Congressional Black Caucus Budget
March 28, 2007
Rep. Maxine Waters [D-CA]: I would like to begin by congratulating Congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick, the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Congressman Bobby Scott, Chair of the CBC Budget Task Force, for their leadership in developing the CBC budget.
I strongly support the CBC budget because it provides sufficient funding for critical domestic priorities such as health care, education, and community development. For example, the CBC budget spends $112 billion more than the Budget Committee's budget and $158 billion more than the President's budget on education, training, employment, and social services. Yet the CBC budget still eliminates the deficit by 2012.
As the Chair of the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity, I am deeply concerned about the need for affordable housing in America. The CBC budget recognizes that affordable housing is all but out of reach for many Americans. Just imagine, the 2006 average minimum wage required to rent affordable housing is $16.31 an hour, more than three times the Federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, putting most housing out of reach for many American families.
Approximately 6 million persons in this country are very needy, paying more than 50 percent of their income for housing. This is a real threat to families trying to educate their children and make ends meet. Affordable rental housing is critical to communities across this Nation. Public housing is still part of the solution, community development programs are part of the solution, and the renewal of the section 8 voucher and many other housing programs is part of the solution.
The President's fiscal year 2008 budget request would cut overall net funding for public housing by $477 million, from $6.4 billion to $5.9 billion, a cut of 7 percent. While the budget increases the operating fund by $136 million, public housing authorities are estimated to receive only 80 percent of their total operating expenses. The budget decreases the capital fund used to repair and modernize public housing units by $415 million, to only $2.0 billion.
Continuing a downward spiral in funding, this is part of the effort to dismantle public housing as we know it. We cannot sit idly by and let this happen. The community development programs would be seriously eroded and undermined if left to this administration. The Brownfields and the section 108 loan guarantee program would also be eliminated. The Community Development Block Grant Program would be cut by 20 percent, losing $735 million. And the list goes on and on.
In addition, Section 202 and 811 housing programs for the elderly and disabled would be cut drastically in the administration budget proposal. Rural housing programs would also suffer serious cutbacks faring no better.
The administration's budget proposes to terminate the major Rural Section 515 rental housing program, which would leave thousands of families living in rural communities, many poor, working families with children, and the disabled and elderly without affordable housing.
There is another issue that I feel strongly about that is addressed in this budget. As a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, I am highly concerned about the origin and proliferation of gangs in communities throughout the United States. Along with full committee chairman JOHN CONYERS and Crime Subcommittee Chairman Bobby Scott, I plan to retool existing authorized Federal programs to comprehensively address this problem. This requires full funding of the following programs: the Juvenile Accountability Block Grant, the Gang Resistance Education and Training Program, the Youth Violence Reduction Demonstration Projects that are administered by the Department of Justice, and the Compassion Capital Fund, which is administered by the Department of Health and Human Services.
In the city of Los Angeles, there are approximately 4,000 gangs and 39,000 gang members. For 2006, there were about 470 homicides, and 250 were gang related. Of the shootings in the city last year, 70 percent were gang related. According to a September 1, 2006, report by Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, it costs about $287 million to treat and hospitalize victims of nonfatal gang assaults countywide in one year.
This is not only in Los Angeles. There are gang problems all over America, and not simply in our cities but in our rural communities, in our suburban communities.
It is about time that we focus some efforts on dealing with the gangs from two perspectives:
Number one, we have got to have prevention. We have got to be able to provide social services. We have got to be able to meet the needs of people in communities that have no hope.
Number two, yes, we must be tough. But the answer is not simply lock them up and throw the key away. The answer is, how do we prevent young people, young children, from connecting and getting involved with gangs in the first place? We need serious funding and smart assembly of existing programs to effectively halt the recruitment of new gang members.
I urge all of my colleagues to support the CBC Budget so that we can begin to tackle important issues like gang violence and the need for affordable housing in our communities.
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Contact: Mikael Moore
202-225-2201
