Campaign Action
Moral arguments about how a civilized society takes care of its children don't seem to cut it with the Republicans of the 21st century. It's now been 38 days since the Children's Health Insurance Program expired, and the only thing they've responded with is partisan political games. If they won't be swayed by entreaties to just be fucking decent human beings, maybe this more utilitarian approach—and reminder that children are our future—from Health Affairs will sway them.
As our country engages in debates on topics such as health care reform, we must weigh the impact of the policies and investments we make today on the lives of the next generation and our future as a nation. With seismic demographic shifts taking place, how we raise, educate, and care for children has reached new importance. […]
The New Importance of Children in America finds declining birthrates mean that each child is proportionately more important to society than ever before. Beyond our moral obligation as a country to care for children for their own sake, our future economy, standard of living, and place as a leader in the world demand that children become our highest priority.
Declining birthrates will lead to a shortage of workers and taxpayers in the near future. Meanwhile, the aging Baby Boom generation is retiring and beginning to draw on federal programs like Medicare and Social Security, leaving the retiree population to rely on a shrinking population of working-age people for support in their retirement years. For example, in 1970 there were twenty-three seniors for every 100 people of working age. By 2015, the senior-to-worker ratio climbed to twenty-eight seniors per 100 working-age people, and by 2030, that senior ratio will leap to forty-two seniors per 100 workers (Exhibit 1). This number possibly could rise still further under changed immigration policy.
Okay, so Republicans are more likely to use that argument to cut Social Security and Medicare than they are to help the children, but how about a more selfish motivation? To wit: Who's going to take care of them in their old age if there aren't any healthy young people?
Because, according to the analysis in this report, we're not growing a healthy generation of adults: 1 in 5 children has an "identified emotional, mental, or behavioral health problem"; children are living in poverty in 2017 at twice the rate of the elderly; a whopping 40 percent of children are on either CHIP or Medicaid; and just 10 percent of the federal budget is directed to programs that help children—and that's going to decline to 8 percent by 2026, unless Congress changes it.
Here's another argument that might sway Republicans: someone is going to have to pay the taxes that pay for their salaries once they rig it so corporations don't have to pay any. Children are a good investment there, too, because "56 cents of every dollar spent on childhood Medicaid is recouped by the federal government through tax payments by the time the covered children reach age sixty, not to mention other benefits to society they found such as lower reliance on public programs and stronger contributions to the labor force."
We don't have a future if we don't take care of our kids. Period. But the smash-and-grab kleptocrats currently in charge seem just fine with that.