A new report asserting that upwards of half of America’s children, and 90 percent of black youngsters, will be on food stamps at some time in their childhood speaks to the skewed nature of much political discourse in this country.

In so many areas, from property taxes to Social Security to health care, we focus on senior citizens as the at-risk group whose interests must be protected as first priority.

The implication is that the typical American over 60 is frail, impoverished and all-deserving.

In fact, this cohort is the best off financially of any population group, and in generally good health.

It is children who are poor to marginal in income and sporadically covered when it comes to health care.

A big difference between the old and young: Medicare.

Before the government beat back the health-care establishment and unleashed “socialized medicine” for the elderly in the 1960s, poverty characterized the golden years.

Today, the elderly live in freedom from the medical cost and access worries that badger younger families and their employers, subject millions to preventable illness and injury, and rank as the leading cause of personal bankruptcy.

Sure, Medicare is costly. An increase in the payroll tax, as well as the push for efficiencies initiated by the Obama administration, are necessities. But Medicare also can claim a higher customer satisfaction rate, and lower overhead, than its for-profit counterparts. It is no coincidence that America has the most private health-care funding system in the world, and the most expensive.

So why are senior citizens, goaded by the for-profit health insurance lobby, railing simultaneously against changing Medicare and extending it to the non-elderly?

Fear and entitlement.

When corporate interests bent on protecting the status quo run television ad after television ad warning against forcing “our seniors” to pay “more than their fair share,” they play to a visceral distrust in the same government that’s served older medical consumers well for nearly a half-century — and to a mind-set that tolerates virtually no demands upon citizens who have reached a certain age, regardless of their means.

To appreciate the potency of this generational wedge-driving, just consider the current bipartisan scramble to award a Social Security cost-of-living increase even though the cost of living has gone down. Now, some seniors may have been hit with expenses that defied the trend; but an across-the-board bonus is just that. It’s pandering. Fixed income? I can point you to many workers who only wish their wages had stayed fixed.

While Americans younger than 65 pay more and more for health care with less and less to pay with, the beneficiaries of public and for-profit funding alike sound the alarm against more “government-run” medicine. Fundamental change, they say, will harm “our seniors” and “the economy.” No change, of course, will simply keep our children out of the economy.