Content area
Full Text
Jonathan Swift proposed relieving the public of the necessity of encountering impoverished Irish children by selling the children, at an early age, to be prepared as a delicacy for those with the means to buy them. My proposal to address the escalating poverty rate among American children is more immodest. All we need to do is give them the vote. Such a proposal would be merely facetious were it not for the fact that today's elected officials, to be successful, must attend strictly to the short-term interests of those directly engaged in the political process. It is not simply the spend-now-pay-later reelection strategy that has become commonplace in Washington. It is not just the pollute-now-conserve-next-century policy choices that remain in vogue. It is not just future generations who are being asked to pay for the pleasure of today's voters. It is the country's own children who are being asked to sacrifice right now.
One need only compare the welfare of children with that of the elderly to see both the extent of the sacrifice being exacted of children and the importance of the ability to vote. Both age groups depend on government programs. Both have a claim on public resources. Both are represented by organizations that state their case before Congress, state legislatures, and executive departments. But only one age group has the vote.
Last May the House Ways and Means Committee released the 1,888-page 1992 "Green Book" on social welfare policy in the United States. It shows that the poverty rate for the elderly fell from 35 percent in 1959 to 25 percent in 1970, and then fell again to 11 percent in 1989 before turning back up slightly to 12 percent during the recession of 1990. Over the past two decades the decline was a remarkable 56 percent. Meanwhile, the poverty rate among children under the age of 18 has been growing--from 14 percent in 1969 to 21 percent in 1990, an increase of 50 percent. The two poverty rates have been changing at roughly the same rate, but in the opposite direction.
Some will argue that the increase in poverty among children is due not to government policy or to voter self-interest, but to social and economic trends beyond government's reach: the...