
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 1, 1991                   TAG: 9104010196
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WHOSE FUTURE?

THE CHILDREN are our future. It's an American byword; you've heard it a zillion times. If it's true, our future looks a lot less promising than our past.

A child in the United States is almost twice as likely as a senior citizen to live in poverty. Studies show that Uncle Sam spends more than $4 on older people for every $1 he invests in children. No other nation in the world has such an age gap between the well-off and the poor.

The bias in spending for seniors is locked in. For instance, the White House's new budget provides for $18.6 billion just in new funds for Social Security, mostly for cost-of-living adjustments. They are automatic. They come every year.

This didn't happen entirely by accident. Over the past few decades, the nation has deliberately shifted a considerable segment of its resources - mainly via Medicare and Social Security payments - to the elderly to protect them from economic distress. The strategy has worked fabulously, but meantime a new underclass has been created.

"We should be proud of what we have done for the elderly," says Rep. Thomas J. Downey, D-N.Y., "and horrified at what we're doing to our children." David Ellwood, a Harvard professor and authority on poverty, adds: "The chief source of economic insecurity in America used to be growing old; now it's being born into or raised in a single-parent family."

The nation didn't, of course, set about beggaring children. Marriages and families are weaker and less cohesive than they used to be. More babies are born out of wedlock. Children don't choose to grow up in single-parent households, but they take the consequences, which often include poverty. If family resources aren't adequate, children may be hungry or malnourished, go without health care or lack other goods or services vital in a person's tender years.

There are efforts to fill the gaps. Head Start and school-meals programs for poor children have been successful. But it's a struggle to keep them funded.

Last fall, the Bush administration and Congress agreed on a multiyear expansion of Head Start. But the same budget containing that $18.6 billion in new Social Security funds lacks money to keep the planned Head Start expansion going. In his State of the Union address last January, the president offered a plan to combat infant mortality in 10 large cities. But the money for it would be taken from existing programs serving similar needs nationwide.

A study by the Food Research and Action Center, indicating that one of every eight children under 12 is hungry, implies that families aren't taking full advantage of food stamps, school lunches and other publicly provided nutritional assistance. Government can't do everything that parents don't. The state can't be charged with raising youngsters properly.

But we can do more than we are doing. Head Start, nutrition assistance for women, infants and children, school meals and other federal programs to help youngsters overcome early disadvantages should be expanded and fully funded. A program to assure them adequate health care should be designed and put in place.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., also proposes the feds create a Children's Trust Fund: a source of public money to assure that the needs of this vulnerable population will be met every year - instead of having to compete for what Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., calls the Treasury's "chump change." The trust-fund approach is doing the job for the older generation. Aren't children deserving as well?

by CNB