Benefits: Elderly Manage, Children Hurt : While Total Budget Has Grown, Young Needy Get Less and Less

Jennifer Lewis, a taffy-haired 7-year old who loves to sing, and her brother Keith, a 6-year old football and soccer demon whose headlong playing style has already cost him his two front teeth, have an unhappy and unwelcome distinction.

Like an increasing percentage of American children, they have been poor for much of their lives.

And even though Jennifer and Keith have often belonged to that group of Americans President Reagan describes as the “neediest of the needy,” year by year they have been entitled to less and less help from the federal government. Moreover, the new budget that Reagan will propose to Congress Wednesday is expected to continue the trend.

While the government’s total budget has grown steadily, the share devoted to helping needy children has declined. Spending for children’s programs as a whole fell more than 10% between 1981 and 1984 after accounting for inflation, according to an Urban Institute study. School breakfast and lunch programs, it found, lost 40% of their federal support; food stamps, 14%; Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 19%, and child care, 34%.

“The programs they rely most on were the ones cut the deepest,” says Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.

The fate of children during the Reagan years contrasts starkly with that of the elderly. While older Americans have, for the most part, held their own financially, children have suffered disproportionately. Today, about 21% of all American children under 18 are poor--nearly double the poverty rate for the elderly. In 1980 those percentages were roughly equal.

Children like Jennifer and Keith are particularly at risk. In the bloodless jargon of demographers, they and their mother, Sharon Lewis, a 32-year-old computer programmer, constitute a single-parent, female-head-of-household family. Such families, a steadily rising segment of the U.S. population, now number 6 million, according to the Census Bureau. And families headed by women are four times as likely to live below the poverty line--$8,570 for a family of three--as other families, the Census Bureau says.

Single Mother Hit Hard

“The single mother with children has been hit very hard,” says Madeleine Kimmich, author of the Urban Institute study. “I don’t see it getting any better for them.”

The median income for women with one or more children 18 and under was $9,768 in 1984, the most recent year for which figures are available, according to the Census Bureau, compared to a median income for all families of $26,433.

“It’s like a grease slide,” said Sandra Porter, executive director of the National Commission on Working Women. “You just keep going backwards.”

In many ways, Sharon Lewis and her children may not fit the popular stereotype of a welfare family. Lewis’s skill as a computer programmer has sometimes enabled her to earn more money than many women in her situation. She has completed more than half of a four-year course in electrical engineering at the University of Maryland. Her estranged husband makes his child-support payments regularly and carries the two children on his medical insurance.

A Ceaseless Struggle

Yet the Lewises are also typical of millions of Americans who struggle ceaselessly with the undertow of poverty.

Since June, 1979, when her marriage broke up, Lewis and her young children have drifted in and out of the government’s official poverty zone--sometimes managing to keep their heads above water far enough to be ineligible for government aid programs, sometimes sinking enough to qualify for food stamps, AFDC, free school lunches, free day care and subsidized housing.

Some years she has earned as little as $1,400 in outside income. Last year, her high-water mark thus far, she earned $7,844 as a computer programmer for part of the year. That income was supplemented by $5,460 in alimony and child support payments from her husband. She paid $432 in federal income tax, $351 in state income tax and $553 in Social Security tax, but her after-tax earnings were still enough to lift her not only above the poverty line but also above the median for families headed by females.

(The tax overhaul bill passed by the House and pending in the Senate would eliminate tax obligations for 6 million low-income taxpayers. A family of four with an annual gross income of $12,800, paying $605 in income taxes under current law, would pay no taxes at all, although their Social Security tax of $915.20 would be unaffected. That would be a saving of more than $400 a year for the Lewises.)

‘Above-Average’ Income

With her “above-average” income, Sharon Lewis rents a modest brown-and-white town house in a tidy, quiet middle-income neighborhood and pays child care costs, $500 a semester for college tuition and whatever she can on the $500 balance remaining on her 1980 Datsun and on $1,000 in outstanding medical bills.

Although her children are covered by their father’s medical insurance policy, which pays 85% of their bills, she has no insurance coverage for herself. Pregnant by a man she once planned to marry, she is paying a hospital clinic $650 for a delivery expected in May.

Medical bills loom ominously for many families like the Lewises. Although their earnings make them ineligible for Medicaid, they do not make enough to pay for private insurance.

Fingering her ash-blond hair, Lewis recalled how she ruptured a disk in her back two years ago when she had to set up her furniture because the movers “dumped everything in the living room.” She did not go to a doctor immediately. “When you pay your own medical bills,” she explained, “you get on your death bed before you go to a doctor.”

Free Day Care

When Lewis did not work, her family was eligible for free day care; when she worked and needed day care more urgently, she paid $119 a month for her two children. During her period of unemployment, her family received $106 a month in food stamps. And while a federal subsidy dropped her rent to $38 a month during her unemployment, she paid $182 when employed.

Although all of these benefits are somewhat smaller than they would have been before the Reagan era of federal budget cuts, they still amount to $367 a month. Lewis lost them all when she resumed working on Jan. 20 as an $858-a-month computer operator for a company that makes plaques and nameplates. Her new employer provides no health insurance, and she began paying federal and state taxes again--her take-home pay is only $173 a week.

“It gets frustrating,” she says. “You start to make more money, but you don’t really have more money. It hardly seems worth it. It’s a rat race.”

Gets Little Respite

Lewis, who sews, knits and crochets both as a hobby and as a necessity, says her family gets little respite. Up at 6 a.m., it’s off to work and day care. Twelve hours later at home, dinner is often a packaged meal--something fast. Outside entertainment is virtually non-existent: “Once in a while I splurge and take the children to Chuck E Cheese’s,” a combination theater and pizza house for children.

Day care is a particular problem. Lewis’ sister, Darlene Dennis, a divorced working mother of two children, says: “You can’t work if you can’t get care for your children.” And Dennis, co-chairman of a board that advises Maryland’s Montgomery County on day-care issues, says program rules are structured so that a woman who earns “one penny over” a fixed level loses half of her day-care benefits.

Nonetheless, Lewis works--and so do a great many other women in similar circumstances. The House Government Operations Committee report cited “overwhelming evidence . . . that women in poverty desire to be self-sufficient, and most desire work as their best means of getting there.”

Thinks Policies ‘Stink’

Lewis talks in no uncertain terms about President Reagan’s budget policies. “I think they stink,” she says. “You have to be dirt poor or filthy rich. If you’re in between, he’s killing you.”

The Administration sees the situation differently. It insists that families such as the Lewises, who are far from the nation’s neediest, should not drain scarce federal resources from the poorest of the poor. It says it has tried to target its budget cuts on the most well-to-do of program beneficiaries, those most able to cope on their own.

But cuts already made in AFDC and other child-oriented programs have led some critics to argue that federal policy now unfairly favors the elderly over the young.

Paul Hewitt, president of Americans for Generational Equity, a Washington-based advocacy group for the young, says the elderly, who vote in large numbers and have politically powerful lobby groups to support them, are “dictating policy at the federal level.”

“Not Enough for the Kids”

“There’s not enough left over for the kids,” Hewitt says. “Children don’t vote, they don’t contribute to campaigns, and they don’t have friends in high places.”

Here in Germantown, Lewis is not focusing on the bleak present; she would rather look to what she hopes will be a bright future.

One day, with or without governmental help, she hopes to develop the ability to design computerized communications systems. “I have a goal,” she says, “and I’m determined to get there.”

Times researcher Aleta Embrey contributed to this report.