Paul Krugmn: Think of the Children

[Derechos]

ne of the favorite lines of austerians is to claim that they’re concerned, above all, with the future prospects of our children. Paul Ryan says it all the time. So a couple of interesting points:

First, as Tim Egan says, the key political calculation behind the Ryan plan was the belief that seniors would be greedily concerned only with their own benefits:

snip

And Egan doesn’t even mention the fact that while Medicare cuts would be postponed, Medicaid would face savage cuts right away. And while much of Medicaid’s spending is on nursing care, many of its beneficiaries are children. In fact, as Tim Geithner just pointed out, at this point 40% of children born in America are on Medicaid.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/think-of-the-children/