Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Rep. Ann Manwaring, D-Wilmington. She is a member of the House Appropriations Committee.
It is probably not a good idea to sit down to write for public consumption when you are angry. But I am angry and I am writing.
Monday afternoon the Appropriations Committees of the Vermont House of Representatives and Senate held a public hearing via Vermont Interactive Television. VIT, a program funded with your tax dollars under the auspices of the Vermont State Colleges, has sites throughout Vermont where people can gather to hold electronic meetings.
This was a hearing on the proposed State budget for Fiscal Year 2012. The meeting was hosted from the Williston VIT site by House Appropriations Chair Martha Heath and Senator Jane Kitchel, Chair of Senate Appropriations. I hosted the Brattleboro site, which is located at Brattleboro Union High School. The format of the meeting was to move around to all 15 sites to hear testimony regarding the concerns of Vermonters. For two and a half hours, we went from site to site to hear two people at a time tell how a proposed cut would affect their lives.
A little background. Several years ago, the State of Vermont joined in a first in the nation partnership with the federal government to shift the use of Medicaid funds from supporting eligible people in nursing homes to a system of community-based supports for people who choose to stay in their communities with their families. It goes by the name Choices for Care, a program which gathers together several streams of state-matched, federal dollars which then are used by eligible recipients and our local agencies which then organize the activities of daily life that we all need, activities that the elderly and the developmentally disabled cannot do for themselves. The focus is to provide supports for individuals to be able to lead an independent life, the same life that we all strive to achieve. Not only is it more human, but it is less expensive.
Back to the VIT hearings. The vast number of people who testified did so to tell how the proposed budget cuts would affect their lives. Within the vast scale of the state budget, some of the cuts seem truly modest, but their effect on individuals can be life altering when a support is taken away. We put money into programs that are given names like Incidentals of Daily Living. Incidentals! Doesn’t sound too important, does it? But it includes things like grocery shopping. Respite care! Care givers have jobs, they have obligations to other family members, they need to maintain their own sanity. Any of you who are now or who have been a care giver for an elderly person or are yourself or know a friend with a disabled child know just how extraordinarily difficult it is to organize your own life and still accommodate the needs of the person you are caring for.
Agency cuts! They are just organizations, not people. Surely they can absorb a 5 percent cut. But the rent still has to be paid, heat and lights still have to be paid for. Surely we wouldn’t want to short change the profits of the Exxons of this world. Caseload! Such an impersonal word. Curtailing new caseload doesn’t seem painful, until you realize each is a person. So that is what the vast majority of people came to the VIT hearings to talk about.
So here is the angry part. This may seem like a leap, but stay with me.
Capitalism, our economic system, the economic system most compatible with democracy and just as complex to sustain as is democracy, has been hijacked to serve the wealthy among us. The evidence is all around us.
Christmas bonuses in the millions to some, declining wages for the rest of us. Foreclosures on our homes by the hundreds of thousands. The result has pushed ever more of us into circumstances where we cannot sustain our own safety let alone pursue that most cherished of American values, an independent life, a value which is essential in our core, no matter where we start or end in life.
How did we get here? Who set our dominant political voice to paint government as the bad guy, as a giant creature whose job is to scoop up our hard earned cash? Unless we are prepared to take down the stop signs, to build and plow the road in front of our own house and hope our neighbors do the same, to be sure our food is safe, etc, etc, etc.
Unless we are prepared to put the elderly and infirm, and eventually ourselves, on an ice floe to feed the fishes, we need to get real and change the conversation, to realize who is driving that conversation, to recognize that using tax dollars to help someone do their grocery shopping is no more or less important than our efforts to do our own grocery shopping.
