THE CHANGING POLITICAL AND POLICY LANDSCAPE: BLEAK PLACE FOR CHILDREN

Those who document children's status in American society seem rarely to acknowledge the political causes of child poverty. Indeed, for all of the socioeconomic data collected on children, there is little actual discussion of the role that public policy decisions (and non-decisions) have played over the past two decades in exacerbating child poverty and contributing to poor social, educational and health outcomes for children. A pattern of steady federal and state government disinvestment in cities, for example, has contributed to rising child poverty rates. The federal and state aid component of central city expenditures declined from a high of 44 percent in 1977 to under 23 percent today (U.S. Census Bureau). Federal disinvestment policies were particularly prominent between 1981 and 1993, when the funding of community development block grant money, urban development action grants, general revenue sharing, mass transportation aid, and other discretionary programs fell by 66.3 percent in real dollar terms (Paget 1998). In the city of Detroit, where the child poverty rate exceeds 40 percent, federal funds declined as a percentage of general city revenues from 27.5 percent in 1976 to under six percent just 12 years later.

Other federal policies -- some that well predated the 1980s -- have also played key roles in concentrating low income families and children in inner-city communities. Federal housing, tax and development policies since World War II, for example, have geographically constructed and reinforced the Aghetto, not only creating the conditions for a downward economic spiral in such communities but also making it difficult to construct broad-based political coalitions to address urban problems at the level or scale required (Massey and Denton 1993; Halpern 1995). The impacts of these and other policy (and economic) trends on child welfare have been significant. [6] According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation's City Kids Count, the child poverty rate in the nation's 50 largest cities increased between 1969 and 1989 from 18 to 27 percent. Nationally, it grew from 15 to 18 percent. Today, in the midst of plenty, the child poverty rate is almost 21 percent, a full five percentage points above what it was three decades ago. In nine states and in the District of Columbia, a quarter or more of children in 1996 were growing up poor, with the percentage reaching as high as 30 percent in Mississippi, 32 percent in Louisiana and 40 percent in Washington, D.C. (Annie E. Casey Foundation 1999). These figures are all the more remarkable given that the United States is currently experience the longest peacetime economic expansion in history.

Considerable variation in state policy commitments also exacerbate and help to explain the extent and severity of child poverty. One recent study, for example, found that state spending per poor child in the highest spending states was over nine times the amount spent in the lowest spending states for Medicaid, over 20 times for the (now-abolished) Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and over 11 times for all of these programs combined (Orland and Cohen 1995). Even where federal entitlement and discretionary programs exist to address or ameliorate child poverty and related social problems, rarely are they taken full advantage of. Approximately 3.2 million children under the age of six who are income eligible for Medicaid were not enrolled in the program in 1994 and low income student participation in the federal School Breakfast program is only just over 39 percent (Foster and Srivastava 1996).

Cross-national comparisons also reveal that children in the U.S. are poorer by far than their counterparts in most other Western democracies. Not only has the child poverty rate in the U.S. been shown to be the highest among 17 countries studied, it was also found to be 50 percent higher than the next highest rate (Annie E. Casey Foundation 1999). To a large extent, such differences reflect the more generous social welfare policies enacted by Western European countries and Canada. Indeed, we tolerate a much higher level of child poverty than other western democracies. The United States is the only advanced western economy that has no family allowance, no universal health insurance for children and adults, and limited support for early childhood programs (Schorr 1997). Given these and other failures of collective political will, it should not be surprising that, even though children make up just over one-fourth of the U.S. total population, they comprise a full 40.1 percent of those in poverty.

Changing national and state policy priorities -- and their negative impacts on children -- reflect both the political isolation of American cities and, more broadly, the disequalizing political effects of the nation's growing wealth and income gap (Paget 1998; Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995). As Verba, Schlozman and Brady have so closely documented, there is a Asystematic bias in representation through participation, with participatory input Atilted in the direction of the more advantaged groups in society (p. 512). Their findings are consistent with decades of research on American political participation -- research that has found patterns of political participation to be deeply embedded in the American social structure. Studies of the interest group universe, for example, have shown that Athe heavenly choir of American interests sings with an upper class accent (Schattschneider 1960, 160). With the thirty year decline in electoral participation and the pronounced class bias in both national and state electorates, it should not be surprising that public benefits flow most heavily to those who need them the least. Myron Orfield's analysis of major metropolitan regions, for example, has found that it is the wealthiest suburbs that derive the greatest benefit from public expenditures, not working-class suburbs or impoverished inner-city communities (Orfield 1997).

The nation's growing wealth and income gap and the increasing geographic segregation of rich and poor make it difficult to generate political support for Aother people's children. Without attention to these broader policy trends and political realities, it seems unlikely that the status and well-being of children will substantially improve, especially for the 20 million poor and near poor children living in the country's most impoverished inner-city and rural communities. [7]

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[6]. Certainly, economic globalization and the shift in the nation's unemployment base from manufacturing to services (and from cities to suburbs) have also undermined wages for the majority of families. Between 1979 and 1993, real family incomes fell for families in the bottom three-fifths of the income distribution.

[7]. According to a new report jointly released by the Institute on Economic Policy and United For a Fair Economy, most households now have a lower net worth than they did in 1983, notwithstanding the stock market's record breaking growth over the past two decades. That growth has concentrated both wealth and income to a phenomenal degree, with the top one percent of households now owning more wealth than the entire bottom 95 percent of the population. Meanwhile, the weekly wages of the average worker in 1998 were actually below what they were in 1973 in inflation-adjusted dollars.