National Women's Law Center

Overview

After seven years of widening inequality, rising insecurity, and erosion of the safety net, President Bush has put forward a budget that would permanently increase the wealth of those at the top while continuing to shrink supports for women and families struggling to get by and get ahead in an increasingly tenuous economy.

The President's budget would cut a wide range of services for low- and moderate-income people at a time when unemployment, food and energy costs, and foreclosures are rising. And the cuts to domestic programs proposed in this budget come on top of years of freezes and cuts that have left ordinary Americans more vulnerable. Even when the overall economy was growing, the Administration's policies failed to produce gains for average Americans. In fact, most families have still failed to recover the ground lost in the last recession.

Almost five million more people lived in poverty in 2006 than in 2000, including 2.2 million women and 1.2 million children.¹ The average real earnings of women working full-time, year-round increased by less than $500 over the same period, while the median income of single-mother families fell by more than $1,200. The ranks of uninsured women grew by nearly 3.4 million between 2000 and 2006. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the richest one percent of households has reached a level not seen since the 1920s.² In 2005, they received 21.2 percent of all income, while households in the bottom half of the income distribution received just 12.8 percent.³

Yet, the President's budget proposes to spend trillions of dollars over the next ten years to lock in the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the very wealthiest. At the same time, the budget would cut health care; child care and early education; services for vulnerable people, including services for victims of domestic violence, housing, energy, and nutrition assistance for low-income individuals and families, child support enforcement, and other social services; and programs that promote equal educational and employment opportunity. The budget also proposes changes to budget process rules that would lock in these distorted priorities for years to come.

Methodology

This report is based on an analysis of the Administration budget released on February 4^th, including related documents issued by the Office of Management and Budget and federal agencies. Unless otherwise noted, all comparisons in this report contrast the Administration's proposed FY 2009 funding levels with enacted FY 2008 levels and funding levels in FY 2002, less any emergency spending. Funding is measured based on budget authority, or what is provided (or proposed to be provided) by Congress, rather than outlays, or what is actually spent by agencies. The reason is that spending (outlays) in a given year may come from resources authorized in other years, yielding an inaccurate picture of current funding priorities.

Since funding for many programs critical to women and their families has been frozen for several years, this report focuses on the budget picture in real terms, adjusting for inflation to account for what current spending levels can buy in today's dollars. Inflation is measured by the CPI-U, the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers. Inflation in the current year and future years is measured using the forecast of the Congressional Budget Office contained in its January Budget and Economic Outlook.

Footnotes

(1) NWLC analysis of data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey.

(2) Emmanuel Saez, Updated figures for "Income Inequality in the United States: 1913-1998," October, 2007, available at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/ (last visited February 1, 2008).

(3) Internal Revenue Service, Individual Statistical Tables by Tax Rate and Income Percentile, Table 5, available at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/05in05tr.xls (last visited February 1, 2008).