A year ago, I wrote about a Federal program that provides boxes of groceries to low-income seniors. A smart, cost-effective program that got help to people who needed it in a form that was genuinely helpful to them. A program--I don't even need to tell you this, do I?--that the Bush administration wanted to cut.
For the most part, they didn't succeed; the budget was cut from $111 million to $106 million, but the program remained largely intact.
Now, a year later, the administration is trying again.
The rationale, then as now, was 'budget constraints'. I'll just quote myself here:
But the outrageousness of this goes way beyond the merits of the program, to the completely surreal budgetary worldview used to justify it. 'Tight budgetary times'? The people who cut revenues by nearly $300 billion per year in order to give free money to the ultrawealthy are talking about tight fucking budgetary times? The people who decided to throw $1 trillion down the rathole in Iraq, who haven't even bothered to keep an eye on how that money is spent, say this program is just too expensive to keep going?It's the same story all over again. Only one thing has changed: the rate of spending on Iraq. At the current rate, $106 million doesn't go as far.
Because that's the punchline here: the food box program costs a whopping $111 million. We're spending that much on Iraq in 13 hours.
Eight hours and fifty minutes.
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