Ryan Budget

Child advocates oppose Ryan budget blueprint

House budget chair proposes deep cuts to health care and income supports

WASHINGTON – Voices for America's Children, the nation's largest network of multi-issue child advocacy organizations, today raised serious concerns over House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's (R-WI) proposed 2013 federal budget, arguing that the plan guts health and income support services needy children and families rely on.

"It is simply unconscionable to pay for trillions of dollars in tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans by slashing services that children and families need," said Bill Bentley, president and CEO of Voices for America's Children. "Especially with the unemployment rate still high, families cannot afford another cut to our most important health and safety net programs."

The budget plan outlined by Rep. Ryan this week would cut Medicaid and related health programs by $770 billion, or about a third. Medicaid provides health care for more than 28 million American children.

"With more than a million children uninsured in Texas, we must protect health programs in the federal budget," said Eileen Garcia, CEO of Texans Care for Children, a Voices member. "Paul Ryan's budget would make things worse for Texas families by gutting Medicaid and stunting the 2010 health reform law."

FY2013 Ryan Budget Proposal on Food Stamps Would Increase Hunger, Eliminate Jobs, and Slow the Economy

Statement attributable to Jim Weill, President, Food Research and Action Center.

March 20, 2012 – Washington, D.C. – The budget proposed today by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) would abandon the many strengths of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), increase hunger and joblessness, and harm the economy. Seventy-seven percent of voters, moreover, oppose cutting SNAP.

For decades, SNAP, the new name for food stamps, has enjoyed strong bipartisan support and has helped ensure the poorest and hungriest people in our nation can put food on the table. SNAP's responsiveness to unemployment proved it to be one of the most effective safety net programs during the recent recession, providing families with a stable source of food. Households are facing impossible choices among food, home heating, gasoline, rent, medicine and other basic needs. FRAC's most recent look at food hardship found that nearly one in five Americans said there were times they didn't have enough money to buy food that they or their families needed in 2011. No state or urban area or congressional district is anywhere close to being hunger-free.

Destroying SNAP's structure by converting it to a block grant would render it unable to respond swiftly in times of need. Under Chairman Ryan's block grant structure for food assistance accompanied – according to a Budget Committee spokesperson – by a $122.5 billion funding cut, states would be faced with impossible choices as need increased: Do they cut benefits, or do they place children and seniors on waiting lists for food assistance? And this doesn't even take into consideration the ability of states to administer the program. In commenting on a recent report regarding shortcomings in state administration by the Center for Public Integrity, the New York Times editorial page noted that states "generally have a poor record of taking care of their neediest citizens, and could not be relied on to maintain lifeline programs like food stamps if Washington just wrote them checks and stopped paying attention."

Threats to Pell in House Budget Proposal are Ungrounded, Unfair and Misguided

Mar 22, 2012
By Vickie Choitz

The House FY 2013 Budget Resolution released this week by budget committee Chairman Paul Ryan makes vague but undeniable threats to the Pell Grant program, proposing to limit funding and further tighten eligibility requirements. The premises for these threats--that Pell is on an unsustainable path and that it increases tuition--are wholly unsupported by the facts, and further cuts to this program are extremely misguided.

Analysis of Congressional Budget Office data shows that the Pell Grant program is on a stable and sustainable growth path: costs are projected to decline slightly in FY13 and remain stable over the next ten years. Pell Grant students already have suffered $56 billion in cuts that will take place over the next decade as a result of recent budget agreements. They lost the "year-round" Pell Grant in the FY11 budget agreement, which allowed them to receive a grant for summer study, and suffered eligibility cuts in the FY12 omnibus appropriations bill. Given that an estimated 40 percent of the recent growth in the program was due to a crumbling economy during the recession, it is unfair to punish Pell Grant students who are trying to regain their economic footing with harsh cuts to their financial aid grants.

The Pell Grant program is projected to be stable over the next ten years, but it does face a large funding gap in FY14 (October 2013-September 2014). This gap is due to a drop in savings from student loan changes last year to help fund prior years' growth. To keep Pell on a sustainable path, Congress should provide continuous funding through this gap without making harmful program changes affecting low-income students. A good place to find this funding would be the current overly complex and poorly targeted array of federal higher education tax credits and deductions.

If Ryan Gets His Way on Poverty

Budget Would Widen Income Gap and Shred the Safety Net

By Joy Moses | March 21, 2012

The latest House Republican budget plan asks low-income and middle-class Americans to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while simultaneously delivering massive tax breaks to the richest 1 percent and preserving huge giveaways to Big Oil. It's a recipe for repeating the mistakes of the Bush administration, during which middle-class incomes stagnated and only the privileged few enjoyed enormous gains.

Each component of the new House Republican budget threatens the middle class while doing nothing to add jobs or grow our economy. It ends the guarantee of decent insurance for senior citizens, breaking Medicare's bedrock promise. It slashes investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research, all of which are key drivers of economic growth and mobility. And it cuts taxes for those at the top, asking the middle class to pick up the tab. It's a budget designed to benefit the top 1 percent at everyone else's expense.

Yesterday House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) released a budget plan for fiscal year 2013. Quite simply, if Rep. Ryan gets his way the nation will never make a full commitment to solve major social problems and in many ways we will take giant steps backward to a time when there was virtually no safety net for those falling on hard times.

Consider how the Ryan budget would shape America's next chapter and then decide whether it reflects our nation, or any nation, at its best.

Income inequality will grow

The Ryan budget will expand the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The middle class has already been disappearing along with the number of well-paying jobs, resulting in sinking wages for average workers.

How would Rep. Ryan take us further down that road? He proposes deep cuts to discretionary spending that would hurt programs like Pell Grants (which help low-income families access higher education), K-12 education, and job training. These programs help individuals secure a place in the middle class and remain there. When these cuts are coupled with Rep. Ryan's continued significant tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, the rich will get richer while ordinary Americans will face greater struggles to adequately provide for themselves and their families.