By Chris Powell
While they quickly approved bonuses for state government employees the other day, Governor Lamont and the General Assembly may require much more time to decide whether and how to finance the “baby bonds” program that was enacted two years ago.
The program would have the state treasurer invest $3,200 of state government money in trust for each child born into poverty in the state — that is, children covered by the state’s Medicaid medical insurance program. There are about 15,000 such births annually. It is estimated that each account would be worth more than $11,000 when the children would qualify for custody of the money at age 18, whereupon they could use it for higher education, buying a home, or investing in a business.
The program authorizes the treasurer to borrow $50 million a year for 12 years to finance the bonds, but it was modified last year, at the governor’s request, so that the bonding requires the approval of the state Bond Commission, which the governor controls. While he signed the original legislation, the governor now doesn’t support raising the “baby bonds” money by bonding. After all, state government is already so heavily indebted not just by past bonding but also by unfunded pension obligations.
It’s a fair concern. Thus the governor suggests that if the “baby bonds” program is as important as its advocates believe, it should be financed by a regular appropriation in the present, not by debt to be repaid by the taxpayers of the future.
But finding money in government in the present is much harder than assigning it to be found by future governors and legislators, which is why bonding always has been so popular. In a perfect coincidence that should be embarrassing to legislators who support “baby bonds,” the $50 million they need to begin the program is the same amount they just found so easily for the state employee bonuses.
Especially for the liberals who control the legislature’s Democratic caucus, placating the politically influential state employee unions is far more important than eliminating child poverty.
In any case a “baby bonds” program is unlikely to do much about child poverty. For the poverty that most entraps children for life is about far more than a little cash. It is mainly about upbringing.
Giving a poor child $11,000 or even $24,000 when he turns 18 will not make him any more educated, skilled, and able to earn his way in the world. For most impoverished young people come out of high school socially promoted, uneducated, unskilled, unprepared for the higher education for which their “baby bond” money might be used, and ignorant of money management. Many are wounded psychologically from their dysfunctional home life. Some are already in trouble with the law.
But it is just like government to throw money at a problem, creating a bureaucracy of political flunkies in the process, when throwing money isn’t the solution, just a way for elected officials to look virtuous while strengthening their machine.
“Baby bonds” are untested, and in Connecticut alone a “baby bonds” program would spend hundreds of millions of dollars over many years before producing evidence of effectiveness.
Meanwhile nearly everyone already knows what most improves a child’s chances in life: an intact and stable family with two devoted parents who know the necessity of education and work. The children of such families long have been overcoming poverty quite without “baby bonds.”
By contrast most of Connecticut’s poorest children live in single-parent households with a mother who is herself overwhelmed, uneducated, unskilled, demoralized, and dependent on welfare, and who also may have a drug problem.
That’s why Connecticut has spent so much on its Department of Children and Families for so long without ever solving the child poverty problem. Of course, thanks to heroic social workers, there are some successes, but the supply of abused and neglected children in the state is always amply replenished and growing.
“Baby bonds” are really just an admission by the government that the most sensible responses to child poverty are politically impossible. Thus “baby bonds” will constitute still another official accommodation of child neglect, maybe the most expensive one yet.
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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.
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Chris Powell column 