George Miller: “in a rush to cut governmental spending, the Republicans seem intent not to look at whether or not programs are…”

“in a rush to cut governmental spending, the Republicans seem intent not to look at whether or not programs are effective, whether or not programs have been successful, but simply to cut and to block-grant those programs so that they can realize the savings that they want to pay for the other things that they wish to do, whether it is an increase in the defense spending or to provide tax cuts to the very wealthy of this country. Unfortunately, the programs caught up in that whirlwind happen to be the nutrition programs. These are among some of the most successful programs in the history of this Government and the history of this Nation. These are the programs that have lifted our elderly out of desperate situations when they did not have enough income to feed themselves, have dramatically reduced the incidence of low-birth-weight and very-low-birth-weight children to pregnant women, to families, to prevent them from suffering the setback and the disappointment and the heartbreak of birth defects of a critically ill child at the moment of birth, and at the same time to alleviate the taxpayers and others of the cost of the thousands of dollars a day it takes to bring a very-low-birth-weight child up to normal weight and the efforts so that they can take that child home. These are the programs that have allowed our senior citizens to live in their own home.”