Federal-state relations

Federal budget. With tax day over, let’s look at issues around federal and state spending. First, USA:

• 22% of FY 2007’s $2.7 Trillion federal budget paid for defense, homeland security, and security-related international activities, and one-fifth of that went for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
• 21% went for 34 million Social Security retirees, 6.5 million surviving children and spouses, and 8.7 million disabled workers
• 21% went to 40 million for Medicare and to 45 million getting Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance benefits
• 9% went to lift 12 million out of poverty and reduced the depth of poverty for another 21 million through a variety of “safety-net” programs
• 9% paid interest on the national debt.

That’s the really big picture.

EITC. The Earned Income Tax Credit returns payroll-deducted monies to Americans who don’t make enough to pay federal income tax. Half of states—including Indiana—do likewise with state payroll withholdings. For these working poor Hoosiers, the amount of state EITC has been 6% of the federal EITC; a 2008 state law pushes that to 9% next year.
Most states with their own EITC pay out more than Indiana will at 9%, ranging from 10% to 43%.

Intergovernmental tension. Congress is now looking at two changes that could create “unintended consequences” for states:

• A higher education bill could penalize states that allow college funding to drop below the last 5 years’ average. It intends to keep states from upping tuitions to match new Pell Grant increases. While this reduces states’ spending flexibility, it could cause governors to keep the average down by not promoting increases in budgets for post-secondary schools, or it may push legislatures to cut other human services, welfare, and K-12.
• A housing bill gives a new property tax deduction for those who don’t itemize their deductions, but it is available only to residents of states or localities that don’t raise their tax rates between now and January 1, 2009. This may hamper local Hoosier governments from making adjustments to support necessities.

These examples show how intricately federal and state programs and budgets are webbed.

Capital punishment. The US Supreme Court upheld the three-drug lethal-injection protocol to execute death sentence prisoners. This is the method used in Indiana. In 1999, there were 98 executions in the USA. A voluntary moratorium began in September 2007 when the Supreme Court agreed to review the practice. Since its reinstatement in 1976, 1,099 prisoners have been executed. The Court will now consider ruling on capital punishment for those convicted of raping a child. The Indiana Dept of Corrections reports that there were 89 executions in Indiana prisons since 1900, with 36% of them in the 1930s. Of them, 73% were white; none women; averaged age 31 years old at sentencing; and time from sentencing to execution ranged from 99 days to nearly 23 years.

Update on Kids

Pre-K. Indiana is one of 12 states that put no public monies into pre-kindergarten education, and even kindergarten is an option for Hoosier parents. The other 76% of states spent $3.7 Billion in the last school year on pre-K schooling, about $3,642 per child, “halting, if not reversing, a trend of declining per-child commitment that has persisted for years,” the National Institute for Early Education Research reports in their recent yearbook. More than a million kids attend state-funded preschool education—22% of 4-year-olds—making states the largest supporter of public pre-K. Nationwide access for 3-year-olds increased by 10% last year.

There were 11,000 Hoosier kids in special education last year and 11,300 in state-funded Head Start, approximately 10% of Indiana’s 3 year olds and 17% of 4-year-olds. You can read the Rutgers study on “The State of Preschool 2007” at http://nieer.org/yearbook.

Child well-being. Geography Matters rebuts the excuse that “we can’t invest in children and youth because we’re a poor state.” Rather, “you’re poor because you don’t invest,” says the Every Child Matters Education Fund (ECM). Their latest report ranks the top and lowest performing states on a wide mix of measures. Even though Indiana rarely makes it into either end of the spectrum, but is in the “mediocre middle,” here’s how IN fares in these comparisons:

• children born in the bottom 10 states are 70% more likely to die in their first year than those in the top 10—IN is #37 at 78% more deaths than #1 Montana with 4.5 infant deaths per 1,000 live births
• kids in the bottom 10 are twice as likely as the top 10 to die by age 14—IN is #32 at 118% more than #1 Rhode Island with 11 deaths per 100k 1-14 year-olds
• teens in the bottom 10 are twice as likely to die than the top 10—IN is #28 at 70% more than #1 Hawaii at 40 deaths per 100,000 15-19 year-olds
• teens in bottom 10 give birth twice as often as the top 10—IN is #33 at 114% above #1 New Hampshire with 18 births per 1000 15-19 year-olds
• women in bottom 10 are 2+times more likely than top 10 to get late or no prenatal care—IN is #28 at 167% above #1 Rhode Island at 1.5%
• a child in bottom 10 is twice as likely to live in poverty as child in the top 10—IN is #30 at 80% more than #1 Maryland with 10% kids in poverty
• kids in the bottom 10 are 2.8 times as likely to be uninsured than the top 10—IN is #16 at 84% more uninsured kids than #1 Rhode Island at 4.2%
• teens in the bottom 10 are twice as likely to be incarcerated as juveniles in the top 10—IN is #47 at 474% more than #1 Vermont with 72 per 100k per 10-state’s upper juvenile offender age
• kids in the bottom 10 are 6.7 times more likely to die from abuse and neglect as those in the top 10—IN is #27 at 402% more than #1 Delaware with no fatalities per 100k children
• IN is #49 at $24.82 per capita state child welfare spending, some 14% of #1 Rhode Island’s $180
• IN ranks #35 in “overall child vulnerability” to #1 Vermont and #30 in comparing its overall tax burden and overall child vulnerability, with Connecticut at #1.

The full report explains the rationale and nuances in differences among states, with data on identical or similar measures coming from 2004 thru 2006. See
everychildmatters.org/homelandinsecurity/
index_geomatters.html for a detailed look at these comparisons.

Children’s budget. While federal funding for child-related programs grew 1.4% over the past five years, total non-defense spending grew nearly ten times that rate, dropping these programs from 11% to 10% of the federal non-defense budget. This continues a 23% decline since 1960.

Federal funding of child welfare programs dropped 11.5% over the past five years. “Mandatory” federal spending (primarily foster care payments) went up 5.7% for FY08 from FY07, but it dropped 6.7% for the myriad of “discretionary” federal children’s programs that totaled $8.4 Billion. Here are FY07-08 changes:

• foster care payments to states (19.2%)
• adoption assistance payments to states (11.2%)
• social services block grant (12.3%)
• community services block grants (10.7%)
• child welfare services (14.6%)
• runaway & homeless youth program (5.7%)
• mentoring children of prisoners (14.2%)
• social services research (3%)
• adoption incentives (49.1%)
• youth at risk programs (6.6%)
• child welfare training (14.7%).

Find the detailed report in “Children’s Budget 2008” at www.firstfocus.net/pages/3391 from First Focus.

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