Bush to Cash Strapped States: "Screw You!"
washingtonpost.com
Rescue's Just Not Part of the Plan
NEW YORK -- For anyone who came of age here in the 1970s, the moment endures as part of a primal political narrative. Its coffers busted, New York City leaders carried a beggar's cup to the nation's capital in hopes of securing a $2 billion loan guarantee. President Gerald Ford listened, and offered nothing.
The Daily News headline the next day had the aphoristic brevity of graffiti: "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD."
Soon a financial control board became the city's czar, and it laid off tens of thousands of workers. New York's current police commissioner, Ray Kelly, recalls watching dozens of officers, one after another, walk into his precinct house and hand in their badges and guns.
Now the Bush administration seems intent on trumping Ford, on a national rather than regional scale. White House officials could glance last week at a potholed national terrain, with more than half of the states bracing for staggering deficits this year and next. California faces a $34 billion hole, New York's is $12 billion and President Bush's home state of Texas anticipates a $9.9 billion shortfall through 2005.
But rather than the sort of rescue package much wished for by the states, the administration is suggesting additional responsibilities. It proposes to replace the $13 billion Section 8 housing voucher program -- the country's main form of housing assistance for the poor -- with one that the states would run. The federal government would provide a lump sum payment to the states each year, but it has offered no assurances that enough federal funding will follow to keep the program whole. Federal officials already whisper their hope that hard-pressed state officials might prune back this "entitlement" program in the future.
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