We must not lose sight of the fact that Medicare is ultimately about people:  the grandfather who can barely afford his heart medication, or the widow who finds her savings wiped out after she is diagnosed with breast cancer.

Democratic staff on the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce recently dived into the consequences of the 2013 Republican “Ryan” budget on individuals.  According to the Committee’s report, the budget would:

• Increase prescription drug costs for 11,000 Central New Jersey seniors, forcing them to pay an extra $101 million for drugs over the next decade.
   
• Eliminate new zero-copay preventive care benefits for 103,000 Central New Jersey Medicare beneficiaries.
   
• Threaten affordable housing programs that provide rental support for 5,100 Central New Jersey senior households.
   
• Put at risk the nursing home care for 2,300 Central New Jersey residents whose expenses are paid by Medicaid.

These are just the consequences of the budgets for seniors.  Many others in Central New Jersey would face other consequences:  cuts in federal investments in infrastructure, education, research and development, Food Stamps, and more.  Yet even as it slashes these crucial programs, the Ryan plan provides such enormous tax breaks, mostly to the wealthy, that it would fail to balance our budget until 2040.

The budget is a moral document, as you may remember me saying.  The Ryan plan is written down in black and white and approved by almost all Republicans and opposed by almost all Democrats in the House.

Federal Agencies Launch Spanish-Language Ciencia.Science.Gov

Science agencies across the U.S. federal government recently announced the launch of the Spanish version of Science.gov, http://ciencia.science.gov. Ciencia.Science.gov provides the same breadth and depth in science search as does Science.gov, covering over 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results from 17 organizations within 13 federal science agencies.

I hope you will share this resource with your Spanish-speaking friends.

Agencias científicas a través del gobierno federal de los EEUU anunciaron el lanzamiento de la versión en español de Science.gov, http://ciencia.science.gov. Ciencia.Science.gov ofrece la misma profundidad y amplitude de contenido y búsqueda que brinda Science.gov, dando cobertura para más de 200 millones de páginas de información científica confiable que incluye resultados de investigación y desarrollo científico de 17 organizaciones dentro de 13 agencias científicas federales.

Yo espero que Uds. comparten este nuevo recurso con sus amigos hispanohablantes.

A Poet’s Hopeful Yearning for America

In his new book, In Time, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet C. K. Williams (who lives in Hopewell and teaches creative writing at Princeton) describes himself as a political poet who buries his political messages deep in his poems – and makes a perceptive observation, not buried.

He says that what some critics called rage in his Vietnam-era poems “was more a kind of hope” about the relation of self to society.  He now worries that through a political “sleight of hand,” the “generations coming into political consciousness now” have had “foisted on them… the so-called necessities of economic inflations, recessions, [and] deficits” and inculcated “insecurity as a way of manipulating people.”  “How hard,” he says, “will it be for them,” living with this “sad consciousness,” “to generate the hope they need to redeem their societies spiritually?”

To which I would say, we must show each other how to keep hope alive.

Sincerely,

Rush Holt
Member of Congress