Jen’s good question
Whoo hooo. I installed XP SP2, and my computer and my wireless connection are both still functional.
Jen asked the darn good question of why the US doesn’t do more about child poverty. Is it just that children don’t vote (and old people do)?
I think that’s part of the story, but only a part. After all, children don’t vote in Europe either, and almost all European countries have a much more extensive safety net. And middle-class children are subsidized through the tax system, especially in the wake of the Bush tax cuts.
So what’s going on?
In particular, I wonder why there’s essentially no discussion in the US about a universal child stipend, available to upper income families as well as poor families, as many European countries have. Some liberal policy wonks have circulated a proposal for universal child credit through the tax system, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten any serious public attention.
My cynical thought is that the countries that have more pro-child policies are less ethnically and racially diverse, and so there’s more of a willingness to subsidize other people’s kids, but I haven’t looked at the data to see if that’s true.
It’s also worth noting one major exception to the overall trend: Over the past 6 or so years, almost all low-income children have become eligible for public health insurance. Children are actually quite inexpensive to insure, so it didn’t cost a ton of money, and it’s such an obviously good idea that Congress was willing to do it, even without a huge public outcry demanding it.
October 2nd, 2004 at 9:43 pm
yeh…keep in mind, though, that the states vary widely on how they implement and advertise the children’s insurance plans. Here in IA the hawk-i plan’s existence is kept pretty quiet, obstacles to access abound, and participation rates are predictably low. The program itself is beautiful, but application is discouraging enough system that our pinko area has taken the novel step of hiring a consumer advocate to aid parents who get turned down. My guess is that if the program were advertised better and acceptance made simpler, the budget wouldn’t come near meeting demand. It’s a little reminiscent of the state-sponsored high-risk health insurance pools provided for in the first HIPAA go-round; sure, states offered them, but in many states they were priced so far out of reach as to be useless.
I do recall a stat from about four years ago saying that 75% of voters were stockholders. If that’s true, I don’t think the current sad patchwork of non-K-12-ed children’s services is a surprise. I’d bet most stockholders — even mutual-funds-in-the-401(k) stockholders — have no idea what it’s like to grow up in poverty, or have a realistic sense of why poor parents are poor & stay poor. The bootstrap fantasy is pretty persistant, and so is the idea that nobody has a right to infringe on my happiness or take away my ability to buy whole housefuls of crap if I want to.
One of the things I learned from being poor is that if you need help, and you’re poor, you best bet is to go to another poor person. They know what it’s all about.