Think of the children.
These days, politicians — and their constituents — generally don’t. For all their baby-kissing, politicians know that it’s the elderly — not suffrage-ineligible children or their parents — who turn out to vote. This perhaps explains why a smaller and smaller share of government budgets is expected to go to children over the coming decade.
This is documented in exhaustive detail in the Urban Institute’s eighth annual “Kids’ Share” report. The study takes stock of all kinds of government spending (including spending through the tax code, such as the child tax credit) that directly benefits children, focusing on the spending controlled at the federal level.
The authors found an uptick in federal spending on children last year, with the share of the budget benefiting the young rising from 9.7 percent in 2012 to 10.2 percent in 2013. But don’t expect the party to last. Spending on kids as a share of the budget is projected to decline dramatically in the coming decade — to just 7.8 percent by 2024.
Kids’ share of federal spending isn’t tumbling because children are suddenly becoming a smaller portion of the population. Nor is this happening because we live in an “age of austerity”; the sizes of both the economy and tax revenue are at all-time highs, after accounting for inflation, and are expected to keep growing. What’s happening is that spending on other stuff — especially the elderly and, even more especially, on health care for the elderly — is crowding it out.