In 2014, 6.4 million children, or 8.7% of those under the age of 18 in the U.S., received direct or indirect benefits from Social Security, up from 5.2 million, or 7.1% of kids in 2001,according to a new report from the Center for Global Policy Solutions (CGPS), a Washington think tank, which developed its numbers with the help of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Significantly, almost all the increase since 2001 is due to the growing number of kids who benefit from Social Security indirectly because they live in “multigenerational” households—either they’re being raised by their grandparents or live in a household with both a parent and grandparent present.
More than 3.2 million kids benefited indirectly from Social Security in 2014, up from fewer than 2.2 million in 2001, the CGPS estimates. Another 3.2 million children received direct Social Security benefits in 2014—either “survivor’s benefits” for a deceased parent, or “dependent” benefits because a living parent receives Social Security disability or retirement benefits.
By the Center’s calculations, 25.5% of children who benefit from Social Security live in households whose income falls below the poverty line. Yet without the Social Security cash, an extraordinay 43% of them would be poor. Put another way, in 2014 Social Security lifted 1.1 million kids out of poverty, up from just under 900,000 in 2001. (The U.S. Census Bureau reportsthe official poverty rate for all U.S. children in 2014 was 21.1%, compared to 13.5% for adults through the age of 64 and just 10% for those 65 and older. )
During a webinar last week discussing the new report, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Henry Aaron observed that sometimes the discussion of Social Security is framed in terms of “generational warfare,’’ with the implication being that the needs of the old are crowding out spending on the young. What the new research demonstrates, he said, “is this is a generational compact, not a generational battle.”
