Congresswoman Brown Denounces Bush Administration's FY 2007 Budget Request

Congresswoman Brown Denounces Bush Administration's FY 2007 Budget Request

(Washington, DC) Congresswoman Corrine Brown made the following statement:

"As an African American woman who represents one of the poorest districts in the state of Florida, I see this budget request as an outright callous and insufficient response to the needs of my constituents, and to the majority of our nation's citizens. Clearly, a budget blueprint is about priorities, and a budget request directs money into areas that the President and his advisors see as worthy of government resources, while cutting or deleting funding from areas perceived as less important. And this year's budget request, similar to those in the past five years, is a budget plan which not only is driving our nation into terrible deficit, but excessively cuts badly needed social programs. So once again, the administration is asking our seniors, our students, our children, and the working poor, to make fiscal sacrifices, while those in the upper income brackets and powerful special interest groups emerge unscathed. Reminiscent of Reaganomics of the 1980s, we are seeing increased deficits, more debt, while the majority of Americans have less economic security and savings.

In a budget worth $2.77 trillion, the administration's severe cuts in 141 programs (many of them social services for the poor), are simply incomprehensible. $36 billion in spending cuts in Medicare over the next five years, billions of dollars in food stamp program cuts, decreased spending for local law enforcement agencies and disease control programs, cuts in child support enforcement payments, decreased funding for state Medicaid, less spending for the State Children's Health Insurance Program, by $5 billion over the first five years and by $12 billion over ten, a 9.4% decrease for DOT, 3.8% for education, and a continuation of cuts in veterans healthcare. And once again, the administration plans to do all of this while simultaneously extending nearly all of the upper income tax cuts beyond the 2010 extension date of expiration.

What is perhaps even more ironic is that this draconian slew of tax cuts, tax incentives and tax cut extensions, that would cost the Treasury $1.7 trillion over the next decade, would actually increase spending by $551 billion in the end, not decrease our deficit, as the President claims!

The only thing to be done with this outright appalling budget is to send it back to the drawing board. When this budget makes its way through Congress, I sincerely hope that even the Republican lawmakers will see its outrageous shortcomings, and we, the lawmaking and appropriating body, will redesign a budget that more equitably distributes our nation's resources."

http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/fl03_brown/pr_060206_fy2007budget.html