Moderate approach to child poverty

You know me, always looking for the middling — er, the modest — wait, the moderate, the middle-of-the-road approach.

Such a pipe dream, the search for that take on matters that mollifies everyone.

But in a better world, people would go there, especially the politicians, who join groups like the

Problem Solvers

Caucus and make all the MAGAs and the Democratic Socialists mad.

So my ears perked up the other day at a mention on the radio of a think-tankish organization called Convergence, motto: “offers a beacon of hope for the majority of Americans frustrated by divisiveness and toxic polarization.”

Fully, it’s the Convergence Center for Policy Resolution, a D.C.-based group that includes both do-gooders and business people, academics and a few politicians able to resist the party line. More motto: Convergence “has pioneered a distinctive approach to collaborative problem-solving across divides to help solve seemingly intractable challenges at the intersection of national politics and policy. We convene leaders in their fields representing wildly divergent views with a consistent record of success in building trust, forging consensus, and driving meaningful change.”

It’s being helped along by a recent $4 million grant from Mackenzie Scott, and damn if that woman isn’t doing a fantastic job redistributing all those dollars we gave to Amazon in a meaningful way.

It was NPR’s Laila Fadel’s and Cory Turner’s mention of a “big bipartisan working group” that caught my ear. Convergence convened that group over the last year to tackle the appalling fact of rampant childhood poverty in our rich nation. “When it comes to children, the U.S. doesn’t score well compared to other wealthy democracies. We’re bottom third in infant mortality and bottom third in relative child poverty,” Fadel noted.

Here was the kick in the head: “I mean, our relative child poverty rate is roughly on par with Russia and Mexico, which is a problem for all of us, even those of us without babies,” Turner said.

I love Mexico beyond words, and Russia is, well, a place that we must deal with. But for our economy to produce the same results for our poorest children as their economies? Inexcusable.

So what do the “30 child development experts, advocates, researchers and think-tankers from across the political spectrum” who met monthly for a year say ought to be done to make things right?

Turner: “No. 1, they say families need more high-quality child care options. That should be pretty obvious to anyone who’s been reading the news lately. In the U.S., there is no child care system.”

No. 2: “The U.S. is unusual among wealthy nations in that it has no national paid maternity leave, let alone parental leave. So that’s even though there is strong research that suggests paid leave improves outcomes not just for babies, but for parents. Several states do offer paid leave, but the federal government only offers 12 weeks of job protections, and even that doesn’t cover everybody. So most on this bipartisan collaborative supported the idea of a federal 12-week paid parental leave.”

And after that? “The third big thing they sort of rallied around was the idea of providing more cash benefits to families, kind of like the child tax credit, maybe focusing more on families that need it most or have the youngest kids.”

Fadel: “OK. So it sounds like good news that they agreed on this, but did they figure out how to pay for this?”

Turner: “Not really.”

But you know what? Government spends five times as much on seniors as on children. If we spent more on kids, “Those benefits last a lifetime.”