School Counselors of Florida

After Finishing With FY2011, House Will Quickly Take Up ‘Reverse Robin Hood’ Budget for FY 2012 Congress and the President agreed to a spending plan for the rest of fiscal year 2011 minutes before midnight on April 8th, narrowly averting a government shutdown. The details of that plan are still coming into focus, and Congress must still vote on the deal this week. The plan would immediately cut $38 billion in federal spending, including $13 billion from programs within the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Labor. Within the Department of Education, the legislation includes cuts of at least $2.5 million to the Elementary and Secondary School Counseling Program, $79 million from Safe and Drug-Free Schools, $25 million from TRIO, $20 million from GEAR UP, and $138 million from career and technical education.

These FY 2011 cuts will be painful for many schools, students, and school counselors. Unfortunately, the FY 2012 budget the House will also vote on this week would even more sharply curtail federal investments in education and would end Medicare and Medicaid as we know it, in order to pay for large tax cuts for the most well-off Americans. If adopted by both chambers of Congress, the House budget proposal would make it virtually impossible to modestly increase Medicare spending to expand access to outpatient mental health services provided by licensed professional counselors, to invest in Pell Grants for low-income college students, and to support school counseling services through the Elementary and Secondary School Counseling Program (ESSCP).

ACA’s legislative agenda includes opposing efforts to address federal deficits solely or primarily through cuts in health, education, and social services spending which will disproportionately impact lower- and middle-income Americans. The House “Path to Prosperity” budget proposal, unveiled last week by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), fails this test.

The Ryan proposal’s tax breaks total $4.2 trillion, including:

· A permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts, under which the average person making at least $1 million a year gets $125,000 a year in tax breaks;

· A doubling in size of the estate tax exemption, up to $10 million from the current $5 million;

· A reduction in the top tax rate for corporations and for individuals earning the very highest incomes down to 25 percent, the lowest level in 80 years, from the current 35 percent rate applied to income above $373,650 a year.

These tax cuts would be paid for by “broadening” the tax base, and through an estimated $4.3 trillion in spending cuts, at least two-thirds of which would come from programs assisting low- and middle-income Americans.

The cuts include:

· Turning Medicare into a voucher system in which seniors and individuals with disabilities would have to buy private health insurance, increasing beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket spending by thousands of dollars;

· Turning Medicaid into a block grant program and reducing spending by $771 billion, raising the cost of nursing home care for millions of American families;

· Repealing $1.4 trillion in funding for health insurance purchasing subsidies and Medicaid spending called for under the new health care reform law;

· Cutting Pell Grant funding by billions of dollars, putting college out of reach for thousands of low-income students;

· Repealing the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program for long-term care insurance;

· Removing the tax credits for small employers offering health insurance to their employees included in the new health care reform law.

Ryan’s budget proposal claims credit for $1.3 trillion more in savings, but these savings are illusory. The budget proposal assumes spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will decline significantly over the next decade with scheduled troop withdrawals, whereas the baseline spending level his budget is being compared to assumes an extension of current law—including present-day troop levels and much higher spending—over the next ten years.

Deficit reduction should include shared sacrifice, not just sacrifice for those at the lower end of the economic spectrum. ACA joined an extensive list of national organizations who are members of the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities in writing to House members urging opposition to the budget. You can read the letter at http://www.c-c-d.org/task_forces/health/CCD-Letter-on-Medicaid(D0357782-6).pdf. Counselors can learn more about the FY 2012 budget through organizations such as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (http://www.cbpp.org) and Families USA (http://www.familiesusa.org).

Representatives should vote against a budget which severely cuts Pell Grants, Medicaid, and Medicare programs with one hand in order to give billions of dollars in tax cuts to those who are already wealthy with the other. Counselors can identify their Representative by entering their zip code in the “Find Your Representative” search box at http://www.house.gov.