KHI News Service
WASHINGTON, D.C. Sept. 12
Federal investment in children is likely to decline markedly within the next decade, according to a new
Urban Institute study
.
Under current policies, the share of the federal budget for programs that benefit children by improving education, promoting good health, or supporting parents’ ability to work is forecast to drop from 1.6 percent of the gross domestic product in 2006 to 1.3 percent by 2017.
The report’s authors point to large federal programs with built-in growth to explain why the slice of the federal budget pie assigned to investment in children will slim.
“Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid do not require annual appropriations and the benefits they pay grow automatically each year with changes in wages, life expectancy, and medical costs. Programs that invest in children seldom grow or expand by design. Increasing investment in kids’ programs is a much more difficult process,” the study”s authors noted. “Reorienting the budget toward investment in children is one way of trying to both increase their future well-being and to give them greater economic capacity to finance the programs that support their parents’ and grandparents’ needs.”
The projected decline in spending would be even steeper but for increased federal spending on children’s health care, which the study attributed largely to spiraling medical costs rather than to deliberate investment in children and their futures.
”
Investing in Children
” charts U.S. federal spending on investment in total and for children from 1965 to 2017. It was written by C. Eugene Steuerle and Gillian Reynolds of the Urban Institute and Adam Carasso, formerly with the Institute and now with the New America Foundation.