Molly Ivins: Screw the children

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C

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 16:53:50 -0800

 

 

 

Fwd: Molly Ivins: Screw the children

 

 

Just what I've been saying, Bush is Robin Hood on acid; he steals

from the poor to give to the rich.

 

 

 

 

Screw the children

Bush budget takes pennies from hungry kids, feeds billions to Star Wars

By Molly Ivins

 

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=18573

 

AUSTIN, Texas -- Budgets are the guts of government. That's where you

find the answer to the first of the three important questions about

who runs a society: Who's getting screwed? Who's doing the screwing?

And what the hell will they do to us next?

 

There was a time when reporters actually read budgets to find out what

was going on, but the things are so humongous these days, we've given

up on that. Consequently, there's usually a bit of a pause after a

budget comes out, while we wait to hear from the various special

interest groups that study their own section of a budget in minute

detail. Then, the screaming from injured parties commences, and the

press presumably sits up and takes note of who's screaming loudest.

 

With President Bush's proposed budget, may it die in committee, no

pause is necessary. Read any overview of the proposal, and you can see

exactly who's getting screwed: children.

 

Good Lord, what a nasty document. The cuts are in health care,

childcare, Head Start, nutrition programs, food stamps and foster

care. Because budgets are such abstract things -- add a little here,

cut some there, all produced by the Department of Great Big Numbers --

it's hard to see what they actually mean to real people's lives.

 

In fact, that's something I've long noticed about George W. Bush: He

really doesn't see any connection between government programs and

helping people. Promoting the general welfare, one of the six reasons

the Constitution gives for having a government in the first place, is

not high on his list. I refer you back to his immortal statement while

governor: " No children are going to go hungry in this state. You'd

think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of hunger in

Texas. " He'd been governor for five years at the time.

 

What this budget means, quite literally, is that more kids will be

hungry and malnourished. More kids who get sick will be unable to see

a doctor, more kids with diseases will go undiagnosed until they get

so sick they have to be carried to the emergency room. More kids who

need glasses or hearing aids won't get them, causing them to fall

behind in school. More kids will show up to start school without being

in the least prepared, and they will remain behind for the rest of

their days. Less money for childcare means more kids left alone or in

unsafe places with irresponsible or incapable people while their

parents work. More kids who are being severely abused will go

unnoticed, and fewer of them will find safe foster homes.

 

I always thought House Majority Leader Tom DeLay should be interested

in that last item -- he had three foster children, now in their 20s,

so he must have some interest in the problem. During his 20 years in

Congress, between 3,000 and 4,000 Texas children have died from abuse.

 

Of course, that's because Texas has such a lousy child " protection "

system. We're quite famous for being " low tax, low service. " Our

abuse-prevention workers carry 74 cases each, the highest in the

nation (to meet national accreditation standards, the monthly

investigative caseload should be 12 to 15), and cutting the federal

foster care budget doesn't help any. Nationwide, about 6,000 kids die

every year from child abuse, murder and suicide.

 

Every now and again, a gross case, like the recently discovered

Florida couple who starved and tortured five of their seven children,

gets some public attention. (Boy, that was a beauty. The kids were

kept in chains in a closet and had their toenails pulled out with

pliers, and the 14-year-old twins weighed 36 and 38 pounds.) But it's

not enough attention, of course, for any God-fearing, Christian

Republican to ever consider voting for taxes (gasp, horrors) to do

something about it.

 

In Texas, whenever there's a budget crunch, the first thing we do is

hurt the children -- last legislative session, we actually turned down

federal money for children's health insurance, leaving almost 170,000

Texas children uninsured, just so the state wouldn't have to put up

the matching funds, $1 for every $2.60 from the feds. How proud we are

to see this fine Texas tradition being exported to Washington by our

former governor.

 

What's really sad is that all this damage is being done to real,

living children -- not clumps of cells in a petri dish -- to save what

is, in Washington terms, pennies. Pitifully small sums.

 

Nothing compared to the $9.9 billion being squandered on the missile

defense boondoggle this year. (Did you notice that the system flunked

yet another test this week, at a cost of another $85 million?) Nothing

compared to the two tax breaks in the budget that benefit ONLY the

really, really rich -- regular folks this time will not even get that

little, tiny slice that went to the middle class in the first Bush tax

cuts.

 

But don't get me started. Read more in the Molly Ivins archive.

 

Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas

Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Who

Let the Dogs In?