Here’s a wake up call for our fearless leaders. Did you know that the U.S. government spends $5 on the elderly for every $1 it invests in children?
Children don’t seem to count much—if government funding is any barometer.
No wonder children are nearly twice as likely to live in poverty compared with seniors. According to recently released American Community Survey estimates, in 2008, nearly 1 in 5 children under age 18 lived in poverty (18 percent) vs. 10 percent of seniors ages 65 and over.
It hasn’t always been like that. Before 1972, the poverty rate for the elderly was higher than that of children, says William P. O’Hare, senior fellow at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. He credits government programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Supplemental Security Income for lowering the poverty rate among the elderly.
Plus, it doesn’t hurt that seniors have powerful lobby groups such as AARP backing them. And because seniors vote, it would be hard for legislators to cut funding for the elderly.
Children can’t count on the same kind of support. When the child poverty rate fell from 23% in 1993 to 16% in 2000, a remarkable decline in a relatively short period, O’Hare notes, you could credit a strong economy that kept people employed in the late 1990s and the expansion of government programs to help low-income working families. For your reference, a family of four living in poverty in 2008 subsisted on cash income of less than $21,834.
With its high child poverty rate, the U.S. lags behind other developed countries
Most other developed countries have much lower child poverty rates than ours. About 20 percent of children in the U.S. are poor compared to less than 5 percent in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway, O’Hare notes.
Considering the U.S. need to remain competitive in an increasingly globalized economy, wouldn’t it make sense to invest in children? It would, agrees O’Hare. But it won’t be easy.
Brookings Institute researchers have projected that child poverty rates will hover above 20 percent for the next decade unless something changes.
“I am not sure we can end child poverty in the U.S.,” O’Hare wrote in an online chat on Wednesday, “but there is clear empirical evidence that we can reduce it.”
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