Are we spending too much on seniors and too little on kids? Many will recognize this as a classic either-or fallacy (what about tax breaks for the wealthy…?) But with Ronald Brownstein, Ezra Klein and Charlie Cook all repeating the Urban Institute statistic that federal spending on seniors is nearly seven times that on children, the idea that seniors are crowding out children’s programs is catching on in Washington. Meanwhile, Urban Institute’s estimate that state and local governments spend nine times more on kids than on seniors hasn’t gotten the same attention. Overall, it appears that government spending on seniors is roughly double (or less) that on children, though this measure includes Social Security, which is almost entirely funded through worker contributions.

Few progressives would dispute the need to spend more on children, especially low-income children. This should be the take-away from the Urban Institute’s Kids’ Share reports, the latest of which was published last July but is still frequently cited. Unfortunately, its findings are used mainly to justify cuts to Social Security and Medicare, rather than expanding worthy kids’ programs.

Reporters love the generational warfare angle, which Urban Institute isn’t above exploiting. The report is rife with selective comparisons to federal spending on elderly and adults with disabilities, as if there were only three groups of recipients of government spending and the size of the government pie was, by necessity, fixed or shrinking.

Much of the information needed to dismiss the crowding out idea is in the report itself, though you have to do a little digging. For starters, even if federal spending on seniors were seven times that on children, state and local government spending on children is nearly nine times that on seniors, according to Urban Institute’s estimates. This is because most education spending is at the state and local level, as is much spending on children’s health, whereas Social Security and Medicare are federal programs. All told, the report estimates that per capita government spending on seniors in 2008 was a little over double that on children.

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When it comes to federal spending on seniors, the only valid concern is that Medicare costs are high and rising and, if not contained, will put pressure on other government programs. However, this is not due to lavish benefits, since seniors’ out-of-pocket costs, even with Medicare, remain much higher than that of younger households, but rather the fact that health tends to decline with age. Nor is it a problem limited to Medicare, which is more efficient than private health insurance programs. Rather, the problem is our quasi-private health system, which costs roughly double that of other countries without providing better health outcomes.

Read the full article on the Economic Policy Institute’s Working Economics blog.