http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0209-26.htm

Published on Wednesday, February 9, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times
Bush's Budget Transforms the War on Poverty Into a War on the Poor
by Eric Garcetti

President Bush refers to himself as a wartime president, and he has shown
resolve not to back down on the battlefield. But the budget he released
this week waves a flag of surrender in another war, the 40-year "war on
poverty."

The budget announces cuts of 28% — or $1.4 billion — from our arsenal of
critical social programs. The largest and most vital to Los Angeles is the
Community Development Block Grant. As more cities draw on poverty-fighting
grants each year, Los Angeles' allocation has steadily decreased, from
$88.6 million in 2003 to $82.7 million this year. Under the proposed cuts,
our allocation would plummet by at least $15 million.

Alongside previously proposed cuts to Section 8 housing assistance, these
reductions send a stark message to the country's poor, its elderly and its
urban youth: You're no longer our problem.

In Los Angeles, these grants pay for after-school programs, home repairs
for the elderly in blighted neighborhoods and intervention programs for
youth on the brink of joining or already in gangs. They spur economic
development projects and fund outreach to the homeless.

Now the president wants to cut these groups off from the prospects of
economic recovery. That represents a radical departure from a nation's
commitment to its most vulnerable citizens.

In the prosperous decades after World War II, the nation found too many
Americans still without access to decent housing, education and economic
opportunity. Later, from President Johnson's declaration of a war on
poverty in 1964 to the expansion of federal anti-poverty programs under
presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter, a national consensus emerged supporting
the federal government's power and duty to alleviate disenfranchisement and
powerlessness in our poorest urban and rural areas. Even President Reagan,
a conservative hero, expanded block grants.

The programs Bush intends to cut enjoy bipartisan support in Congress:
Conservatives often favor block grants, which allow local governments to
set their own agenda to fight poverty. Federal officials have suggested
that the cuts are intended to hold local governments "more accountable."
The Department of Housing and Urban Development already conditions grants
on oversight and meeting exacting standards.

Even more perverse, the president himself has called the country's
attention to causes that his own budget abandons. His State of the Union
address admirably underscored the fight against gang violence. But the
organizations that struggle to do what Bush called "giving young people,
especially young men in our cities, better options than apathy, or gangs,
or jail" rely on block grant funds.

The president has also sworn to end homelessness in a decade, but block
grants finance the city and county's homeless services and make up 20% of
the city's Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

New ideas are welcome in the struggle against poverty. Fiscal discipline
will be necessary to balance an overstretched budget. But this budget
attempts neither. The war on poverty has suddenly become a war on the poor.

Eric Garcetti, who represents the 13th District on the Los Angeles City
Council, chairs the city's Housing, Community and Economic Development
Committee.