Then this is for you! ;*)
Posted on 03/08/2006 10:21:17 AM PST by newgeezer
WASHINGTON -- The Senate has agreed to put an additional $1 billion this year into a program to help poor people with energy costs, but only after overcoming resistance from warm state senators who said those suffering from summer heat weren't getting their fair share.
The additional spending would increase to $3.1 billion the amount the federal government will have this year for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, a decades-old program that subsidizes heating and cooling costs for poor families.
The legislation, which still must be considered by the House, passed by a voice vote Tuesday, but only after a lengthy debate between northern state senators, who said rising heating costs were creating a crisis in their states, and lawmakers from warmer states who claimed they were being shortchanged.
Sen. Olympia Snowe, D-Maine, sponsor of the legislation, said people in her state were going without food to pay for heating or, in more dire cases, being hospitalized with hypothermia. "Come to Maine and tell us about it being a mild winter," she said.
Snowe's original bill would have distributed $250 million under an existing formula that she said would mainly benefit warm-weather states. The remaining $750 million would have been labeled contingency funding and disbursed at the discretion of the president. The money was shifted from $1 billion that had been set aside for fiscal 2007.
But that wasn't acceptable to several of her Republican colleagues from the South and Southwest, who said that division would only exacerbate the program's traditional slant toward heating rather than cooling assistance.
Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said LIHEAP spending tends to be front-ended, with the money being used up in the winter months so nothing is left when the temperatures in Arizona climb over 100 degrees. He said the Arizona LIHEAP program reaches only 4 percent of those eligible for assistance.
Kyl said all the money should be decided by formula so that all states were guaranteed a fair share.
"We don't deny there is a need," said Rep. John Ensign, R-Nev. But "is it fair across the country or does it benefit some states and not other states?"
Snowe finally offered a compromise under which 50 percent of the new money would be distributed according to the existing formula, and the other 50 percent be considered emergency spending. That proposal was approved 68-31.
"We're denying the president the ability to respond to an emergency," she said of the Kyl proposal. "States are going to receive funding when there is no emergency?" she added. "How does that make sense?"
Congress authorized $5.1 billion for home energy aid as part of an energy bill passed last summer, but budgetary constraints pushed the final figure for fiscal 2006 down to $2.1 billion, largely unchanged from the $2 billion level that has held steady in recent years.
Last week Snowe successfully overcame opposition from conservative Republicans, led by Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who tried to kill the bill on the grounds that the spending was not offset by cuts in other programs.
Federal assistance for home energy costs, dating back to the oil crisis of the 1970s, now reaches some 5 million families. Proponents of expanding the program say the $2 billion budget doesn't go very far when there are some 33 million households, spending about $55 billion a year in energy costs, eligible for the program.
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Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/liheap/
and leave the windows open in the middle of winter. You should see the 'hood up close and personal. I'm right down the street. A great many of the fires here are from overworked furnaces. We even get a box to check on the utility bill if we care to donate to the community heating fund.
Then this is for you! ;*)
How nice for them... we just had to make the cut from regular basic to sub basic... we get about 11 channels..6 of those local..
I'm with you.... this working for a living seems to be a sucker's bet....My neighbors on food stamps eat better than I do.
Not so, Kennedy was still a Liberal. He did cut the marginal tax rates from 91% to 70%. His VP, LBJ after the 1964 landslide added the huge extra layer of socialism on top of what FDR started.
THANKS! :-)
That doesn't matter. What matters is that enough voters are looking for handouts.
If you're a taxpayer, our benevolent Congress has already donated on your behalf.
Of course, if you're still motivated, ...
So, the peanut man engineeers the oil "crisis" then sets up a government hand out system endearing the sheeple to the daddy government. All these years I thought he was stupid.
Hmm... I wonder if a certain revered "conservative" originally signed it into existence.
History will someday show the fall of the Great United States started the day it's government discovered it could buy votes with other peoples money. "It all went down hill from there".
Socialist societies always fall, and so will we.
They're in more than just the Preamble. They're also in Article I.8, right at the beginning of that section which outlines the powers of Congress. It's still a specious argument to say that they give Congress any extra spending powers (the phrase is only there to provide context to the power to tax), but ignoring that text altogether won't expose the faulty argument that the Left has made.
I wonder if this is really true, or just some bullshit designed to make opponents look mean-spirited in a "throw the seniors out in the street" kind of way.
G*d only knows how much of your rampant energy costs are due to Kalifornia taxes and regulations...
You are right, JFK was far more conservative than Bush. Actually, even though JFK was not a liberal, there have been liberal presidents more conservative than Bush. Scumbag was actually more fiscally conservative than Bush.
We could not have had a bigger disaster for the conservative cause than George Bush. What a turncoat he is. Even if one were to claim Bush was a moderate, not a conservative, Bush has been a turncoat to the moderate cause then. Bush has been a Marxist. The word Marxist most accurately describes Bush's agenda. It is not hyperbole, it is the way he has governed.
yes. Thanks.
"All he has to do is make it clear to the public when he vetoes it that the Congressmen who do this are the ones playing games with national security, not he."
How does he make it clear to the public what his stand is when the MSM does not cover what he says, but instead show what portion of what he says that they choose to show?
Reagan was able to get his points across, and the MSM wasn't exactly in his pocket. If Bush keeps hammering it, he'll make it past the MSM. And he has a cadre of supporters throughout the country ready and willing to help him spread the word. The problem is, he won't even try. And when he keeps letting his supporters twist in the wind, eventually they get tired of it.
"Reagan was able to get his points across, and the MSM wasn't exactly in his pocket. If Bush keeps hammering it, he'll make it past the MSM. And he has a cadre of supporters throughout the country ready and willing to help him spread the word. The problem is, he won't even try. And when he keeps letting his supporters twist in the wind, eventually they get tired of it."
So, in the middle of a war, the President is supposed to drop everything until everyone understands what he has to say.
I agree that the media was no friend of Reagan's, but I have seen them get much worse about refusing to cover the President. President Bush can talk all day everyday and we would be lucky to hear 1% of what he says. An that 1% will be presented the way the media wants to present it.
This whole issue came about because the media wanted to present this as a security issue, claiming that the UAE company was going to be taking over security at 6 of our most important ports, which is not even close to the truth.
He doesn't have to "drop everything". He's has plenty of time budgeted for making his case about various things. He just has to make some use of it. Instead of just talking about whitebread fluff in his weekly radio addresses, he could try saying something substantive that would actually add to the discussion. He chooses not to. That makes him a largely ineffective leader.
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