The U.S. welfare system sure creates some crazy disincentives to working your way up the ladder. Benefits stacked upon benefits can mean it is financially better, at least in the short term, to stay at a lower-paying jobs rather than taking a higher paying job and losing those benefits. This is called the “welfare cliff.”
Let’s take the example of a single mom with two kids, 1 and 4. She has a $29,000 a year job, putting the kids in daycare during the day while she works.
As the above chart – via Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s secretary of Public Welfare — shows, the single mom is better off earning gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income and benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income & benefits of $57,045.
It would sure be tempting for that mom to keep the status quo rather than take the new job, even though the new position might lead to further career advancement and a higher standard of living. I guess this is something the Obama White House forgot to mention in its “Life of Julia” cartoons extolling government assistance.
Fatherlessness is absolutely horrible for children across the board. Not just in terms of their development, but also their material well-being and their physical safety. Fatherlessness is a loss in three ways for children. The federal government should NOT be taking money from good married households and transferring it to women who decline to marry before choosing to have reckless, irresponsible recreational sex.
Two-thirds of single women voted for President Barack Obama on Tuesday – showing that unattached women are a powerful Democratic voting bloc.
These women were galvanized not only by traditional “women’s” issues such as birth control and abortion rights, but also by Obama’s jobs message and health reform, analysts say.
NBC News national exit polling shows that 67 percent of unmarried women said they voted for Obama. That’s in line with the 2008 election, when 70 percent of single women helped usher the president into office. This proves it wasn’t a single-election phenomenon: unmarried women have solidified into a powerful voting force, experts say.
“One of the reasons for that is the birth control issue,” says American Association of University Women Policy Director Lisa Maatz. “Abortion — reasonable people can disagree on that and do. But the whole issue of access to birth control…is something that most women thought was a settled issue.”
By the way — this isn’t just young women, Maatz pointed out. Many of the single women voters were over 50 — divorced, widowed or never married.
In the rest of this post, when I say “women”, I mean “67% of single / unmarried / divorced women who voted for abortion and gay marriage”. Please keep that in mind.
So what is it that these single / unmarried / divorced women really want these days?
Here’s what they want:
they want taxpayer-funded contraceptives, paid for by Christians and provided by Christians
they want taxpayer-funded abortions, paid for by Christians and provided by Christians (no conscience protections)
they want children to be raised by single mothers, supported with taxpayer money
they want children to be raised by same-sex couples, and harsh laws preventing anyone from disagreeing with gay marriage
they want no-fault divorce laws, so that they can easily get out of any marriages that don’t make them happy
they want taxpayer-funded day care, so that they can get back to their careers as quickly as possible
In the UK, you can also get taxpayer-funded breast enlargements. And in some parts of Canada, you can get taxpayer-funded in-vitro fertilization. Both countries have single-payer health care, which is very popular with single women because women typically need more health care and men need less – but you pay into these systems based on income, so it is a redistributive system that punishes work and rewards those people who require more health care – sometimes as a result of their own poor choices.
So women basically want to be unchaste, to depend on government handouts, to dismiss the traditional roles of men in marriage (protector, provider, moral/spiritual leader) and to dismiss the needs of children for their mother and father (either through day care, single motherhood or divorce). If their plan to have a ton of recreational sex results in a baby, then they want to kill that baby, so they won’t be burdened by the consequences of their own choices. Women don’t want to stay home with very young children. They don’t want to care for their husbands’ needs. In fact, most of them would prefer to have money extracted from working men through taxation, and then distributed back to to women through government programs and handouts. What they really mean is that they want to marry the government, and escape from the authority of husbands and fathers, and the obligation to respect them, too.
Now, speaking as a chaste Christian man, marriage is my goal and so I read a lot of research about how marriage succeeds or fails, as well as research on what children need in order to succeed. The evidence that I’ve written about before shows that marriages are more stable and better quality if both the man and the woman have no previous sexual experience. The evidence also shows that children need a mother for at least the first two years of life, and preferably the first five years of life. The evidence shows that fatherlessness is tantamount to child abuse. And the evidence shows that divorce scars children for life. And the evidence shows that men feel better about themselves when they are recognized and respected by their family as the protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader of the home.
Therefore, we should be encouraging men and women to be chaste prior to marriage. Not only is this good for marital stability and quality, but fewer unborn children will be murdered by women. We should encourage women to stay home at least two years with new children, and five would be better. We should be encouraging people to be more careful about choosing the right man for the roles of husband and father, and not telling them to choose a man based on superficialities like appearance, emotions and cultural approval. We should be making it harder for women to divorce men by removing the financial incentives to divorce and requiring a demonstration of fault.
That’s what we would do if we wanted a marriage that is good for God, good for society, good for men and good for children. But let me be clear: that is not what women want. They say they want “marriage”, but they don’t want what marriage actually is: husbands caring for wives, wives submitting to husbands, and protecting and nurturing children. Marriage, to a woman, means that government will make sure that no one can obligate her to do anything that doesn’t make her feel happy. Not husbands. Not children. No one.
I think that Christian men like me need to be very careful about knitting our souls to a single woman today. Lots of women label themselves as “Christian” and even attend church. But if they haven’t taken the time to get informed about men and marriage, you shouldn’t be fooled by them. They are opposed to God, men, morality, marriage and children. They are pro-abortion. They will kill to make recreational sex consequence free. They are pro-gay-marriage. They don’t believe that children have a right to a mother and a father to whom they belong, and who are obligated to care for them.
Single men: be careful about marrying single women today – the odds are that you are going to get hurt. You can see the danger they pose to you and your children by looking at what they vote for. You might as well go to the zoo and marry an alligator and hope for love for you and your children from that. Don’t be stupid. Look how they vote and think about what it tells you about their priorities and sense of obligation. Marriage made sense when women were self-controlled and cared about the needs of men and children and their obligations to men and children. Now they don’t. If you want a traditional marriage, and the happiness of being a real man to a woman, and the joy of seeing your children cared for by someone you love and trust, then think carefully before you get married. Because that old definition of marriage is dead. The word remains, but the meaning is lost.
Official figures revealed that 90 children are sent home every day for attacking teachers or classmates.
And the worst deterioration in behaviour is being seen in the most affluent parts of the country. Teachers blamed parents for failing to equip children with the social skills they need to cope in the classroom.
Last year primary schools expelled nearly 300 pupils aged 11 and under for violence and handed out almost 17,000 suspensions. This means that on any given school day in 2010/11, 90 pupils were ordered out of school for attacking a member of staff or fellow pupil.
Primaries were forced to bar pupils more than 10,000 times for persistent disruption in lessons and 6,390 times for verbal abuse.
Hundreds more pupils were sent home for other serious breaches of school rules such as bullying, racist abuse, sexual misconduct, theft, drugs or alcohol offences and damage to property.
Figures issued by the Department for Education shows that while the number of secondary pupils being suspended or expelled is falling, there is a worsening picture at primary level – especially in the most affluent parts of the country.
The number of suspensions has increased most sharply in the country’s wealthiest areas.
The trend follows claims from teachers that spoilt middle-class children are just as likely to challenge authority at school.
Earlier this year, Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: ‘A minority of children are very aware of their rights, have a total disregard of school rules and are rather less aware of their responsibility for their own learning and how to show respect to staff and other students.
‘This can apply as much to over-indulged middle class children as those from challenging families.’
Everyone seems to be puzzled about why children of wealthy families might be more likely to misbehave. But I think that children are influenced by their parents the most, and in wealthy families, both parents are probably working. Who is there to supervise and and interact with the children if both parents are working? A day care worker is not the same as a parent. Children definitely need a lot of attention and discipline – does anyone really believe that day care workers can substitute for a parent in that task?
WINTERY KNIGHT 