Budget cuts victimize the disabled

WE CAN'T FAULT Gov. Rendell for leading the trip that rescued 53 orphans from a Haitian orphanage last week and brought them to Pennsylvania.

We understand how gratified he was that his "clout" as governor was able to cut through a pile of red tape.

Too bad his clout wasn't enough to better help the 340,000 disabled Pennsylvanians - among them, 67,000 children - who live in miserable poverty right here.

Advocates for the elderly and disabled in Pennsylvania only recently learned that Pennsylvania's budget - finally passed in October, four months late - was balanced in part by reducing already-small supplementary payments to the commonwealth's poor and disabled citizens.

A Jan. 16 notice from the Department of Public Welfare announced that it is cutting about $5.30 a month from the state supplementary payments of $27.40 that it provides to individuals who receive federal Supplemental Security Income (disability) payments. If a both partners of a married couple receive SSI, the cut is $10.40.

According to his office, Rendell had originally proposed increasing the state's payments by $3 million. He fought against even larger cuts proposed by Senate Republicans that would have slashed $21 million from the program - instead of the $12 million in cuts that prevailed.

If $5 and $10 cuts don't seem like much, consider this: People who are "totally and permanently disabled" - physically unable to work at all - get no more than about $700 a month in federal SSI payments, and many get less. (That's at least $2,430 lower than the federal poverty line of $10,830 a year for an individual.) In that world, $5 means a lot - the copay on necessary drugs, for example, or the last few dollars for the electric bill or the rent.

Just so we understand: Republicans opposed a temporary income-tax increase that would have cost workers about $5 a week and brought in a billion in revenue. They are unwilling to enact a production tax on Marcellus Shale natural gas wells that stand to make energy companies big profits. But it's OK to make the state's most vulnerable citizens take a hit.

More than 120,000 of our neighbors in the five-county area will be affected by these cuts. Urge your state representatives and senators to find a way to restore these payments - at least to what they were. Surely, we are better than this.