"Kids Now same old story: more government, less family
From Kentucky Citizen Digest, January/February, 2000

Sometimes it seems as if the government spends half its time creating problems and the other half creating programs to deal with the problems it has created.

The most recent illustration of how this works was handed to us in the form of a report, entitled “Kids Now.” The report, from the Governor’s Early Childhood Task Force, proposes a number of solutions for various problems ... Okay, let’s just put it bluntly: It proposes to solve practically every problem facing young children in Kentucky. Health, childcare, education — the report has a solution for all of them. Unfortunately, most of the solutions involve more government bureaucracy and a greater level of government dependency.

The report frets that the state “lacks an overall plan” to deal with these various problems. This is certainly true. There is a plethora of programs to deal with children, and they tend to multiply and mutate with each passing session of the state’s General Assembly. They all have as their goal the betterment of children — and they all involve significant amounts of taxpayer dollars.

And what’s the solution to a confused riot of government programs? Why, another government program to organize all the other programs that have been created. We have heard this before, of course. When the legislature created the Family Resource and Youth Services Centers on local schools, they too were to bring order to the welter of government programs for young people. However, they quickly became another program to add to the confused jumble.

Here we go again.

In fact, the new proposals bear a close resemblance to these earlier in-school efforts. With KERA, schools began to be seen less as places to educate children than as easy places to get children hooked early on various government programs. Apparently, this was not early enough. The effort now appears to have spilled out of schools, and state policymakers are now looking to get government involved at an even earlier age. Most of the proposals have to do with raising eligibility limits for things like Medicaid (200 percent of the poverty rate) and other programs such as KCHIP (a similar percentage), but most have simply to do with making it easier to access government programs.

Other proposals speak of establishing various new councils, partnerships and advisory groups. All of the proposals have as their aim quite laudable goals. And, in fact, there are a group of proposals that actually speak of strengthening families, including one to reduce the tax burden of families.

The main problem with these proposals is conceptual. At what point do we say that there is enough government? At what point do we stop talking about “support structures” for children and realize that family is the only real support structure? At what point do we ask the question: “How can we talk about reducing the tax burden on families, when in the very same breath we are creating new and expensive government programs that have to be paid for by the same families we say we are trying to help?”
 

Key Family Foundation Contacts: Kent Ostrander, Executive Director Martin Cothran, Senior Associate Policy Analyst