Head Start to suffer in federal budget cuts
Planned federal budget cuts could hurt low-income families who count on programs like Head Start to give their children a shot. Around 80,000 slots for children could disappear by next year, and 30,000 teachers and staff could be out of work.
Since 1965, Head Start has provided preschool for children of low-income families. We think of education as the great equalizer in America, allowing people to succeed despite disadvantage and adversity. If that’s so, then Head Start is a great equalizer of education, making sure that even the most needy children start school ready to learn. The Annie E. Casey Foundation has made the case for the importance of early learning, showing that raising achievement and closing gaps in performance by third grade is critical.
The cuts come as part of “sequestration,” a congressional plan for automatically trimming the budget that we detailed in our weekly newsletter. While many of the programs Voices cares most about, like Medicaid, food stamps, and other aid to the neediest, are protected from sequestration cuts, Head Start is in real danger. This only underscores why it’s important to take action against the cuts.
Comments
August 6, 2012 at 9:38 am by Larry HovekampOur children- our future- matters much more than the spoiled brat demands upon the budget as demanded by the lobbyists and their special interests. Head Start especially needs consistant and adequate funding if poor children are to be ready for the classroom. This program has proven to help the young from the most impoverished and educationally denied backgrounds with a more equal chance to catch up with their more privileged peers. Therefore, preserving- and expanding- Head Start must be a priority for the next Federal budget and all future budgets.
September 17, 2012 at 1:00 am by MikeybWell, I think you make a great point. You’re right, social seitucry was funded by those who put into the system for years and years and years, but then it was robbed by lawmakers. Absolutely correct. I’m just saying that it was the Baby Boomers’ disengenuous politics and misplaced priorities that allowed those types of things to happen. Certainly not all Boomers deserve the blame (y’all and my parents are great examples of exceptions to the rule ), but as a whole the generation y’all belong to turned a lot of things upside down. The same holds true for my generation there are many exceptions to the rule (and I’d like to think I’m one of them), but a good portion of my generation seems to know no other way to do it th an to continue down the same destructive path. The bottom line, as far as social seitucry is concerned, is that due to lawmakers’ robbing it of its funds and the demographic challenges of large numbers of Baby Boomer retirees being funded by a smaller group of working-aged adults, we’re now left with the task of finding a way to make it sustainable. For people like yourself who’ve been promised certain amounts and are now using them or close to using them, we must honor those commitments. But for the rest of us who still have years and years left to work and put into the system, it’s real simple the system as it’s built isn’t sustainable and therefore must be modified. And for people who aren’t even born yet, it’s ridiculous to think that liberals would object to raising the retirement age. When social seitucry was first enacted in 1935, the average life expectancy for a person collecting benefits was 65 and they placed the retirement age at 65. So, the system wasn’t originally envisioned to finance long-term retirement. It was put in place to sustain the portion of the population who lived beyond retirement, but the thinking was that the average length of retirement wouldn’t be an extraordinarily long period of time. Since then, the retirement age has remained roughly the same (it gradually increased to 67 for full benefits), but life expectancy has jumped to 78. Therefore, we certainly should be able to gradually raise the retirement age going forward to at least age 70 which would completely repair the system. If people under 55 could bring themselves to work for just a few more months, with that increase rising gradually from there, the problem would be solved. But Democrats and interest groups are resisting these kinds of minor and sensible changes with everything they’ve got. If we can’t even make those kinds of easy adjustments, we’re in big trouble as a society because solving social seitucry is a piece of cake compared to the kind of cuts that will be required to make Medicare and Medicaid sustainable.
September 20, 2012 at 3:32 pm by idmyefkkdvfmGcmrZ , [url=http://ippggilntcri.com/]ippggilntcri[/url], [link=http://rwbaleehqetk.com/]rwbaleehqetk[/link], http://uvlkunndmihg.com/
Leave a Comment