Our guest blogger is Rebecca Vallas from the SSI Coalition for Children and Families.

House Republicans recently proposed billions of dollars in cuts to Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a critical income support for kids with severe disabilities who live in households with very low-income and assets. While the proposed cuts amount to just one 1/100th of a percentage point of the federal budget, they would be nothing short of devastating for our nation’s most vulnerable children, and the families who care for them.

The 2013 House Budget Resolution includes $3.5 billion in cuts (over 10 years) to benefits for the hardest-hit youngsters — those in families with more than one child receiving SSI for their disability. Some 150,000 children with severe disabilities would see their critically needed benefits cut dramatically, forcing parents to make impossible choices — whether to meet the needs of one disabled child over the other.

SSI provides income support, and Medicaid in most states, to low-income elderly and disabled Americans, including about 1.3 million children with severe disabilities. Only the most severely impaired children in households with very low income and resources qualify for SSI. Kids receive less than $600 per month, on average. While modest, SSI makes it possible for families to care for their kids with disabilities at home instead of in costly institutions.

It offsets some of the extra expenses related to the child’s disability — like transportation to and from doctors and specialists; adaptive equipment; and specialized child care — many of which may not be covered by private insurance or Medicaid.

It also replaces some of the income lost when a parent reduces his or her hours, or leaves a job altogether to stay home to care for a disabled child. Between 10 and 30 percent of parents (usually mothers) with disabled children report stopping working entirely, and between 15 and 68 percent report cutting work hours to care for their children with disabilities. Even with the income support from SSI, over a third of children receiving SSI remain in poverty.

Families with more than one disabled child are even harder hit. Over 70 percent of families with more than one disabled child receiving SSI report experiencing material hardships such as food insecurity, and housing and utility hardships—even with the income support from SSI.

Kids with disabilities face considerable obstacles. They are more likely to drop out of school, be unemployed, have lower earnings, and receive disability benefits as adults. SSI helps parents provide the services and supports kids with disabilities need, offering them a better chance to achieve self-sufficiency later in life, and saving taxpayer expenditures down the road.

Families raising low-income children with disabilities need more help, not less. Cutting SSI, especially for families raising more than one disabled child, would push already needy children with disabilities deeper into poverty, and would end up costing taxpayer dollars in the long run.

We can and must do better than balancing the budget on the backs of poor, disabled kids.

Click here for more information about the SSI Coalition for Children and Families, or to get involved.

Click here to share your story if SSI has helped your family or someone that you know.

Jesse Kelly 2010 campaign flyer

In the ad, Kelly makes a widely-debunked claim that ObamaCare will “cut $500 billion from Medicare.” The legislation aims to achieve $500 billion in Medicare savings, which will extend the life of the program and provide better care.

But after his disclaimer, Kelly and his grandfather Hank Allgyer say:

KELLY: I’m committed to protecting Social Security and Medicare for our seniors.”

ALLGYER: Don’t let Ron Barber cut my benefits, Jesse. I’ve earned them.

KELLY: Don’t worry, Grandpa. I won’t.

ALLGYER: I know you’ll protect us.

Watch the video:

On his website, Kelly says he supports “preserving, protecting and strengthening Social Security and Medicare” and does not support “privatizing, eliminating or phasing out these programs in any way.” He advocates actions to prevent Social Security from “going bankrupt” but lays out five principles that would seemingly prevent any real action to do that:

1. Any solution must be bipartisan
2. I will not vote for any solution that privatizes social security
3. I will not vote for any solution that raises taxes
4. I will not vote for any solution that cuts benefits
5. I will not vote for any solution that raises the retirement age

By ruling out changing the amount of money coming in to the Social Security fund (raising taxes) or the amount going out (cutting benefits or changing the retirement age), he seems to take virtually everything off the table. But he hasn’t always had this view.

The Hill noted that as recently as April 18, his website called for partial privatization of Social Security. His earlier view that “Younger workers should have the choice of allocating a portion of their contribution into a personal retirement account in their name,” is has been completely erased from his positions page.

And, the same article notes, in a 2010 debate, Kelly said the nation must take steps to reform, privatize, and phase out entitlements. “You need to fulfill your promises in the near future while phasing out future generations, taking steps to privatize, vouchers, everything,” he said. “It’s not an option of should it be done. It must be done.”

Kelly, a construction manager and Tea Party favorite, infamously hosted an M16 automatic weapons shooting campaign event to help supporters “get on target” to “help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office,” just months before a gunman went on a shooting spree at a Giffords community event in Tuscon, leaving six dead and a dozen wounded — including both Giffords and Barber. Giffords resigned her seat in January to focus on her recovery.

His issues page has since been changed to remove the phrase “The Second Amendment of the Constitution is not just about hunting. It is about the right of a free people to defend themselves.”

The Kelly website makes no mention of whether the nation has always been at war with Eastasia, but Kelly apparently does not think Arizona voters can remember all the way back to April 2012.

Social Security is going broke even faster than expected, according to a report from the program’s actuaries released yesterday. At least, that’s the narrative the national media presented to the American public.

Headlines from across the country — like the following from the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times — were quick to paint a grim picture of the program’s future finances, noting that “painful” changes would need to be made to ensure its solvency beyond 2033:

The headlines and stories that follow create the illusion that Social Security is fast going broke, even though it is fully funded for another two decades and could pay 75 percent of its benefits thereafter (imagine the shock the media would display, meanwhile, if transportation, food stamps, or other programs had two decades of guaranteed funding).

They also ignore an easy way to ensure the program’s long-term solvency without large changes or cuts to benefits. Payroll taxes that finance Social Security are only collected on income up to a certain level ($110,100 in 2012), creating a regressive system that puts an undue burden on low- and middle-income workers. Eliminating that cap would allow Social Security to pay full benefits for the next 75 years, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) introduced legislation that would raise the cap last year, but it has been ignored by Republicans and the media, who instead continue to feed the narrative that Social Security needs vast changes — including potential benefit cuts — to shore up its future. Americans of all political stripes oppose cuts to Social Security benefits, but as the Columbia Journalism Review noted earlier this month, media coverage has perpetuated the belief — particularly among young Americans — that Social Security is broken.

“The elite press repeatedly quotes the commentary of the devoted opponents of social insurance retirement programs,” Yale professor emeritus Theodore Marmor told CJR. “But they appear unaware of how they are supporting a strategic attack on social insurance that has been going on for years.”

U.S. Senate candidate Sam Rohrer (R-PA)

Rohrer also thinks the government should no longer provide federal services to the American people, a position he took a step farther Saturday at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference. During a debate featuring the state’s Republican Senate candidates, Rohrer, the party’s front-runner, outlined a proposal to privatize Social Security and end the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which provides aid to disabled Americans:

ROHRER: The structural aspect of the program that is in place, financially, if we don’t make changes, it will not be there for those who are coming up. So we’ve got to stop the cost increase, meaning we do it this way. We’ve got to take out the younger workers, maybe it’s an age of 50, maybe it’s as you say, 45, determine that age where those up to that point are not compelled to join Social Security. They’re allowed to go into a program like 401(k), have their own plan, and you obviously cut the cost on the outside.

But secondarily, we have to reduce the cost of Social Security now, otherwise we will not find us able to make payouts either. And that, I recommend, we do by bringing it back into line with what Social Security was acceptably set into place to be originally, and that’s as a retirement assistance program. Meaning we have to back off such things as disability — SSI payments — where we have many new people brought into the program. Many illegal aliens are receiving SSI payments. That is a part of the program that Social Security was never intended to fund, and that’s a part that we can logically back off, bring it back to its major core. I think we can preserve and extend the life of Social Security.

Watch it:

Privatizing Social Security, as Rohrer would like to do, would have had disastrous consequences for Americans during the Great Recession. According to a 2008 Center for American Progress analysis found that an October 2008 retiree would have lost $26,000 in a private Social Security account even before the market bottomed out in 2009. Given that two-thirds of senior citizens count on Social Security for more than half their monthly income, those kind of losses would dump millions into poverty.

Ending SSI and disability payments goes even farther. According to the Social Security Administration, more than 8.1 million Americans received SSI in January 2012, and nearly 1.3 million of the recipients were children. SSI’s support is modest — the average monthly payment in January was $517 — but important. A 2005 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that SSI lifted 2.4 million Americans above the poverty line in 2003. And despite Rohrer’s claims that “illegal aliens” are benefiting from the program, SSI has far stricter requirements even for legal immigrants than most federal assistance programs.

Rohrer, meanwhile, ignored the easiest solution to Social Security’s long-term health. Lifting the payroll tax cap, which currently taxes all income below $106,800 for Social Security purposes, would ensure the program’s solvency for the next 75 years.

Families that depend on government assistance face countless threats, but a new study from the Urban Institute shows just how devastating budget cuts could be to America’s poorest families.

According to the report, as of 2009, low-income children received 70 percent of government funding for children — a respectable portion of overall federal spending dedicated to the needs of those under 18. But while the straight numbers look good for poor kids, those children’s future prospects are frightening.

The Urban Institute “estimate[s] that low-income children receive 99 percent of housing expenditures, 98 percent of expenditures on nutrition, 97 percent of health expenditures, and 94 percent of expenditures on social services.” So, of course, cutting the budgets for these areas would disproportionately affect children:

If these services sound familiar, it’s because many are the same programs that Republicans have aimed to cut in their most recent budget proposals — specifically, housing, nutrition, and health.

Millions of children have been kept out of extreme poverty by programs like food stamps, and the overall poverty rates would have been twice as high in 2010 without the social safety net. Surely, the opposite effect would occur with any cuts to welfare, social security, medicaid, or the other programs that keep these kids afloat.