News reports the day after President Bush unveiled his $2.77 trillion proposed federal budget centered on the fact that it called for more spending on security and less on domestic programs.
The plan’s emphasis on preserving tax cuts and devoting more money to defense while limiting the growth in Medicare spending set off the usual partisan sparring between Republicans and Democrats. But lost in the big political picture is the dilemma of the organized Jewish community.
The battle of the budget is exactly the sort of tussle mainstream Jewish groups would like to stay out of. Despite the fact that most American Jews still identify with liberal policies and the Democratic Party, injecting a Jewish theme into the wrangling over how much money goes into various federal program strikes many Jewish leaders as not only wrong but a no-win proposition.
It is, they reason, better that the community remember it has friends on both sides of the aisle, and avoid being pigeonholed as being in one party’s pocket. But the pressure on the organized Jewish world from both sides of that conundrum is growing.
One problem for fundraising umbrella groups like Jewish federations is that budget cuts hit them where they live. Bush’s federal budget proposal listed $36 billion savings from cuts in the projected growth in Medicare spending.
When that is accompanied by other cuts in state Medicaid disbursements to health-care and senior-care providers, the result is that some Jewish institutions – homes for the elderly, for example – are going to be, at best, squeezed. The worst-case scenario is that such facilities would then be pushed to the brink of destruction. Already cash-starved Jewish federations would then be asked to bail them out. The result is that the community might be forced to shift its own meager resources away from new strategic priorities such as Jewish education in order to make up the shortfalls.
That’s just one example not only of the potential budget pitfalls for organizations, but of the ironic position that the Jewish community now finds itself in.
Though most of the rhetoric from Jewish sources on domestic politics this last year has been in the form of apocalyptic declarations that the GOP is about to end religious liberty because of the influence of conservative Christians, the reality is far more complicated, and a lot less easy for the ideologies of the left or the right to spin.
The irony stems from the fact that just as liberal Jews are increasingly scared stiff about alleged threats to the separation of church and state in this country from the supposedly rapacious ambitions of the Christian Right, most of these same Jews want their leaders to lobby the government for more federal dollars. We want a high “wall of separation” with a few loopholes through which federal subsidies may pass to favored causes.
But if there is a disconnect between the instinct of most Jewish groups to decry any entanglement between the federal government and sectarian institutions, no one is mentioning it as the community joins in the mad scramble with just about everyone else in the country to get what they think is a fair share of the national pie. Such scruples tend to break down whenever it is possible to get some federal money for what is thought to be a good cause.
So what will follow now is a full-fledged effort not to derail the Bush budget or to wage a fight against tax cuts as liberal partisans want. Rather, Jewish groups will probably use whatever access they have to persuade enough legislators on both national and state levels to save the programs and the spending they need to support the Jewish social-service network.