Austerity's other failure—babies abandoned in a box

The rallying cry of government budget cutters in the austerity vs. stimulus debate is that they don’t want to burden our children and grandchildren with the country’s debt. 

That certainly is a more appealing argument than the “austerity leads to a healthier economy” baloney.  The evidence is all too clear that while the U.S. economy is only slowly improving thanks to our mediocre stimulus efforts, Europe’s austerity experiment has countries still in a deep recession or worse. 

But what about those children the “shrink the government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” crowd is so concerned about?

According to a CNBC report entitled "Austerity's Cost: Abandoned Children in Europe", the number of abandoned babies and young children across Europe is increasing.  In the last year in Italy child abandonment has gone up over 87% from a year ago and Greece has seen a tenfold rise in abandoned children since 2003.  Many of the babies are left anonymously in a monitored box where it is legal to do so in many European countries.

The National Director of SOS Villages said that because parents are struggling to even feed and clothe their children and the number of these economic orphans is expected to grow.  Data shows that 27.7 percent in Greece are facing extreme poverty. 

Stergios Sifnios of SOS villages told CNBC, “We are really afraid that in the future we will have a big number of families that cannot manage to keep their own children because of these problems. We are trying to be ready for this.”

The other price of the failed economic austerity model—abandoned children.