Joe Kennedy blasts President Obama’s plan

Political heavyweights on both sides of the aisle are turning up the heat on President Obama’s proposal to cut fuel assistance to the needy.

“To expect that the federal budget can be balanced by simply cutting discretionary programs . . . while we let the richest people in the country get enormous tax breaks . . . is just wrong,” Joseph P. Kennedy II, president of Citizens Energy Corp., a Boston company that provides fuel to low-income families, told the Herald earlier this week. “It tells me we should set aside a couple hundred thousand dollars to send President Obama and the Republicans back to math class.”

Mayor Thomas M. Menino, Sen. John Kerry and Republican Sen. Scott Brown are also asking the president to reconsider a plan to trim the federal deficit by cutting fuel aid to families.Obama’s fiscal 2012 budget would cut the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program in half to $2.5 billion. This winter, Massachusetts has received $182 million in funding from the federal government and expects more than 216,000 households to qualify for help this year, up from 206,000 last year, according to the state Department of Housing and Community Development.

Menino said slashing the fuel program will have a huge impact on struggling families at a time when unemployment in Massachusetts is 8 percent. “These cuts are ill-timed,” Menino said. “We have to make sure that the president and Congress understand that the working class are the heart and soul of who make America great.”
Brown said the heating oil assistance program is essential given the cold Bay State winters. “There are plenty of other things to cut besides fuel assistance,” he said.
Meg Reilly, a White House spokeswoman, declined to comment on Kennedy, Menino and Brown’s remarks. In a statement, she said, “As the President said, we need to make tough choices to get our deficits under control so that we can be competitive in the global economy.”
“That will take shared sacrifice as we pursue his five-year freeze on non-defense security spending,” she said. “It will mean cutting programs that do not work or are duplicative, and also cutting back on some areas whose mission we agree with, but can’t afford to fund — or fund robustly.”