Details on the Radical Republican Plan to Starve the Poor and Give to the Wealthy:

After five years of budget hypocrisy, Republican leaders in Congress are floundering in their current attempt to portray themselves as fiscally responsible. Their plan to cut basic safety-net programs for the poor and use the money for a new round of ridiculous tax reductions for the wealthy is meeting resistance from the party's newly emboldened moderates. When the House returns for business today, we hope those late-arriving champions of financial and moral sanity hold firm.

The House's Grand Guignol theatrics involve $50 billion in spending cuts that would be more than canceled by the $70 billion lost in extending what the Republicans initially sold as "temporary" cuts in capital gains and dividend taxes.

The coalition of moderate Republicans and unified Democrats should continue holding out on the House floor. People are unhappy enough with the performance of the Bush administration and its Congressional allies these days. We doubt if they'd want their representatives to plunge the nation further into debt and cut government services, all in the name of additional tax advantages for investors.

Some of the cruel and unnecessary cuts the moderates are fighting include the following:

• $12 billion in Medicaid cuts that would invite states to levy health care co-payments and workfare increases on the poor while dropping preventive medical care for children.

• $14 billion from the underpinnings of some of the most vital student aid and loan programs.

• $4 billion from efforts to enforce child support - a successful program with a four-to-one return on investment, and rooted, it should be noted, in the family-values agenda invoked by conservatives.

• $844 million in food stamp cuts, knocking close to 300,000 working poor and legal immigrants from the program.

• The elimination of day care subsidies for an estimated 330,000 children of the working poor.

Not mentioned in the Republicans' budget stew are the lost surpluses and deepening deficits created with five years of choking the revenue flow. Conservatives posturing for "tough choices" budgeting will eventually have to find some dead-of-night moment for the unavoidable necessity of voting to raise the national debt another trillion or so to pay for all of their fiscal responsibility. Sh-sh-sh!

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/opinion/15tue3.html?th&emc=th

email (http://www.house.gov/writerep/) or call (202- 224-3121) your Representative today.