Posted by JM Ashby
I hate to say "please think of the children" but in this case that is exactly what people need to be doing. More specifically congress, which has a bad case of the budget-cutting fever, needs to take into account the very real human cost that is associated with those cuts. A new study conducted by the Foundation for Child Development shows that middle-class children are now more dependent on social programs than they ever have been before.
The FCD report finds that even prior to the recession that began in 2007, the gap in real family income separating a middle-class family -- one with an annual income between $22,758 and $110,000 -- from a high-income one expanded from $59,800 in 1985 to $93,100 by 2008. Between 2000 and 2008, middle-class families experienced a drop in real family income of more than $4,000, compared to a dip of just $139 for the top 20 percent of earners.
...Donald Hernandez, senior adviser to the Foundation for Child Development and author of the report, said his findings show that middle class is clearly not what it used to be.
"It makes me ask the question, 'What is the middle class?'" he told HuffPost. "We used to think of it as having the capacity to pay for a lot of basic needs and services, and that's less and less the case from the point of view of children and the increasing need they have to depend on government programs to get basic early education and health care."
Children don't have a voice in congress, but at least half of congress is more than willing to casually write-off their future in form of budget cuts to social programs. I don't need to point out which half.
Choosing to neglect tomorrow's generation, rather than strengthen them, is exactly what the president warned against in his SOTU address.