It probably has something to do with the fact the billionaire investment banker owns lots of government bonds on which he collects interest. (Okay, I don't know this for sure, but I'm guessing that he does own bonds.) The interest that a billionaire like Peterson collects on government bonds would almost certainly exceed by a huge amount payments for poor children for items like health care or child care.
Is this an injustice? Perhaps, but most people would consider the fact that Peterson paid for the bonds to be an important factor in the discussion. In the same vein, where does Steven Pearlstein get off complaining that the government spends $7 on the elderly for every $1 it spends on children, without noting that most of this spending comes through Social Security and Medicare, programs with designated taxes? In other words, seniors paid for these benefits.
Pearlstein may not care that seniors were told that their taxes were paying for these programs, but everyone else does. (That is why they are designated taxes, as opposed to "payroll taxes for funding defense spending and Wall Street subsidies.") This sort of comparison is dishonest.
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