Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [78]
Cruz’ North Philly neighborhood doesn’t have a lot of curb appeal. Some of the row houses are tagged with condemned signs. Some have already been demolished, and the lots between the standing homes give the effect of missing teeth. Some are occupied by squatters. But the Cruz house is well kept and painted a tropical blue and yellow that looks like better times in Puerto Rico. The mortgage payment is $341.
Cruz said she is lucky the gas company didn’t cut her off in the fall when she was trying to negotiate a payment plan. The city doesn’t allow cutoffs in winter. She was trying to cut costs and deal with her bills so she wouldn’t get cut off in spring or summer and face the following winter with no heat. That had already happened to ten thousand Philadelphia households.
In order to save $10 a week, her son rides the “wawa” to school in the morning but walks home when it’s warmer in the afternoon. (When Cruz talks about the wawa, you realize you can take the girl out of Puerto Rico, but you can’t take the Puerto Rico out of the girl. A wawa in Puerto Rico is an autobus in most Latin American countries.) Joshua’s walk home from the local high school is only a couple of miles. No big deal, he said. He’s a tall, healthy kid who wants to be a chef. The $40 he saves each month will help pay the gas bill down enough so maybe the gas won’t be shut off in the spring.
Cruz washes clothes at the Laundromat because it’s cheaper than using her own water and electricity. She keeps the thermostat as low as she can without risking the children’s health. She has no car so there are no car expenses. She tries to cut costs at the grocery store, “pero es muy difícil,” she said. She would like to go back to work but doesn’t see a way out.
The last thing Luz Cruz needs is for George Bush to make her life harder. When Bush cut $300 million from the annual budget of LIHEAP—the heating-oil and gas subsidy program designed to help people in Luz Cruz’ situation—her assistance was put on hold. She has gotten LIHEAP assistance in the past but is having a hard time in 2003. Even if she does get it, the $250 annual stipend from the federally funded program will not cover her delinquent bill. In fact, it won’t even cover the current bills, which run about a hundred dollars a month. “It would help,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’ll let them have the house and go back to Puerto Rico. I can find work in a beauty salon there, and it’s never cold.”
It was probably not a bad time for Cruz to leave. The Delaware hadn’t seen this much ice since George Washington crossed it. There were ice-skaters on the Schuylkill. Household energy prices this winter were up 19 percent for natural gas, 45 percent for heating oil, and 22 percent for propane. Two rounds of Bush tax cuts for the wealthy made the federal budget harder to balance. By moving just 500,000 low-income families off LIHEAP—in the direction of energy independence—the president saved $300 million, one thousandth of his dividend tax cut. Too easy for him to pass up.
The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program has been in place since 1974. By 2001 it was helping 4.6 million low-income families, half with children under eighteen, keep their homes warm in winter. Bush didn’t intend to wipe out the subsidy for all of them, just for half a million. His numbers-crunchers even came up with a plan to get two bangs for their buck. A warm winter in 2001 had left LIHEAP $500 million in surplus funds, which could be rolled back into general revenue if not spent. The president’s 2003 budget provided $1.4 billion instead of the $1.7 appropriated the previous year. Add the $500 million surplus from 2002 to the $300 million cut