December 11, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor
Working Hard and Losing Out
By SHARON LERNER

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ON a small plot of land in North White Plains, low-income women have been planting and harvesting their own squash, collard greens and tomatoes for the last three years. For the women, many of whom are returning to work after struggles with domestic violence and mental illness, the garden provides a lesson in self-sufficiency even as it lowers their food bills. Yet the money that pays for such innovative efforts to combat hunger will be eliminated if the budget package passed by the House of Representatives just before Thanksgiving becomes law in a few weeks.

The loss of the little garden is probably the smallest of the many changes facing Americans if the House gets its way, but it's an apt metaphor for the cuts, which threaten to undermine both the independence and sustenance of thousands of poor New Yorkers. The final budget package is likely to come to a vote in Congress just in time for the holidays. It may well be remembered as the gift that keeps on taking for years to come.

Members of Congress have set out to find the bulk of their budget savings in programs like Medicaid, child-support enforcement, food stamps and subsidized child care, even though poor people are already facing increasingly grim prospects, particularly here in New York. More than one in 10 New Yorkers either face hunger or are on the brink of hunger, according to the most recent figures from the United States Department of Agriculture. Fewer than two-thirds have employer-based health insurance. And in New York City, more than one in five residents - over 500,000 of them are children - live below the poverty line.

If the federal cuts are approved, state and city lawmakers will then have to determine how to follow the new rules - a process that won't always be clear-cut or easy. Revisions to Medicaid, for example, give states several options to reduce spending on the health program for the poor.

Legislators could raise fees, impose new premiums or scale back covered services. It's not clear which options New York lawmakers would choose to save money, but the obvious target will be working families with incomes just above the poverty line, including tens of thousands of who have left welfare in recent years.

The belt-tightening doesn't always make financial sense. For example, the child-support enforcement program, which helps single parents collect money from their former partners, could see cuts by almost a billion dollars during the next 10 years. This loss of federal money would cause single parents - mostly mothers - in New York State to lose more than a billion dollars in child support over that period, unless state taxpayers cover the cost of the program themselves.

Proposed cuts to the food-stamp program would similarly reverberate well into the future. By 2008, the proposed law would increase to seven years from five the length of time a legal immigrant needs to be in this country before receiving help from the food program and cause some 13,600 legal New York immigrants to lose benefits, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Perhaps the biggest setback for low-income New Yorkers isn't a cut at all, at least not technically. The House bill ratchets up the time single mothers on welfare must spend engaged in work-related activities outside the house to 40 hours per week from 30, but offers very little additional money for child care. Just meeting the increased need for child care along with the administrative costs of enforcing the new work requirements would cost $8.3 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, more than 16 times the new spending offered in the bill.

Because the government is required to pay for child care for those on welfare, low-income working families, who rely on the same limited pot of money for child-care assistance, would probably end up the big losers. Already facing long waiting lists, rising co-payments and stricter eligibility requirements in many New York counties, many parents would be forced by the inability to secure safe, affordable places to keep their children to give up their jobs, which would in turn swell the welfare rolls.

That's an outcome no one wants.

It's unclear how members of the House and Senate will vote on the final budget legislation. Let's hope that once they understand all that's at stake, New York's representatives in Washington will reject any proposal that leaves poor people in the state worse off and more dependent.

Sharon Lerner is a senior fellow at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.