Here are just a few recent headlines about crises facing America’s children, focused on child welfare, my area of legal practice.
→ The mental health of our nation’s children and youth continues to deteriorate. According to 2019 data, 15% of youth experienced a major depressive episode within the past 12 months, and 60% of them did not receive any treatment.
→ On October 19, 2021 the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association together declared a “National Emergency in Child and Adolescent Mental Health,” in part due to an increase in mental illness attributed to the pandemic.
→ Foster care continues to be under-resourced. In Fresno, California, for example, children awaiting placement have been sleeping on yoga mats in social workers’ offices, and urinating in bottles (as in the exhibit below), sometimes for weeks at a time.
The reason most often cited for why we can’t remedy these crises is lack of money. Meanwhile, tax cheats annually deprive the U.S. Treasury of the amount of money paid by the lowest earning 90% of taxpayers — about $600 billion each year. Congress can neither agree on more enforcement nor on more taxation. Even reaching an agreement on maintaining physical infrastructure seemed for most of 2021 like an overreach — idiomatically A Bridge Too Far.
One simple solution to meet our national needs would be to borrow more. But Republicans, who increase the national debt by passing tax cuts when they are in charge, bitterly complain about the debt when they are not the party in power. And even when the GOP is in power, they hypocritically attack Democrats who help them raise the debt ceiling. They behave like a previously contented business owner who, suddenly realizing that Democrats are in charge, bursts into his company and exclaims, “Gadzooks! I just realized that we have a mortgage on this building that’s bigger than our annual business revenue. So, no raises for any of you this year and I’m going to cancel all of the maintenance contracts on our building and equipment. Otherwise, my grandchildren will be saddled with debt and begging in the streets!”
Republicans also are prone to saying that the government should be run like a business. President Calvin Coolidge, nicknamed “Silent Cal,” nonetheless was famous for saying, “The business of America is business.” President Reagan admired his quiet predecessor and repeated this slogan many times. (In 1990, he also praised Coolidge’s reduction of the national debt, while ignoring his own status of having caused the greatest increase in the debt — as a percentage — of any President since FDR.)
Fair enough, let’s use the GOP’s business viewpoint to reframe national borrowing: We should appraise the national debt the way a business would. Bank of America recently concluded, using the same Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis businesses use, that our country’s fiscal condition is quite healthy. Our service of the national debt is less than 1% of GDP, and we have high probabilities of continued GDP growth and substantial tax revenues.
A 2020 Brookings Institute research paper used the DCF business formula and reached the same conclusion about the debt. It stated: “We reject traditional ideas of a cyclically balanced budget on the grounds that it would likely lead to inadequate growth and excessive financial instability.” It went on to propose that we should borrow to pay for investments in children that “would plausibly pay for themselves in present value.”
Numerous studies have demonstrated that investments in childcare, education and mental health care for children pay for themselves. Investments in children’s medical care come close. It would be to our credit if we extended our credit to invest in our children, and stopped allowing the GOP to hold them hostage to hypocrisy.
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All important points. But I have a hard time believing that the responsibility for all of these problems rest entirely on the shoulders of the GOP. The tax structure, the underfunding of the IRS, the blind eye turned toward children and families -- all of these have persisted over many years, and under many administrations. Take a look at state-run agencies in California, New York and other states controlled by Democratic governors and legislatures; I think you'll find endemic problems there with family- and child-welfare agencies. Here in California we've had several children die of abuse while supposedly under the supervision of child protection workers.
We have a lot of problems in this country, most recently a tribal divisiveness in the body politic. Exacerbating that by blaming one political party for all of our ills is hardly a recipe for bipartisan commitment to progress.