Because you keep saying things like this:
and this
… which are 100 percent irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Romney’s quote specifically linked dignity to work for welfare moms. If you’re not asking for government money, you can – with dignity aplenty – work as a stay-at-home mom; to the precise extent that you request money from someone else, they can predicate the pay on all sorts of reasonable stuff.
So the dignity a mother feels from the work she does raising her children is justified solely by who pays her. Got it.
I don’t see the irrelevance. The idea is that, if folks ask the government for money, they can be asked by the government to perform work in exchange for the money; you’ve pointed out that you see little difference between the government and private citizens; I’ve agreed that, if folks ask private citizens for money, they can likewise be asked to perform work in exchange for the money.
Why did you bring up that “I see little difference…” point, if not to open up the entirely relevant question of whether – as I agree! – there’s little difference whether folks get the money from the government or from private citizens? So long as you’re noting that you see little difference, what could possibly be more relevant than me (a) noting that I likewise see little difference, and (b) pointing out why I see little difference? Take the money and take the strings in either case, sez I.
The issue isn’t whether the government is allowed to impose requirements on people receiving benefits. It’s about why Romney thinks certain requirements should be imposed.
No, the dignity she feels from the work she does has nothing to do with who pays her; the dignity she feels upon requesting money from someone is an entirely separate and separable issue.
It’s no different than if you’re working as a painter or a plumber instead of a parent: you can feel whatever dignity you want from the work you do – and should feel none if you go on to demand some of my money while refusing to do any work for me. I don’t wish to pay painters or plumbers who ask for my money without doing any work for me or mine; why would I wish to pay a demanding parent in that situation? Wouldn’t I accuse such a painter or plumber of needing a refresher course in dignity in such a situation? Why would a parent be any different?
He presumably thinks people who live beyond their means – instead of responsibly raising only as many kids as they can afford – should request money from yet other folks only if they’re willing to get a paying job; if they aren’t willing to do so, it’s presumably because they feel they shouldn’t have to do a thing for the people who’ll be paying them – which suggests they don’t understand the dignity of work.
Possibly he thinks the alternative will lead them to irresponsibly raise yet more kids they can’t afford; possibly he thinks such kids will grow up likewise expecting handouts from people they likewise aren’t working for. Possibly he thinks pairing those requirements with those benefits will instill a deeper understanding about dignity and work and responsibility and living within one’s means and raising only as many kids as one can afford, which will therefore lead to fewer such benefits being paid out as sensible self-reliance sweeps o’er the land. Why do you believe he thinks those requirements should be imposed?
What it points to is that he decided to make a big deal about the position of some obscure person, nominally on the other side but with no particular political role, on this issue, despite the fact that he clearly hadn’t thought it through himself enough to know what the underpinnings of his own position(s) really were.
I suppose we Dems could jump on every stupid thing Michele Bachmann said, and we’d be far more justified: Bachmann is, after all, a member of Congress.
That’s what Romney was doing with someone of far less importance - and it basically amounted to “this obscure person is wrong, and I’m gonna jump all over her case about it - and I don’t even know what’s right.”
I imagine that his point is that there’s a difference between women who planned and financed, along with their husband, to have children and then become a stay-at-home mother, and those who got knocked up and never saw the father again.
The first isn’t a drain on the average taxpayer. The latter is. From Romney’s position, the latter mother should have to work off her debt to society if she wants to feel dignified.
And that is what you would rather talk about, rather than the dignity of the work done by stay at home moms. If I was a Romney apologist, I wouldn’t want to talk about his words either.
“Pay [one’s] debt to society”? Shall we understand Romney’s position to be that being poor and availing oneself of the minimal—and I hasten to add, legal—social safety net is akin to committing a criminal act.
Mind you, I don’t think you’re wrong to surmise that this is Romney’s take on the matter. I just wish he and his supporters would have the courage of their convictions* to say it outright.
- Yeah, yeah, I know. Saying Mitt Romney has any convictions of belief is assuming facts not evidence.
Uh, no. She said this on Anderson Cooper 360, which as I recall has a sizable audience.
Your wife was watching, then? Or did she hear it because it went viral from there? Or was this a typical oppo pump job?
Well, the solution to this is of course eugenics. Exterminate the poor (primarily through contraceptives and abortion) that live beyond their means so that they’re not a burden on the rest of society. Very few Republicans are willing to accept that though, they’d much rather have an industrial reserve army around that they can denigrate and use to create dissension among those that’d otherwise unite against their policies.
Anyway, Ann Romney has been living on state government money for a while (it’s at least some proportion of her income, presumably). The issue is that when something is held as valuable to an individual, it’s lauded, but when something is in the interests of society (ensuring that children that are alive do not starve to death), it must be repudiated.
This quote is illustrative in that regard:
The issue is that Romney is applying two standards here. He imposes the condition of work on plebs, but not on his wife. This, despite the fact that it’d probably be far easier for him to afford stellar boarding schools and care for his children, far superior to the quality one may expect to be provided by the state.
Except there are no, repeat NO such benefits with “no strings attached”. Benefits to needy families have LOTS of strings attached. They have time limits. The days of “unlimited” welfare ended in 1996.
These rants of people “raising more kids than they can afford” also ignore two other points: families that COULD afford children when they had them then later experienced a financial upset, and that unlike a car or a home you can’t return kids to the store when you can no longer afford them.
These attitudes are all about punishing poor people, presumably in an effort to get them to no longer be poor (as if being poor didn’t suck enough on its own), without regard to what damage might be done to the kids involved.
In other words, raising kids is hard work if you’re middle class or higher, but if you’re poor raising kids isn’t any form of work at all so you should get up off your lazy ass and get a job. Yes, it’s hypocritical. Either raising kids is work or it isn’t.
The difference between painting and plumbing and raising kids is that if you want you can quit that job of painting or plumbing if it’s not bringing in the money and do something else but you can’t just quit being a parent. Always, always your words assume a parent that was never married is and is just having kids, but make no allowance for people who were middle class and could afford kids who then experience some problem - like a lay off experienced by tens of millions of people in recent years - that drops them into poverty. What are they supposed to do with the kids? Send them “back”? Put them into the execrable foster “care” system? Kill them and bury them in the backyard?
Add to this the Republican hypocrisy of punishing the poor for reproducing at the same time as cutting off funding for contraception, abortion, and all other forms of family planning other than the old “aspirin between the knees” and it’s revealed that from their viewpoint the poor exist as scapegoats for all that ills the nation, much as the Jews were blamed for all things bad in 1930’s Germany. They despise the poor and view them as criminal and vermin, but they have to have them because if they didn’t they’d have to take responsibility for their failed policies.
Nothing “imagined” about it. It shows just how phony the poutrage over the Rosen thing really is.
I don’t follow you at all, here. Who is paying Ann Romney?
[QUOTE=Broomstick]
In other words, raising kids is hard work if you’re middle class or higher, but if you’re poor raising kids isn’t any form of work at all so you should get up off your lazy ass and get a job. Yes, it’s hypocritical. Either raising kids is work or it isn’t.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, it’s work in either case. And – just as I perform paid work for my employer, without also asking for pay from the government – raising kids is work whether (a) “you’re middle class or higher” and so don’t also ask for pay from the government, or whether (b) you do also ask for pay from the government.
If I want to get some government pay on top of my paycheck, I should go out and do some other work. If a parent – or a plumber or a painter – wants to get some government pay on top of what they already make, they should likewise do some other work. Nothing hypocritical about that; it’s the same across the board.
Isn’t that Romney’s exact point? That you can, in fact, get a paying job if parenting isn’t bringing in enough money – because, as he said in the quote way back in the OP, “No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work.”
That’s got to be the weakest attempt at a Godwin ever. You’re saying the Republicans punish folks who don’t have paying jobs by – letting 'em do as they wish until and unless they ask for a handout, at which point the response is “No problem, but can you get a paying job?” You think that’s analogous to how Jews were viewed in 1930’s Germany? Really?
Man, you’re – wait, hold on, let me lazily put this together, slapdash-style – you’re blaming the Republicans in much the way that, uh, the Germans blamed the Jews back in the '30s, in that you (a) keep accusing 'em of keeping their stuff, and you of course (b) want to take their stuff away from them. Have I got that right?
You keep harping on that as if it is relevant to the dignity of being a stay at home mom.
Unless they happen to be his wife. As far as I can tell he’s willing to make it policy that women are required to get a job or risk losing their children unless those children happen to be related to him.
Edit: Was mistaken about Romney accepting a salary. I don’t think it’s really all that relevant though.