Friday, June 4, 2004

Eugene Steuerle has posted The Incredible Shrinking Budget for Working Families and Children on the Tax Policy Center web site. Here is the opening:

Programs for working families and children are scheduled to shrink rapidly over the next few years, squeezed between rising expenditures on programs for the elderly and declines in tax revenues. This scenario will play out even if only modest defense and international needs are factored into the division of federal funds. Temporary deficit financing can delay the day of reckoning very little, since borrowing against the future only compounds today’s problems.

Of course, policymakers aren’t likely to zero out all spending on working families and children. They could instead revamp elderly programs, reform taxes, or do both. But here’s the rub: programs for the politically disadvantaged wear stone slippers in the dance of budget legislation. Put another way, programs for families and children do not receive the large, automatic, built-in growth of many elderly programs or the automatically growing costs of many tax breaks.