To William Rapfogel, who heads New York City’s major Jewish poverty program, the tax and budget revolution in Washington is not just a clash of ideologies in the capital, it’s a communal emergency with potentially disastrous consequences for countless clients.
Many could face homelessness, even severe hunger as a result.
“It’s a gamble,” said Rapfogel, executive director of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, of the Bush tax cuts. “[The administration] is gambling they will work, and that they will improve the economy.
“But if the economy doesn’t turn around, we could face the worst budget crisis in our lifetimes. And people could starve in our community. People could die because they don’t get the services they need, and hard-working Jewish families could find themselves homeless.”
Many Jewish activists in Washington agree that the Bush administration’s policies are nothing less than a sea change in the way the federal government views its responsibilities to the nation’s needy.
But most Jewish organizations have been resolutely silent in the face of this upheaval.
A confluence of factors, including a reluctance to criticize an administration that has been unusually supportive of Israel, fear of losing coveted White House access and the lack of effective opposition by other groups, including the Democrats, have muted the Jewish community.
So has naked self-interest.
“A lot of the biggest givers [to Jewish groups], the seven-figure givers, are the people who benefit the most from the tax cuts,” said a longtime leader of the United Jewish Communities. “The fact that this is a gray area--the Democrats say the tax cuts are terrible, the Republicans say they will fix the economy--takes some of the pressure off to speak out.”
But other Jewish leaders say the collective silence of the Jewish world means the community has no input into decisions that are remaking the government.
“It’s a leadership crisis,” said Shoshana Cardin, whose resume includes the chairs of the Council of Jewish Federations, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and a host of other groups. “If you’re going to be a leader, you know you’re going to put yourself out in front, become a target. We don’t have much of that courage around today.”
The results, Cardin said, could be disastrous for a Jewish community that has come to depend heavily on government funds to bolster its network of private charities providing critical services to those in need.
Jewish and government officials describe a snowballing budget crisis that already is forcing program cutbacks across the country.
Last week’s signing of the Bush administration’s second big tax cut, approved by Congress despite rising anxiety among some Republicans as well as staunch opposition by Democrats, will just accelerate the shift in budget priorities, critics charge.
“What you’re seeing is that the tax cuts shift, and in many cases increase, the burden not just on American families but on all the groups that are providing services,” said Rep. Nita Lowey (D-Westchester). “Decreased government revenues will trickle down to the states and the local communities, and eventually families simply will not have enough money in their pocketbooks.”
The administration says the big tax cuts were necessary, despite the lurching shift from big surpluses to record deficits in only two years, to jump-start a sagging economy. But some critics say the doggedness by the administration and Congress to slash taxes is part of an ideological effort to force the kinds of draconian cuts in government social programs they have been unable to win through more conventional political strategies.
“This is really an attack on the federal revenue structure,” said Peter Edelman, an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration and now a law professor at Georgetown University. “It’s the same thing, but far more thorough-going, that we saw under Ronald Reagan. The only conclusion I can draw is that they want to be in a position to say we don’t have any money to deal with the health-care needs of the country, and the housing needs, and the needs of the elderly, and a long list of other needs.”
Conservative economist Milton Friedman, in a Wall Street Journal article, said that “deficits will be an effective--I would go so far as to say, the only effective--restraint on the spending propensities of the executive branch and the legislature.” That principle seems to have overridden the traditional conservative aversion to big deficits.
The record tax cuts, Edelman said, already are causing budgetary damage that “will be very hard to reverse. It will be very hard to go back now and increase taxes.”
Observers said that as the tax cuts come on line, the deficit will mushroom, and along with it the pressure to hack away at vulnerable social programs.
The result will be “nothing short of carnage to the programs we care about--the programs that serve the poor, the elderly, the sick, children,” said an official with a major Jewish group.
“Every federation social service agency in the country is feeling the pinch now, or is about to feel the pinch, and that’s nothing compared to what’s a year or two down the line, unless there is a very rapid and strong economic recovery.”
In fact this week UJC officials announced a 10 percent budget cut, from $42.5 million to $38.5 million.
Rapfogel of Met Council puts the looming crisis in human terms.
He described some typical clients--a family where one parent has lost a job and savings have been depleted by medical or other problems. Now they face eviction.
“Normally we’d do an assessment, and then look to take some dollars we get from a variety of sources, including the local UJA and various government agencies,” Rapfogel said. “We’d find a way to pay a few months rent, maybe provide food distribution to take off some of the pressure on these people. Later we might offer career counseling or job development help, or help with health insurance.”
Money for all those programs is in decline, Rapfogel said, and agencies are laying off caseworkers, making it harder to provide timely evaluation and assistance.
“The wait could be the difference between helping them to independence or homelessness,” he said.
That’s the real bottom line: needs are increasing exponentially as the impact of the sour economy metastasizes through communities, but local, state, federal and philanthropic funding is in decline.
The budget crisis in Washington means state and local officials can expect no help as they confront their own fiscal disasters.
Rapfogel described the confluence of crisis the “perfect storm,” and said that new rounds of budget cutting in Washington--most observers say they are inevitable now that the new tax cut is law--will increase the vulnerability of needy New Yorkers.
The story is the same for Jewish agencies around the country.
“It’s only just begun,” said Mark Talisman, the former director of the United Jewish Appeal’s Washington Action Office.
Talisman was one of the architects of the partnership between Jewish social services and government agencies.
“The impact of the tax cuts is just starting,” he said. “And if the economy moves into deflation, the impact on Jewish agencies across the board will be horrendous.”
But aside from pleading for more money for individual programs, the Jewish community has been largely silent.
Only the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs expressed reservations about the first big Bush tax cut. Groups such as the UJC, which fund countless health and welfare programs that are heavily dependent on government money, remained quiet on the broad issue of tax cuts and budget policy.
Cardin said one reason for that silence is the failure of the Democrats to mount any serious opposition to the Republicans’ tax-cutting and government-slashing agenda.
“Without any serious opposition on the political level, Jewish groups and others are reluctant to get involved,” she said. “Nobody wants to be out in front.”
The crisis in the Middle East has diverted attention and resources that might otherwise be applied to the domestic crisis, she said.
And UJC, struggling with internal issues, “is still finding its role, its direction and its comfort level,” she said. “So much of what could have been done has not been done.”
Diana Aviv, UJC’s vice president for public policy, said the tax issue is “relevant” to her organization, but that UJC did not take a position on recent tax cuts because “we don’t have consensus within our own community. We have consensus on the spending side, but not on the tax side.”
She added that a number of state governments are now considering tax hikes to cope with their own budget meltdowns, and that it will be up to individual federations whether to support or oppose those increases.
Cardin said that most Jews also “do not understand how we rely on the federal government. There is a feeling that we are taking care of our own, which we have always done. But we’ve also become very dependent on that government money for services.”
Other observers have noted a big gap between the professionals in many Jewish organizations and lay leaders, mostly very wealthy Jews who stand to gain from the president’s economic policies.
Asked if that is also a factor in the relative silence of big Jewish groups, Cardin said, “It’s a strong possibility.”
Another leading Jewish activist described a recent vignette at a New York Jewish gathering:
“I heard some major donor say, ‘Why do you need home care for senior citizens? Let their children take care of them.’ The problem, of course, is that many Jews don’t have enough money to take care of elderly parents. The gap between the lay leadership and the professionals is huge.”
“When we’ve spoken out about it, the reaction has been very good from the local community councils, which have very serious concerns about how their services to immigrants, to the elderly and to the poor will be impacted,” said Hannah Rosenthal, executive vice-chair of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “But we have heard strongly from others that these are things we should not be involved in.”
But others say the Jewish reticence on the subject has more to do with realpolitik.
“You feel reticent to bite the hand that feeds you,” said Edelman, the former Clinton administration official. “Most communities in this country, whether Jewish, Catholic, Protestant or secular, have been unduly silenced throughout this tax-cutting and budget-cutting process, and that factor is a major reason why.”
