>Show me one cut in the budget for anything. If a department gets a 5%
>increase
>instead of a 12 % increase that is not a cut.

Okay. You ask, you get.

From a series of reports I have on hand:

----------------
The Administration's budget for fiscal 2003 proposes a cut of nearly $600
million or 80 percent in the COPS program, a federal-local partnership that
promotes community policing and funds additional police officers and new
technology. The proposed cut would eliminate all funding for hiring
community-based and school-based police officers. Similarly, the Local Law
Enforcement Block Grant program, which helps local police departments pay for
hiring, training, and overtime for officers, as well as equipment purchases,
would be merged with another program and cut by $200 million. And that is on
top of the 25% cut the program suffered last year.
-------------------

Cuts in the Federal Budet for the Federal Center for Mental Health Services
(CMHS) has resulted/is resulting in the closing of three centers--the National
Empowerment Center in Massachusetts, the National Mental Health Consumers
Self-Help Clearinghouse in Pennsylvania, and the Consumer Organization and
Networking Technical Assistance Center (CONTAC) in West Virginia.

-----------------------

Housing vouchers for low income families -- people who are working hard but
whose basic living utilities and rent consume over half their
below-poverty-line incomes -- have been cut back, eliminating as many as
137,000 people who may end up homeless as a result.

--------------

The Feds recently required a new smallpox vaccination program for the states to
comply with, but they are not *funding* any of this, requiring the states to do
so. Further, the Bush Bio-Watch program has begun sending vast amounts of
material to various public labs for testing, but the Federal
Government/Homeland Security only allocates $1 million per city where the
testing is being done, a fraction of what the actual costs will be, and the
states are still required to handle the testing, so the states will have to
take that money out of other resources (which is happening a lot).

I've got another dozen or so on hand...you want 'em all? Or is just the "one
cut" you mentioned sufficient?

>Where in the Constitution does it give the government the right to STEAL
>money from
>one group and give it to another. NOWHERE.

So I guess all this money given to foreign countries, to the military, to
Halliburton, all that's illegal an unconstitutional, is that your point?

>As far as the environment goes the damn environmentalist and their lawyers
>have
>caused far more damage. There used to be something called the superfund
>cleanup act
>where the chemical companies and others paid taxes into the fund for cleanup
>of
>toxic sites. So how did little Bill spend the money?. On lawyers to sue the
>companies that paid into the superfund for cleanup and to run around the
>country
>finding out who dumped one barrel of waste into a pit and suing them. So why
>have
>there been few or no toxic cleanups, and the answer is government bureaucrats
>who
>keep their careers going by finding more ways to sue companies rather than
>just
>cleaning up the toxic sites.

The only thing wrong with this is that it ain't so. If you'd done your
homework, you would have found out that there were a LOT of superfund cleanup
activities and prosecutions done under the prior administration, and work *was*
done on cleanups.

The problem is that lawsuits take time, and when the Bush administration came
in, many cases were just coming to fruition...and they gutted the provisions
and the budget for forcing the companies to do the cleanups. So they left the
investigative aspect intact, and took out the money, the resources, and the
authority to force anybody to do anything.


jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
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