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Come and play the Spot the Spin game!!
Seems that the feministas and their supporters know only one thing: cry
long, cry loud and you'll eventually blind people to the truth with your screams for attention (and money). --------------------------------------------------- http://www.wacotrib.com/opin/content...editorial.html Editorial: Abandoning child support Friday, September 08, 2006 Now the "no-new-taxes" crowd in Austin knows how the other half lives. The other half is the local governments on which the Legislature continually dumps unfunded mandates. Now the shoe is on the other foot. The issue is child support enforcement amid dramatic cuts in federal aid. The question: Will lawmakers step up and deal with a serious problem, or will they make matters worse? State officials were in for a shock recently when word came down that the federal Deficit Reduction Act, passed in February, would result in a cut of $196.6 million in federal funds for child support enforcement in Texas. At the same time, Gov. Rick Perry has asked agencies to suggest 10 percent cuts in spending. That would amount to $43.7 million for the attorney general's office, which collects child support. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott says the the two sets of budget cuts would slash his work force by more than half over the next two years. Worse than that, Abbott says the loss of enforcement capacity could cause a staggering $2 billion drop in child support collections. That would win the Olympic gold medal for false economy. Child support is the linchpin of welfare reform. Instead of relying on the government to pay for a child, the government goes after the father. Welfare reform is touted by policymakers in Washington as a major achievement. So why undermine it? Because they've painted themselves into a corner relative to unnecessary tax cuts and spending that actually pays off. This should be a cautionary tale to any and all politicians who talk about spending cuts "across the board." Some spending cuts end up costing taxpayers in the end. Indeed, for a state that spends less per capita than any state in the nation, deeper budget cuts than already have transpired in the last five years would be highly destructive in areas like foster care, child and adult protective services and mental health care. At the same time, the state continues to heap requirements onto local governments. McLennan County Judge Jim Lewis says that 70 percent of the county budget is mandated by the state, though Austin doesn't help out with any of the costs. At the federal level, we've seen ambitious programs like No Child Left Behind become underfunded mandates dumped in states' laps. We've seen the proposed move to convert Medicaid to block grants. Block grants are touted as giving states flexibility. Ultimately, they would limit how much the federal government spends on a program it created and wants to dump on the states. And now? Deep cuts in the programs needed to make welfare reform pay off. And who gets hurt? Not the state. Not the feds. It's the children who get hurt. |
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