The Bush Budget vs. America's Communities

The Bush administration’s 2006 budget proposes devastating cutbacks in domestic security, community development, education, human services, transportation, and the environment that spell disaster for America’s cities and towns.

Most of the news about the budget focuses specific programs--Social Security and Medicaid,  education, the Community Development Block Grant, agricultural subsidies, Amtrak, among a host of others. 

We are also learning what this budget will mean to broad groups of people in the United States--the elderly, veterans, farmers, working families, the poor.

Yet the central principle behind all of these cutbacks is clear:

The Bush administration wants to make America’s cities, neighborhoods, and communities pay for the War in Iraq, at a time when wealthy taxpayers are benefiting from more than $220 billion in tax cuts that the President now proposes to make permanent.

American conservatives seem to think that while it’s an honor to die for your country, it’s an imposition to pay for it.

America’s communities are paying the price.

We at the Institute for the Study of Civic Values believe that to ”promote the general welfare,” and “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity,” the federal government must help us build strong and healthy communities throughout the United States.

That is an American principle as old as the 1st National Bank of the United States and the 19th Century Homestead Act. It has been a central premise of federal policy for more than 70 years.

This what the Bush administration  wants to discard in the name of “effective government.”

For this reason, we have developed a new web site--BushBudget.com--to provide updated information devastating impact that the 2006 proposed Bush budget will have on America’s communities, large and small. Among its main features is direct access to the Census Bureau's Consolidated Federal Funds Reports that the total federal investment in each and every County in the United States.

We have also established an email list to bring together people from all parts of the country who are prepared to fight for America’s communities in the budget process.

You can join it by going to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bushbudget/join.

One thing is certain: unless we, the people working to build strong communities in America mobilize to defend them, no one will do it for us.

The campaign for America’s communities begins here.