| :East Valley Tribune; |
:Feb 9, 2005; |
:East Valley News; |
:21 |
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BUDGETARY ‘BOOT CAMP’
Sadly, funding for kids isn’t ‘off the table’
Carol Kamin, Ph.D., is president and CEO of the Children’s Action Alliance (www.azchildren.org).
Ihave just returned from a "boot camp" in Washington, D.C., which was supposed to help me understand the federal budget process and its impact on Arizona’s kids and families. My head still hurts. It is miserably complicated and my (and perhaps your) very natural instinct is to retreat into my own world. But I’m not going to retreat and neither should any Arizonan who cares about the kind of world our children and grandchildren will inherit.
The federal budget (just like state and local budgets) is about our priorities and values; it’s about choices. The president just released his budget proposal and many of his choices are wrong. This proposal includes spending cuts that could result in our children’s generation being the first that does worse than their parents. And key congressional leaders have already announced plans to include even deeper cuts in the budget as it is finalized.
Under this budget proposal more kids won’t be able to see a doctor when they’re sick; more kids will be hungry; more kids will not be ready for school; more kids will be in unsafe conditions while their parents work; and more kids who have been abused will be less likely to get a safe foster home.
These budget cuts are the wrong choices. Instead of resolving the budget deficit, these budget cuts create more problems. We know that when kids have health insurance, they are healthier and do better in school. We know that for every dollar invested in quality preschool now, we get $17 back. These are the kinds of services that kids need to become productive, tax-paying citizens.
Arizona will be asked to pick up the pieces when federal support crumbles. Our state is already struggling with having far too many kids uninsured, or home alone without decent child care, or in schools that lack the small class sizes and well-trained teachers all parents want. Federal budget cuts will only make our problems worse.
It also is simply not fair. In all probability, Social Security, Medicare, defense, and homeland security will be "off the table." This means that a very large share of the proposed budget reduction — nearly half — may consist of cuts in programs for lowincome families and their kids — the very people who lack the political support of powerful constituencies. (My boot camp taught me that programs that provide help to low-income families and individuals make up 20 percent of all government expenditures, so how’s this fair?)
We all want to have our money spent wisely. And we elect senators and representatives to make those hard decisions. Our own Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl will have particularly pivotal roles. I believe they know that passing the buck to the state and to cities and asking them to do more with less is wrong. It’s wrong to cut health care for children when fewer parents are able to get health coverage through work. It’s wrong to squeeze services so that each year fewer and fewer children come to school healthy and ready to succeed. And it doesn’t make sense to cut taxes so much that we go into debt and cannot invest in our basic human capital.
This budget has the potential of destroying our historic commitment to protect our kids from sickness, hunger, abuse and danger. As adults, our fundamental responsibility is to ensure that our kids are better off than we are. Let’s not blow it.
