How much money and public debate will it take to bring 18.8 percent of Maine’s toddlers out of poverty?

The rate of poverty among Maine children age 5 and under increased last year by more than 3 percent to stand at 18.8 percent of all preschoolers. The reality should break our hearts: almost one in every five of Maine’s smallest children don’t have the basics of a decent life – adequate food, a clean, warm bed or hope for a better life as an adult.

Yet, when was the last time our Legislature seriously debated child poverty and promised to do something about it? How far back must we go to find anything meaningful about child poverty in any political party platform? Who is the last Maine governor to declare war on child poverty? Or even just poverty?

When’s the last time a social service agency didn’t have to fight at town meeting for a few dollars to help shut-ins get to their doctors’ appointments or to stock food pantries for when families run out of money?

How is it that we can spend so much money fighting over the environment, property taxes and big boxes, but not child poverty?

We seem to have settled in our minds that a certain percentage of our kids will always be poor and that we can’t do anything about it; that we have done our best and poverty could be much worse – and has been much worse – and so those kids we have left behind will just have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

How many jail cells will we build, drug agents will we hire and public defenders will we pay before we get smart and redirect that energy and money to the root of the problem? How many books, winter coats, dinners, diapers and bootstraps would that money buy?

How much money would it even take to bring that 18.8 percent of Maine toddlers out of poverty?

Even child advocates, like Ellie Goldberg of the Maine Children’s Alliance, say that’s hard to figure. Perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps if someone could tell Maine people how much more money needs to be spent to bring those one in five kids out of poverty, we would then find a way to do it.

That, however, would demand that we set serious priorities as a state and put children at the top of the pile instead of burying them under it.

Re-setting our priorities also would demand as pitched a public debate over poverty as over tax breaks for Maine’s biggest corporations or how much dissolved oxygen should be discharged into the Androscoggin River.