IFF: Group is working to expand child hunger

I read something disturbing on the Idaho Freedom Foundation website. While researching child hunger, I clicked to this IFF article: “Stopping Yet Another Welfare Program Won’t Starve Children.” This statement is as incorrect as it is horrifying. Government provision of food and financial subsidies has been shown to directly reduce child poverty, hunger and malnutrition.

When children live in poverty, they grow up with inadequate nutrition, problems with housing insecurity and reduced access to educational resources. This in turn affects their development, longterm health and economic potential. It puts them at higher risk for incarceration, ongoing poverty, homelessness, unplanned pregnancy and early death. It is a brutal cycle.

Child poverty costs the U.S. over $1 trillion a year, reducing GDP by 5.4% due to diminished economic productivity, increased health and crime costs, and the costs of child homelessness and abuse. Estimates indicate that for every dollar spent alleviating child poverty, the U.S. would save $7. Fighting child poverty would cost between $90 and $110 billion per year but be more than compensated by increased economic output between $800 billion to $1.1 trillion per year.

Idaho Freedom Foundation has created a convenient measure that shows which Idaho legislators vote consistently to expand the conditions for childhood hunger and poverty in Idaho. The higher the “Freedom Index,” the worse your legislator is.

The candidates most likely to help Idaho’s kids tend to be Democrats. Can you vote your conscience instead of following party lines? Remember, your ballot is anonymous.

CARRIE ROLLER

Sandpoint