Don't you know we're at war?

In a new study, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that under Bush's budget, the Housing Choice Voucher program, better known as Section 8, will be cut 40% by 2009 - "one of the deepest cuts made in any major program to help low-income families and elderly and disabled people in recent decades." The Section 8 program is the main federal program for assisting low-income people obtain housing.

If the funding cut were accommodated by reducing the number of households the program assists, the number of low-income families with children, senior citizens, and people with disabilities whom the program serves would be reduced by 250,000 next year and more than 800,000 by 2009.

The program would also be converted to a block grant while removing basic requirements such as limiting how much tenants can be charged for rent and targeting vouchers to poor rather than middle-class households.

Conservatives love block grants because they allow them to wax poetic about their concern for the poor while actually subsidizing middle- and upper-class projects. Community development block grants, originally supposedly intended to help lower-income neighborhoods improve infrastructure and facilities, have been known to help underwrite sports arenas and shopping malls instead - some of which actually drove out of neighborhoods the very people the money was theoretically aimed to help.

The argument is always for "flexibility." "States understand their needs better than federal bureaucrats," they say - a stand that is instantly forgotten when some state passes regulations either stiffer (in terms of corporate control) or looser (in terms of eligibility for public assistance) than the rightists want, at which time the need to avoid "a confusing array of varying standards" becomes paramount. The "flexibility" they propose for block grants is usually akin to going to the hospital for appendicitis and allowing the physician the "flexibility" to treat you for heart disease instead because they get a better insurance payout that way.

But don't worry about cutbacks: I'm sure as part of the expanded budget for "homeland security," there will be a multitude of bright new posters explaining how our fears have been color-coded, and they'll make fine liners for cardboard carton housing.

Link via Daily News Online.