A. At Feltonville School of Arts and Sciences, a middle school in a poor neighborhoodof Philadelphia, the school year began chaotically as budget cuts took effect. Lines ofkids snaked out the door while a single school secretary tried to ensure the 600 or sostudents attending were registered. Classrooms were packed to their limit of 33;someeven spilled over.
B. This year, with the cuts meaning no school nurse or counselor, teachers fill the gaps,disrupting lessons to help students in distress. And the problems are not small: Aboy was stabbed in the head with a pencil by a fellow student; a girl reported sexualassault by an uncle; another refused to speak after the brutal murder of a parent. Andthat was just the start of the school year.
C. "I had a kid in class today who threatened to slash her wrists with a broken ruler," saidAmy Roat, a teacher at Feltonville, "Most of us can't even prepare lessons becausewe're using all our time counseling kids." To make matters worse, budget cuts arehurting essential academic programs. Feltonville eliminated two math teachers andtwo science teachers this year. Now many students who used to get 90 minutes ofmath instruction a day, only get half that.
D. Across the United States, whether it's schools, health care or entry-level jobs, theyoung are feeling the impact of government cutbacks. With debt and public spendingat the top of the Republican agenda, with Grand Old Party members promising not toraise revenue through taxes in any circumstances, there has never been a worse timeto need help from the government.
E. Not long ago, the young and vulnerable especially have been hit hard through federalspending cuts to programs like Head Start, nutrition assistance, and child welfare.Financial crises in cities like Philadelphia and Detroit have meant another wave ofschool budget cutbacks. And the weak job market is hurting the youngest workersmost, with youth unemployment more than double the national jobless rate.
F. This is not just an American problem. In Europe, too, austerity budgets ( 紧缩预算 ) arepinching even basic education and health needs. A decrease in the amount of moneyfor fundamental social programs that have been in operation since World War II iswidespread across the developed world. As governments try to cover budget shortfallsand calm debt fears, the young are losing out. "We're underinvesting ( 投资不足 )in our children," said Julia Isaacs, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a childpolicy expert. "Looking at future budget trends and the fact that Congress doesn'twant to raise taxes, I can see children's programs continuing to be squeezed."
G. That has implications for long-term economic growth. Cutting back on the youngis like eating the seed corn: satisfying a momentary need but leaving no way to grow a prosperous future. The debate on Capitol Hill, fired by Americans who have become skeptical of the value of federal spending, is all big-picture economics. It is a principled debate about where government starts and ends.
H. But is America overspending on its young? Public spending in the U.S. on children came to $12,164 per child in 2008, in current dollars, according to Kids' Share, an annual report published by the Urban Institute. Of that total, about a third came from the federal government and two thirds from state and local governments.
I.Compare that to what we spend on the elderly, which primarily comes from the federal government. According to the Urban Institute, public outlays on the elderly, in current dollars, was $27,117 per person in 2008, more than double the spending on children. The trend is the same across the developed world. Julia Lynch, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, studied 20 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development between 1985 and 2000 and found each spent more public funds on the elderly than on the young.
J.But there were large differences among them. She found the most youth-oriented welfare states were the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, and in Scandinavia, while the most elderly-oriented were Japan, Italy, Greece, the U.S., Spain, and Austria. Somewhere in the middle were Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Portugal. For all the talk about needing to cut spending to save our children and grandchildren from paying off our debt, in practice we are already ignoring our children so we may remain comfortable deep into old age.
K. Since the 1960s, federal spending on kids in the U.S. had been rising. That trend ended in 2011, when it dropped by $2 billion to $377 billion. A year later the figureplunged even more--by $28 billion, or a 7 percent decline. And spending on kids isprojected to shrink further over the next decade. The Urban Institute has forecast that federal spending on kids will decrease from 10 percent of the federal budget today to 8 percent by 2023.
L. That decline will occur even as federal spending is expected to increase by $1 trillion over the same period. In other words, kids are not expected to benefit much, if at all, from a big jump in federal spending forecast over the next decade. "There'sconcern about the growing gap between the rich and the poor," said LaurenceKotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University and co-author of The Coming Generational Storm, "But we've got another big problem: the growing gap inspending on the young versus the old."
M.Federal spending has increased dramatically for the elderly--but not for the young.According to the Urban Institute, while the children's share of the domestic federalbudget has declined 23 percent during the past 50 years, non-children spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid has more than doubled. Today, an elderlyperson gets about seven federal dollars for every one dollar given to a child. Andwhile the elderly population is roughly half the size of all children in the U.S.,taxpayers spend three times as much for them as they do on the young.
N. So, what is the federal government spending on? The budget can be roughly divided in the following way: 41 percent goes to the elderly and disabled portions of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; 20 percent to defense; 10 percent to children;6 percent to interest payments on the debt; and 23 percent to all other governmentfunctions. So if spending on kids does fall to 8 percent of the federal budget, andif interest payments rise along with higher interest rates over the same period, thefederal government soon will be spending more on interest payments on the debt thanon children.
O. Such cutbacks hurt low-income kids the most. That's because federal spending onkids tends to target those in need with programs like Medicaid and food stamps,while state and local spending focuses on education. Isaacs has calculated thatdisadvantaged children get about twice as much per capita as those who are better off.
 So cutbacks on kids are exacerbating ( 加剧 ) the gap between rich and poor, andthe two issues are now firmly intertwined.
P. What's driving government cutbacks? Much can be tied to fears of rising nationaldebt. Paradoxically, advocates of debt reduction and fiscal austerity claim they areacting in the interest of the young; our debts seem be too onerous (繁重的 ) for thenext generation. But in a hypercompetitive global economy, nations investing today inthe well-being and education of the young are writing the success stories of tomorrow.