Republican Budget Plans Get Two-Thirds of Cuts From Programs for People With Low or Moderate Incomes

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By Richard Kogan and Isaac Shapiro
March 23, 2015

The budgets adopted on March 19 by the House Budget Committee and the Senate Budget Committee each cut more than $3 trillion over ten years (2016-2025) from programs that serve people of limited means. These deep reductions amount to 69 percent of the cuts to non-defense spending in both the House and Senate plans.

Each budget plan derives more than two-thirds of its non-defense budget cuts from programs for people with low or modest incomes even though these programs constitute less than one-quarter of federal program costs. Moreover, spending on these programs is already scheduled to decline as a share of the economy between now and 2025.[1]

The bipartisan deficit reduction plan that Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles (co-chairs of the National Commission on Federal Policy) issued in 2010 adhered to the basic principle that deficit reduction should not increase poverty or widen inequality. The new Congressional plans chart a radically different course, imposing their most severe cuts on people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

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This information depicts the striking imbalance of the House and Senate budget plans. They turn a blind eye to the principle that the nation’s fiscal problems should not be addressed by imposing more hardship on the poorest and most vulnerable Americans. They ignore other alternatives to reducing the deficit, most notably by failing to reduce the more than $1 trillion a year in tax expenditures (deductions, exclusions, credits, and other preferences), which disproportionately benefit high-income households and many of which essentially operate as entitlements provided through the tax code, as former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan has noted.

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