Tax and spend politicians and their supporters have begun framing austerity in a negative way. Austerity - spending what you make, or even less so you have a reserve - is now regarded as a negative by people that believe taxes and more government lead to growth, even if those beliefs are what led to their economic collapse.

Such is the case in Brazil, which has led the world in defaulting on loans from other countries due to its boom-bust overspending. Now Brazil is once again trying to contain its deficit and is lowering the rates of increases in social spending and groups are concerned by this cyclic "austerity" and created statistical estimates which they use to claim childhood mortality rates could be 8.6 percent lower by 2030 if spending in two major social programs are not increased rather than limited. 

Thanks to unfunded expansion, Brazil can claim it is the eighth largest economy in the world, but yet another deep economic crisis caused by runaway spending has required a new round of reductions for programs. The authors are concerned about the Bolsa Familia Programme (BFP) and the Estrategia Saude da Familia (ESF) - Brazil's main welfare program and primary healthcare service. The BFP was launched in 2003 and in 2016 was estimated to cover 25 percent of Brazilian families. The ESF delivers community-based healthcare services like vaccination, child healthcare services, treatment of simple conditions, and chronic disease management. Obviously vaccines are good things, whereas chronic disease management is incredibly costly when it's 25 percent of the country.

In their paper, advocates for increased spending created their own statistical model to measure the projected effects of the economic crisis, poverty, as well as the impact of reductions to these two programs on child health in all 5,507 Brazilian municipalities for the period 2017-2030. Their estimates were that maintaining coverage from social protection programs could lead to a child mortality rate up to 8.6 percent lower in 2030. 

In addition, their estimates say maintaining coverage of the BFP and ESF might reduce avoidable childhood deaths by nearly 20,000 and avoidable childhood hospitalizations were up to 124,000 lower between 2017 and 2030, compared to austerity. 
 
They also lament the changes might impact the poorest. It's no surprise that such cuts impact the poorest people, the wealthy don't use those services.