Maggie Stevens, with Early Ed Watch, informs us on January 19, 2010 that the question is arising again, as it did before the ARRA fund release, “What will happen to state and federal budgets for programs that serve children when they run out?” Panelists discussed this question last Thursday at the Urban Institute in Washington D.C.  These panelists gathered to discuss the Kids’ Share report.

In the third annual Kids’ Share analysis report, some interesting information was shared:

• ·     From 1960 to the present, outlays on children have increased in dollars and as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. However, children are receiving a smaller share of the overall domestic federal budget.
• ·      In 2008, the largest federal spending programs for children were Medicaid, food and nutrition programs, and TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families).  These programs plus child tax credit, SNAP, and Medicaid had unusually high 2008 expenditures..
• ·    State expenditures on children’s programs are not distributed evenly across all ages of childhood.
• ·     As of 2004, states and localities accounted for 68% of spending on children birth to 18.  But for very young children, birth to age 2, more than three quarters (77%) of spending comes from the federal government.

The alarming news is that if “current policies remain the same, spending on children as a percent of GDP will decrease over the coming decade while non-child portions of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will increase by an estimated 2.3 percentage points."  That increase alone, the report says, is larger than the entire projected 2010 federal budget for spending on children.