximum benefit for a single individual.

This makes some sense, as we shoppers know. A gallon of milk costs less per ounce than a pint.

It’s absurd to think that a parent who has two or more children with disabilities could achieve some comparable economies of scale.

Last time I checked, pharmacies don’t give discounts if a parent fills prescriptions for more than one child. Nor do the day care centers that provide the intensive, specialized care that children with severe disabilities need.

Perhaps the House Budget majority thinks parents can achieve efficiencies — for example, rotate use of a wheelchair between two children with mobility impairments.

Set aside for a moment the effects on the kids. The idea itself implies that all disabled children in a family have identical needs. You don’t have to be an expert to know this is wrong, even when the children have disabilities with the same clinical name.

More likely, the Republican majority is going after SSI because it’s “welfare.” Not only that, but an entitlement — the worst kind of federal spending, if it aids low-income people.

False Claim of Support

What’s truly beyond the pale is the Committee’s claim that advocates have supported a sliding scale. To exemplify, it cites a remark Jonathan Stein made during a 1995 hearing.

Stein, General Counsel at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, allowed as how there should be some sort of cap or sliding scale of benefits “for very large families” — this in response to a hypothetical about a family with eight disabled children.

To rope him and his organization into the current proposal is fundamentally — and knowingly — dishonest.

Maybe the best the Committee could do because it’s hard to justify the cut otherwise.

NOTE: I am deeply indebted to Rebecca Vallas, another attorney at CLS, for helping me get up to speed on this issue. What I’ve written reflects some of the many documents she shared and her answers to my many questions. The political analysis (and any errors) are entirely my own.

Why I’ve Little to Say About the Ryan-Republican Budget … But Say It Anyway

I feel I ought to write something about the Ryan-Republican budget plan. I’ve been advised to call it that because it represents the platform Republicans are running on.

I’ve  read the Path to PovertyProsperity twice now. Both times got infuriated, which usually gets my blogging juices flowing.

But I’m stuck for a fresh topic. So I’ll write about that because the reasons are telling.

Proposals Replicate Last Year’s

One reason it’s hard for me to figure out what to write is that the new budget plan is in many ways the same as last years — at least for the issues I cover.

As you’ve probably read, it does take a new tack on privatizing Medicare. But the end results would be the same — costs increasingly shifted to seniors, ultimately less health care — and death of the traditional Medicare option the plan supposedly preserves.

So far as safety net programs are concerned, the two the Path gives specifics about are basically rehashes of the 2011 Path proposals.

Change Medicaid from a cost-sharing program to a block grant. Link increases in federal funding to population growth and the overall inflation rate rather than to health care costs. And let states do whatever to cope with the cost crunch.

Well, I wrote about that last year.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has updated figures, but the bottom line is still the same — many millions of low-income people without health insurance, fewer services and/or higher co-pays for those fortunate enough to still qualify.

Same deal for the food stamp program. Once again, the budget plan would convert it to a block grant, using the deeply-flawed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program as a model.

There’d be new work requirements for participants — and time limits, even apparently for the nearly 30% of households that have income from work. Also apparently for those too young, too old or too disabled to work — well over half of all participants.

And again federal funding would be capped at a level far below projected costs.

But I’ve already written about this attack on the safety net too.

The only news is that the block grant would kick in one year later and cut federal spending by more — at least $133.5 billion over the first 10 years, rather than the $127 billion estimated last year.

Plan Lacks Specifics

The other reason I find it hard to write about the budget plan is that it’s egregiously short on specifics.

The food stamp program, for example, is lumped into a category called “other mandatory,” i.e., all programs that don’t depend on annual appropriations for funding, except for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and a couple of other health care programs.

Jim Horney, CBPP’s Vice President for Federal Fiscal Policy, tells us that the budget plan reflects $1.2 trillion less than projected spending for these programs under current policies.

So even if one accepts Congressman Ryan’s assumed savings in farm subsidies and the federal retirement plan, there’d still be $900 billion in savings unaccounted for.

Where would they come from? Subsidized school meals and/or other child nutrition programs? Supplemental Security Income for low-income elderly and disabled people? Unemployment insurance? TANF (again)?

All of the above?

The same question mark hangs over non-defense programs that depend on annual appropriations — education and job training, housing assistance, veterans benefits, food safety, law enforcement, highways and a whole lot more.

Funding for these programs would be cut $1.2 trillion more than under the caps Congress agreed to last August. Where would the ax fall? Or rather, how close to the ground — and when?

Drastic Changes Deserve Informed Debate

Speaking of the mandatory programs, Horney concludes that “it would be a real travesty” to pass a budget like the Ryan-Republican plan “without a full and honest debate about [the cuts] and without leveling with policymakers and the public what cuts the … budget envisions.”

I think the same is true for the so-called non-defense discretionary programs. True, it’s up to the House Appropriations Committee and its subcommitees to decide exactly how to apportion the cuts.

But we ought to be told straight out how the Ryan-Republican budget would transform our country — because it surely would.

A preliminary analysis by the Congressional Budget Office indicates that, by mid-century, there’d be virtually no funding left for anything except defense, Social Security, the major mandatory health care programs and interest on the debt.

The rest of the federal government would, as arch-conservative Grover Norquist wishes, have been shrunk so small it could be drowned in a bathtub.

Surely this merits more debate than the annual budget process allows — and a full, frank accounting to base it on.

UPDATE: After I posted this, I discovered that the House Budget Committee had published a report that essentially spells out the Fiscal Year 2013 plan in greater detail. It says that block granting the food stamp program would save $122.5 billion over the first 10 years.