Nancy Folbre: Austerity for Posterity Whether Democrats and Republicans come to budgetary agreement before the end of the year, it seems likely that some Americans are going to be thrown off a fiscal cliff. Even President Obama's proposals call for cuts in discretionary spending that will disproportionately affect low-income children. The chasm between pro-family rhetoric and anti-family policies is widening. We are told to raise more children in order to prevent the aging of our population. We are told that education is the key to national economic success in this "age of human capital." But what we see is a growing political effort to reduce public spending on children. As Eduardo Porter recently explained, proposed cuts to federal spending will leave government as little more "than a heavily armed pension plan with a health insurer on the side" - not an entity likely to offer a helping hand to families struggling to support and educate the next generation. Provisions now teetering on the edge of possible elimination include those that increased eligibility for the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, which augment the after-tax income of families with children. Funds for Head Start, Early Head Start and child-care assistance will almost certainly be squeezed. Cuts in federal support for college attendance (both Pell grants and tax breaks) are likely to kick in, worsening student debt. The probable cuts come on top of increased economic stress for those in charge of posterity. As the 2012 National Child and Youth Well-Being Index Report published by the Foundation for Child Development documents, the percentage of children living in families below the poverty line has increased over the last decade to 21.4 percent in 2011 from 15.6 percent in 2001. More than a third of African-American and Hispanic children were living in poverty in 2011. The median income of families with children up to 18 years old has declined significantly - more than $6,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars - over the same time period. Parents are less likely to be securely employed than they were in 2001 and more susceptible to unemployment and involuntary part-time work. Investments in the early education of young children, widely considered to offer a high social and economic payback, are declining. After steady growth in the 1990s, the percentage of 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in prekindergarten programs has failed to grow significantly for the last 10 years. The number of children enrolled dwindled in 12 states, including Arizona, which dropped state support for its program. Four states (Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Ohio) enrolled a smaller percentage of 4-year-olds than a decade ago. Inflation-adjusted state spending on prekindergarten declined in 2010-11 for the first time ever. Inflation-adjusted spending per child also declined; partly as a result, several programs lost ground on quality standards (as monitored by site visits). A new report by Legal Momentum comparing single-parent families in the United States with those in 16 other high-income countries finds that the American families are more vulnerable to poverty despite putting in longer hours of market work. In other words, lack of effort to find paying jobs doesn't explain their plight. Rather, the jobs they find pay poorly, and lack of access to child care and sick leave makes it difficult for them to hold onto a good job when they find one. The level of social assistance for single parents (primarily through Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) varies from state to state in the United States but is consistently lower everywhere than in any of the comparison countries but for Spain. But while policies in many European countries are far more generous than those in the United States, they too are being crimped by austerity measures. A new report from Eurochild, an organization promoting the welfare and rights of children and young people, points to their growing vulnerability to cuts in social spending. One could make the case that our increasingly elderly voting population is worried more about its own economic future than that of the next generation. But it's not clear that voters have a clear picture of the intergenerational impact of public spending, as neither political leaders nor academic researchers have laid this out in clear detail. One thing is clear. Austerity that leads to reduced investments in children will reduce posterity's prosperity.