DeMint's deficit-cutting plan targets poor
DeMint's deficit-cutting plan targets poor
Posted on Tuesday, 12.20.11
By JAMES ROSEN McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/20/2554475/demints-deficit-cutting-plan-targets.html
A plan by Republican U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina to slash the federal budget deficit would hit the poorest Americans especially hard, directing 70 percent of its $4.2 trillion in spending cuts at safety-net programs intended to help tens of millions of low-income people.
The plan proposes $20 billion in cuts that would affect the affluent. It suggests almost $3 trillion in cuts that would affect low-income Americans, leading one liberal economist to call the plan "cruel."
But DeMint, a leading figure in the national tea party movement, says the cuts - including eliminating the earned income-tax credit and child tax credit for Americans who don't earn enough money to owe federal income taxes - are needed.
"During the Clinton years, during the Bush years, even when the economy was booming, we were still adding to the welfare rolls," DeMint said. "We have not helped the people we're supposedly helping. Poverty has gone up in America.
"We have trained several generations of Americans to be dependent on government rather than trying to get them off welfare."
DeMint's plan won't pass this Congress. Democrats, who control the Senate, easily could kill it if it came up for a vote.
However, the budget cuts proposed by DeMint - known as Sen. Tea Party - provide insight into the thinking of one of the Senate's most archconservatives and his tea party allies. DeMint helped raise money for many of the tea party-backed GOP freshmen in Congress.
DeMint released the plan last month alongside Republican Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah, though the bulk of its spending cuts would come from the Welfare Reform Act, a bill that DeMint also introduced last month.
Paul and Lee are first-year senators who are indebted to DeMint because he helped them win election by contributing a combined $603,520 to their campaigns from his Senate Conservatives Fund.
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