Creative Accounting

Sure, the state budget is a grown-up mess, but that’s no reason kids shouldn’t clean it up.

Last summer, Dennys George did his bit to balance the state budget. The seventeen-year-old spent two days in a super maximum security unit at the Adult Correctional Institution, arrested on a drug charge. For forty-eight hours, he ate, slept, relieved himself, waited and worried about prison rape in his cell, caught in a fiscal dragnet. Last spring, Governor Carcieri and the General Assembly, desperate to cover a $360 million shortfall, passed a new law lowering the age of adult offenders to seventeen years. The move was billed as a cost-cutting measure, but the logic escaped George.   

“I don’t know,” he says. “But the one who thought about that was stupid. Who in the world would think of such an idea to save money for the state? They aren’t thinking about us minors.”

In 1729, Jonathan Swift suggested that the Irish could alleviate their poverty by selling their babies to the wealthy British to be eaten. A well-nourished one-year-old, he suggested, would make “wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.” A Modest Proposal: For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public is now a classic work of political satire.

Pureeing poor children into the plat du jour seems to be the only measure policymakers missed in their zeal to slash spending. In the last two years, Rhode Island, once a national model for the care of its most vulnerable children, took significant steps backwards. With no apparent irony, the General Assembly: 

• Narrowed the eligibility requirements for families seeking state-subsidized child care and cut their reimbursements to providers outright. At least 2,000 children lost daycare in September, and the Providence YMCA shuttered six centers and laid off staff.

• Voted to treat all seventeen-year-old offenders as adults in criminal court. (Three months later, the law was repealed—not because it was bad public policy, but because they discovered that it wouldn’t save any money.)

• Removed twenty-one-year-olds from the jurisdiction of the Family Court, where for thirty years their interests have been protected by a court-appointed advocate, and cut in half the Department of Children, Youth and Families budget to provide their care.

• Increased the sanctions for participants of the Family Independence Program (FIP), so that children lose their cash benefit if parents don’t comply with their work plan within six months—even if they are making a good-faith effort by working twenty-five hours out of a goal of thirty.

All the state’s children took it on the chin in a couple of other legislative maneuvers. State aid to education received level funding, which amounts to a cut. And the governor, who originally proposed to express seventeen-year-olds into the adult correctional system, nixed a plan to express them into civic life when he vetoed a bill that would have preregistered sixteen-year-olds to vote when they apply for a driver’s license.    

The hand of financial calumny didn’t touch everyone. Last year, the legislature enacted a tax cut for the richest Rhode Islanders. The General Assembly and their families still receive free health care, a package worth $1.39 million annually.

 “It’s scary. Children don’t matter; they don’t vote,” says State Child Advocate Jametta Alston, who is currently suing the state in federal court, charging physical and mental abuse of children in state care. “Our children lost substantive rights through fiscal management.”

There is not a politician in America today who does not brim with family values. And yet, you wouldn’t know it from a recent UNICEF report ranking children’s wellbeing in twenty-one advanced industrialized countries. The U.S. averaged twentieth overall in six criteria, including health, safety, material wellbeing and education (Britain was last).

“We have a long history of focusing on the poor rather than enhancing the well-being of all children. But we don’t do a good job of that either,” says Sheila Kamerman, who specializes in children and family policy at Columbia University’s School of Social Work.

“Other advanced industrialized countries have universal family policies. In the U.S., the approach is means-testing. And once you go that route, you end up with very meager provisions.”

Our current spending priorities threaten to slice children’s programs into even thinner pieces, says Isabel Sawhill, an economist and expert on domestic poverty with the Washington, D.C.-based, Brookings Institute.

The $300 billion deficit, war spending, entitlement programs for the elderly and tax cuts for the wealthy threaten to put “a huge squeeze on existing commitments to children.” And Rhode Island’s is “exactly what I’m afraid will happen nationally,” Sawhill says.

To some extent, the squeeze is already underway. A federal deficit reduction law imposing stricter documentation requirements for government-subsidized health care stripped 6,000 from RIte Care, the state health insurance plan. This fall, President Bush vetoed a plan to increase the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan to $35 billion.  

The state’s child welfare community has cast its predictions of the future consequences: increased homelessness among young adults, mental illness, child abuse and crime. Some say the frayed edges are already showing.

“Until three years ago, we never had a kid come in from a homeless family. Today, I have three or four who are homeless,” says Brother Brendan Gerrity of Ocean Tides, a residential treatment center for at-risk boys. “Now, when the kids come back on a Sunday night, they are hungry.”

And the enrollment rate in early childhood education and family studies is dropping at the University of Rhode Island says Karen McCurdy, associate professor of human development and family studies.

“There’s going to be a spiraling long-term effect when there’s a shortage of social service and day care providers to work with kids,” she says. “In conversations with our students, they say: ‘We love this field, but I’m going to look for a job in business’ because there aren’t jobs in human services that will pay them enough to live on.”

As advocates prepare to battle for poor children this legislative session, there is hope, but not a lot of confidence in regaining lost ground.

“We have requested that the administration sit down to craft a thoughtful plan to make FIP a better workforce plan,” says Kate Brewster of the Poverty Institute at Rhode Island College. “That request was denied. We hope their solution is not to make the program more challenging for families who desperately need it.”

It is sad to those who walk through this great state when they see the malls, the street and triple-deckers crowded with poor women followed by three, four or six children, all in outfits from Ocean State Job Lot and draining our budget with their unceasing demand for healthcare, child care and court translators.

I think that everyone can agree that this prodigious number of children is, in the present deplorable state of Rhode Island, a big problem; and, therefore, whoever could find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the state would deserve a public statue in his honor.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, to which I hope no one will object. In the present attitude of mollycoddling, we have been remiss in transforming these mewling babes from tax users to taxpayers. An allowance is, by any other name, income. And, is even the humblest teddy bear not property? We have all observed children building veritable cities with their blocks and Legos. It is time for the appraisers to visit these structures and determine a proper levy. Finally, there is the municipal work undone. Children, creatures low to the ground as they are, are perfectly suited to the enterprise of gathering trash from the roadsides. I am certain that we can all lend our wits to the task of finding other means of wresting service or—all the better—cash from their little hands.      

Just a modest proposal.

Ellen Liberman is an award-winning journalist who has reported on politics and government affairs for television, public radio, newspapers and magazines for more than two decades.