Children Losing Ground to the Elderly.

• Position: Children not being educated properly - Brief Article

For decades, America's social insurance programs have helped the elderly become prosperous while doing less and less to raise the income status of children--a formula that could spell economic disaster as aging whites grow increasingly dependent on a future workforce dominated by Hispanics and other relatively poor and young minorities. "America's future is being jeopardized by the country's inability to invest effectively in the education and financial well-being of its children," maintains Martha N. Ozawa, the Bettie Boefinger Brown Professor of Social Policy, Washington University in St. Louis (Mo.), who has spent three decades studying the nation's far-flung public assistance network. She contends that the U.S. must move away from traditional social programs that transfer wealth to the elderly and begin investing in its future.

"It is critical for policymakers to keep in mind that children have lost substantial economic ground in relation to adults and elderly people since the late 1960s.... Traditional government income transfer programs have not been very effective in helping children, and current welfare reforms will only add to the growing income disparity between young and old."

In the next 20 years, an estimated 76,000,000 people will reach retirement age and leave the U.S. workforce. The fastest growing segment of the U.S. population is women over age 85. By 2030, one in five residents will be over 65. The baby boom, it seems, rapidly is becoming the senior boom. Meanwhile, the nation's ranks of Hispanics and other minorities are swelling due to immigration and relatively higher birth rates. Whites still comprise nearly 90% of the nation's elderly population, but the percentage of whites among children is shrinking fast. Already, three out of every 10 kids are minorities. As minorities continue to displace whites in the child population, the income status of youngsters is expected to fall further still in comparison to the elderly.

Why should retirees be concerned about this? Altruism...