IMO his whole discussion about “the dignity of work” is a rhetorical sham to justify classes of “deserving” and “underserving” SAHM’s. The ones whose domestic chores already provide them dignity are those who are compensated for it by their husbands, a point justified by the awkward metaphor that they are “paying” for the “service” of having their children raised in a loving home. The ones who don’t have it and really need it–well, they’re the single mothers (the GOP used to call them “welfare queens”) demanding compensation for a service the payer didn’t receive–like the analogy of having your neighbor pay for you to paint a room in your house.
Romney was quite proud of imposing a work requirement on mothers who receive welfare: “Even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work…I’m willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.” Katha Pollitt over at the Nation (far better than I ever could) rightly calls bullsh!t on this distinction:
[QUOTE=Katha Pollitt]
So there it is: the difference between a stay-home mother and a welfare mother is money and a wedding ring. Unlike any other kind of labor I can think of, domestic labor is productive or not, depending on who performs it. For a college-educated married woman, it is the most valuable thing she could possibly do, totally off the scale of human endeavor. What is curing malaria compared with raising a couple of Ivy Leaguers? For these women, being supported by a man is good—the one exception to our American creed of self-reliance. Taking paid work, after all, poses all sorts of risks to the kids. (Watch out, though, ladies: if you expect the father of your children to underwrite your homemaking after divorce, you go straight from saint to gold-digger.) But for a low-income single woman, forgoing a job to raise children is an evasion of responsibility, which is to marry and/or support herself. For her children, staying home sets a bad example, breeding the next generation of criminals and layabouts.
All of which goes to show that it is not really possible to disengage domestic work from its social, gendered context: the work is valuable if the woman is valuable, and what determines her value is whether a man has found her so and how much money he has.
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That last sentence is key. Rich SAHM’s like Ann Romney are canonized. Poor ones need the “dignity of work". And the right says it’s Obama fomenting class warfare…
What about 'em? I feel the work done by local cops and firefighters is of value to me and mine, and vote accordingly; give me the chance to stop paying 'em in exchange for their services and I’d say, no, of course not, they’re doing fine work for me; there’s a reason why rich folks pay private bodyguards and corporations hire security guards and so on. (Well, so long as the cops and firefighters are doing their jobs to the satisfaction of their employer, by which I mean us; I of course figure we should fire any individuals who aren’t doing their jobs as specified.)
By contrast, I wouldn’t pay Ann Romney to raise her kids; I’d pay her to raise mine, which is something I would value, but she’s not like a cop in my city or a firefighter standing by to save my house; she’s arguably like a cop or a firefighter serving some other jurisdiction entirely: that’s fine work, but it’s not work I feel like paying for.
I similarly feel the military does work that’s of value to me and mine, which is a big part of why I joined their ranks back when and felt like I’d earned a paycheck upon obeying lawful orders. (Heck, while those orders came from officers above me, those officers in turn obeyed lawful orders all the way up the chain to the President, who by dint of doing crucial work on behalf of the folks he represents makes it easier to justify that soldiers are doing the sort of work that taxpayers figure is worth paying for; people vote according to whether they approve of the job he’s doing, right? And other politicians who win office are at best are much the same, and at worst a necessary evil, likewise?)
I don’t quite follow you on “doctors with medicare doctors” – that’s some awfully awkward phrasing, there – but agree with the Supreme Court that someone who can’t otherwise get the assistance of counsel for his defense involves the whole Sixth Amendment right that’s meant to be one heck of a check on the government. I’m the one paying to prosecute those folks; I don’t mind paying extra to make sure they get a fair trial.
I’d be OK with applying the same argument to SAHF. But I think this is a red herring. Again, let me quote from the linked article:
[QUOTE=Katha Pollitt]
Sure, there are fathers who stay home with kids—about 150,000 of them, compared with 5 million stay-home mothers—but not as some socially hallowed mission. Society gives men all the parental kudos they need for showing up at the school play, making pancakes on Sunday and exuding some kind of vaguely benevolent authority. Do you think Mitt lay awake at night wondering if he was a bad person for slaving away at Bain Capital and making Ann change the stinkier diapers? If he was a woman, he’d never have gotten a good night’s rest.
[/quote]
IOW, a large segment of American society still sees the parenting of young children as primarily the mother’s job. I’m not saying that’s right–in fact I don’t think it is–but I suspect this belief is far more common among those who lionize SAHM’s like Ann Romney.
Yeah, sorry, I meant doctors that take medicare patients but I didn’t edit it accordingly.
Thing is, your taxes are spent on firefighters fighting fires in a city far away and in the form of foreign aid, to pay for someone to paint their own living room (after a storm, say). That’s part of the social contract.
Has Mittens ever worked fast food for minimum wage while trying to pay rent and live an actual life with U.S. costs of living? Because I have and there was no goddamn “dignity” in it. All I hear is “let them eat cake”.
No they wouldn’t. Having kids you can’t afford and need help to feed, clothe and shelter is something that incites middle America who thinks they pay too much in taxes to start with. It upsets people who made procreation decisions around what we could afford, not what we wanted. It opens up a can of worms about giving people tax credits to stay home with kids. Human nature being what it is, most of us really aren’t compassionate enough to want it waved in our faces that a 20 year old girl didn’t choose adoption or that a woman who already had two children that she couldn’t afford had a third. Granted, shit happens, but a hell of a lot of people have kids after the shit already happened or before the shit has gotten shoveled out of their lives.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t support these women and - more importantly - their children, just that its not a winning strategy to try and shame the GOP over their lack of compassion on an issue that, frankly, even a lot of liberals have mixed feelings about.
Yep. When you subsidize something, you generally get more of it. I would support a program if it could be structured in a way as to give the baby what it needed, but didn’t reward the parents. Or, rather, if we can help the baby without rewarding the parents.
Cite that those populations are statistically the same as the U.S. so that its fair to extrapolate those numbers?
Here is the thing, Americans are different than Swedes. Or Koreans. Or Mexicans. Or Russians, or Afghanis, or Germans. We have a different culture. For that matter, people from Alabama are different than people from New York.
These things aren’t that simple. It would be great if they were.
If we’re going to argue special pleading, then why should childbearing respond to subsidy like growing crops?
Mitt Romney’s position according to ontheissues is:
How exactly would that be achieved? Should only rich people have more than two children, so that poor people don’t propagate? Should homosexuality or abstinence only be encouraged for poor people? Should contraceptives and abortion be preferentially distributed to the poor?
How about if your spouse doesn’t want to support you? Doesn’t sound dignified by any example I’ve heard in this thread from your side.
Clearly it would be if the couple agreed.
However the government, as the will of the governed, is choosing to support stay at home moms, for a time -in a limited, strings attached way.
It seems the question is being begged, why is the government different than a spouse? Why can it not consent to an arrangement but a spouse can?
Or it seems you’re arguing one spouse can force to support them against their will, and this is dignified. That seems a rather odd definition that would include this, to me.
American Exceptionalism is a turd of an argument. Quite frankly as an American I consider it a personal slur. It only seems to get pulled out by Conservatives saying things that work brilliantly elsewhere won’t work here because Americans are too degenerate.
Specifically, what relevant difference would being American have on birthrates as opposed to a Canadian, a Kiwi, or a Norwegian?
Just those three? We have more ethnic and cultural diversity. Our economy is bigger. We spend less on education and have for years. We have a more religiously Christian population. We are less rural, have larger cities. We are more politically conservative. We are more obese. There is a much larger gap between the rich and the poor.
(I’m fairly liberal, btw. But “hey, this works somewhere else” is a piss poor argument for “it will work over here.” Regardless of the two countries. I spent some time moving processes between the U.S. and China and Ireland. Just because something works fine here, doesn’t mean it will work when you put the same process in the hands of Chinese or Irish staff)
This isn’t true, neither in scale, nor per capita, nor per secondary school student. Here’s one source. Religiosity may be a factor, namely in public funding for the colossal failure of abstinence education… which is something Mitt Romney supports. With race, one has to admit one of two things. The first is that there is a situational component, essentially admitting that the differences are class based (and that the preponderance of ethnic minorities will be in the proletariat in America). The alternative is that ethnic minorities are predisposed to be welfare mothers (or stated politely: we can’t compare the Scandinavian countries to ours due to our highly heterogeneous population). I’d like to see you commit to one of those positions.
First you ever been to Canada? Toronto has more immigrants than natural born citizens. There’s a stereotype that they’re white as snow, but it is very wrong. Walking the city streets you hear and see so many languages.
Please enlighten me why a bigger economy would a matter. We seem to have a huge income gap in that supposed richer economy, as you note. To the poor, how does money they will never see affect them?
I find this jaw dropping. If you’re arguing Americans will do stupid things because they’re receiving an inferior education, maybe the solution is to stop shitting on teachers and give them a better education, yeah? If I’m completely off base, and you aren’t arguing the cheaper education is inferior (which it may not be, but I highly doubt it), what do mean by that?
Ahh fatties ruin it. Nice. There you go people, we’re too fat to do something right.
There are things that makes us different, and could change success rates, I agree. However if something works in a variety of other countries, it is up to you demonstrate something in the US will change that success. Not just a vague “something”, but an actual thing. There’s nothing inherently better about Canadians than Americans. Yet, in Canada people seem nicer, happier, healthier, more informed, and empowered in life.
I want that for my people, the Americans. We put men on the moon. You telling me we’re too incompetent to build a social safety net? One generation put a human being on another world. The next we’re going amateur hour with how to run a society. The hell?
To make it short, an urban Japanese nationalist, and my rural multicultural interested self are very different, yet if you prick us both, we both bleed red. In our blood, and in our souls, we are all people. Hairless apes, who stole technological fire from the gods without a Prometheus’s help.
I’m not “blaming” those attributes for anything, I’m just pointing out that statistically the U.S. population is different with different attributes. And statistically, you cannot extrapolate across populations and assume you’ll get the same results. And therefore, any cite you give would only say that for OTHER populations, more welfare may not incentive more children, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be the case here. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t.