Deficit making poor poorer, rich richer

By PETER ROGNESS
MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL STAR TRIBUNE
Webster defines the word "reconcile" as "to cause to be friendly again, to bring back to harmony." Strange, then, to see a host of leaders rise up from the religious and non-profit sectors to stand against reconciliation.
Reconciliation is also the term for what happens when the government addresses gaps in revenue and expenditures in the federal budget. When the figures don't add up, Congress has mandated that "reconciliation legislation" be passed to bring the budget into alignment. (Never mind that we end up with huge deficits nevertheless.)
This reconciliation process has been around for 25 years. This year the proposed cuts have an air of cruel class warfare to them because Congress has split reconciliation into two bills, one mandating about $35 billion in program cuts, the other making permanent $70 billion in tax cuts.
With the pressures of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Congress chose to delay until now the painful process of budget reconciliation. It wouldn't have been seemly, with poor residents in the South seen daily on our television screens, to pull back the very programs on which so many of them depend. But now the time has come.
Hunger and disease
The proposed cuts would be devastating to low- and moderate-income people, not only in the Gulf Coast but throughout the nation. With deep cuts in food stamps and Medicaid, the poor would face more hunger and disease. Low- and moderate-income families would see cuts in student financial aid. The United States would cut its already less-than-fair-share contribution to the international commitment to end extreme global poverty. And on and on.
Meanwhile, the second bill will propose extending the 2003 tax cuts that lowered the tax rate on capital gains and dividend income. Fifty-three percent of the benefits from those two provisions go to the 0.2 percent of households with incomes over $1 million per year; 78 percent of the cuts go to the 3.3 percent of households with incomes exceeding $200,000 per year.
The cruel irony is that the $35 billion in program cuts don't match the proposed $70 billion in tax cuts, so this two-part reconciliation doesn't reconcile anything. It makes our deficit bigger, the poor poorer and the rich richer.
This reconciliation is neither friendly nor harmonious. It is cynical and savage. It pits the rich against the poor. And it does violence to the compassionate values we claim in this country. It needs to stop in its tracks, and we need to require of our leaders that they in fact shape national policy that is harmonious, just and compassionate. They need to be reminded of the values that undergird our life together.
True reconciliation is one of them.
X Peter Rogness is bishop of the St. Paul (Minn.) Area Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.