Dean Baker
There is a well-funded effort (think Fix the Debt and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation) to distract people from the upward redistribution to the rich through claims that the problem is really the elderly living high on Social Security and Medicare. Catherine Rampell contributed to this effort with a column warning the spending on the elderly threatens to crowd out spending on our children. Just about every claim in the column is either seriously misleading or outright wrong.
To begin with we get these two paragraphs:
“Spending on kids as a share of the budget is projected to decline dramatically in the coming decade – to just 7.8 percent by 2024. If you exclude health spending, spending on children falls in raw, inflation-adjusted dollars, too, not just as a percentage of total spending.
“‘Kids’ share of federal spending isn’t tumbling because children are suddenly becoming a smaller fraction of the population. Nor is this happening because we live in an “age of austerity”; the sizes of both the economy and tax revenue are at all-time highs, after accounting for inflation, and are expected to keep growing. Federal spending overall is likewise projected to swell in coming years.”
Okay, why would we exclude spending on health care for kids, unless we are trying to deceive readers? After all, the piece doesn’t exclude spending on health care when it discusses spending on the elderly. Also, we know that the main avenue for spending on kids is education. This is done primarily at the state and local level. Rampell acknowledges this point later in the piece, but then why the histrionics over the age composition of federal spending?
Also saying that we are not in an age of austerity is bizarre. Tax revenues as a share of GDP have fallen to levels not seen since the 1950s. Yes, the economy is growing and the budget is growing along with it, but what matters are the shares of the GDP going to tax revenue.