Tag Archives: Social Programs

News

Assessing Obama’s claims about income inequality in America

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From Zero Hedge.

Excerpt:

Tonight’s stunning financial piece de resistance comes from Wyatt Emerich of The Cleveland Current. In what is sure to inspire some serious ire among all those who once believed Ronald Reagan that it was the USSR that was the “Evil Empire”, Emmerich analyzes disposable income and economic benefits among several key income classes and comes to the stunning (and verifiable) conclusion that “a one-parent family of three making $14,500 a year (minimum wage) has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year.” And that excludes benefits from Supplemental Security Income disability checks. America is now a country which punishes those middle-class people who not only try to work hard, but avoid scamming the system. Not surprisingly, it is not only the richest and most audacious thieves that prosper – it is also the penny scammers at the very bottom of the economic ladder that rip off the middle class each and every day, courtesy of the world’s most generous entitlement system. Perhaps if Reagan were alive today, he would wish to modify the object of his once legendary remark.

And it gets worse for those who don’t report their income:

If the one-week-a-month worker maintains an unreported cash-only job on the side, the deal gets better than a regular $60,000-a-year job.  In this scenario, you maintain a reportable, payroll deductible, low-income job for federal tax purposes. This allows you to easily establish your qualification for all these welfare programs. Then your black-market job gives you additional cash without interfering with your benefits. Some economists estimate there is one trillion in unreported income each year in the United States.

This really got me thinking. Just how much money could I get if I set out to deliberately scam the system? I soon realized that getting a low-paying minimum wage job would set the stage for far more welfare benefits than you could earn in a real job, if you were weilling to cheat. Even if you dodn’t cheat, you could do almost as well working one week a month at minimum wage than busting a gut at a $60,000-a-year job.

SSI pays $8,088 per year for each “disabled” family member. A person can be deemed “disabled” if thy are totally lacking in the cultural and educational skills needed to be employable in the workforce.

If you add $24,262 a year for three disability checks, the lowest paid welfare family would now have far more take-home income than the $60,000-a-year family.

Why am I getting up early every morning and going in to work to pay for the lifestyles of these other people? Well – this is how the Democrats are able to get elected. They buy  votes from the people who are dependent on government by paying them off with money taken from people who work for a living. And they think that this Robin Hood redistribution of wealth is noble and compassion. I am “greedy” because I want to tax cuts to keep more of what I earn.

News

Typical working UK mother spends 19 minutes per day with her children

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This is a re-post of a story I posted during the Christmas holidays, and I wanted to make sure everyone saw it.

From the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt:

According to the Office of National Statistics, a typical working mother spends as little as  19 minutes a day with her children; working fathers even less.

Time-neglect is what child psychologists call it, and they are studying its effect in middle-class families with increasing concern.

‘We are seeing some of the most privileged and yet in some ways the most neglected children in history,’ says child psychologist Dr Richard House, from the University of Roehampton.

We have some of the longest working hours in Europe and the recession is piling pressure on parents to be the last to leave the office. The guilt parents feel about this has consequences for when they are with their children.

‘Parents are reluctant to say “No” when they need to. They try to compensate by lavishing gifts on them. Neither is good for children’s well-being and healthy development,’ says Dr House.

His warnings follow a Unicef report that admonished British parents for trapping their children in a ‘cycle of compulsive consumerism’ by showering them with toys and designer labels rather than time.

[…]Unicef’s research also shows that what children actually want is more stable family time, as do many of the parents struggling to provide for them.

More than two-thirds of mothers work, and no one would want to see the progress women have made in the workplace reversed.

No one except the husbands and the children, but who cares about them?

More:

Historian Rebecca Fraser, mother of three daughters and author of A People’s History Of Britain, says that while nostalgia for the Fifties is understandable, the progress of women in education makes a return to that model unlikely.

‘In 1951, only one quarter of the tiny British student population (5 per cent of adults) were women, while in 2011 more than half the student population are female,’ she says.

‘With so many attending university, it is probably inevitable that most women are going to continue to want a career.’

[…]Child-care experts warn that time-neglect by high-achievers  can have serious consequences on their children.

Professor Suniya Luthar, a world expert in the welfare of children from affluent homes, has just completed research that shows the numbers of teenagers with significant mental health issues can be up to three times higher among those from high-achieving and prosperous families.

‘Traditionally, the view is that these children have it all, but the pressures on them are immense,’ says Professor Luthar.

‘The solution for any parent is to spend time with them.’

They also need clear boundaries, she says, something that ‘uber-working’ parents often are less able to enforce.

Every decision a woman makes has to be based on the plan for a marriage, family and children. Ideologies like feminism and socialism are incompatible with marriage and family. What is the use of a woman crying crocodile tears over her voluntary neglect of her own children when every decision she made prior to marriage and after marriage is based on an anti-family, pro-government worldview?

When a woman votes for government to tax her future family, regulate her husband’s employer, and restrict the family to purchasing  government services only (day care, public schools), then she must not complain when she is forced into the workplace and her child is handed to strangers to raise. That is the end result of being taken in by fashionable ideologies. When you oppose low taxes and small government, you oppose keeping money in the family. And that means that the wife will work, and the children will be raised by strangers. Women who vote for socialism, environmentalism, feminism, etc. are forcing themselves away from their future children.

Think before you act – don’t act on feelings and intuitions. If you want a marriage and a family, then vote accordingly.

Commentary

How the Labor Party killed marriage in the UK

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Kathy Gyngell explains in this UK Daily Mail article. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt:

Across its various forms and rules [marriage] is a human universal and with good reason. Marriage everywhere is the bridge between affinal and kin relationships ­ a bond integral to the functioning and survival of human society. It defines social relationships, social and economic responsibilities.

It establishes genealogical connections and confers ‘belonging’ and social identity. It prevents incest­ now more prevalent in our underclass than we know (something of deep concern to the more thoughtful of our politicians and social workers). No other set of relationships or connections ­ whether through friendship, work, sport or volunteering – replicate the function of marriage. The state certainly cannot ­ the failure of communism demonstrated that.

[…]I believe governments (successive ones) are culpable for setting marriage adrift as the sexual/ cultural revolution swept in. This was not the case elsewhere.

Britain silently, casually and progressively abolished the family … first through liberalising the divorce laws; later came the official signal that marriage no longer mattered.

Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson’s reform of personal taxation set in train the abolition of the married couple’s allowance. (He failed, as he had planned in his Green Paper, to balance independent taxation by transferring the unused personal allowance to a non-earning, most likely child-rearing-spouse.)

But it was Gordon Brown’s first budget that did the real damage. It marked, as Harriet Harman emphasized triumphantly at the time, “the end of the assumption that families consist of a male breadwinner and a female helpmate in the home”. Labour’s new measures did not just recognise that women were in paid work and needed help with childcare, they pushed this agenda aggressively with tax incentives and a massive expansion of childcare facilities.

Married mothers at home were indeed marked as second class citizens. What¹s more their families were to subsidise, through their disproportionately burdensome taxes, those families with no breadwinner at all. Frank Field¹s intention to cut back on lone-parent benefits in order to discourage dependency was abandoned in the face of party fury and threatened rebellion.

State support for lone parenthood has entrenched illegitimacy ­ the word no one dares speak. This is our root social problem. It is why we are now Europe¹s pre-eminent ‘transient shack up’ society. We cannot rest the entire blame on the pill per se (available across Europe) or on women’s lib. Betty Friedman and Germaine Greer (both made their way onto most European bookshop shelves) or cultural osmosis, though feminism and socialism have proved a pernicious mix.

The fact is other countries in Europe have done more to support and sustain marriage and married families. They have capitulated less to aggressive feminist ideologues ­ people who viewed marriage as the tool of an oppressive patriarchal regime, if not as prostitution (Jenni Murray in the past) but never as an institution the majority of young women continued to aspire to.

That marriage socialised men, and that women had power in marriage, did not occur to this particular monstrous regiment of women. Nor did men marshal the arguments against this craziness, for fear of falling foul of irrational and strident Gingerbread demands for lone parent economic independence – courtesy of the state of course.

Whatever cost to the state and taxpayer – subsidising lone mothers back to work, putting their fatherless children into state paid for childcare and continuing to mop after what were never viable families in the first place, whether in the form of Louise Casey or Sure Start, remains the mantra of left and most of the centre of politics.

Marriage didn’t just die in the UK by accident. It was a victim of a partnership of big government and militant feminism. Financial incentives were put in place by the secular left with the goal of discouraging people from marrying and have a mother stay at home and raise the children. The mistake that many women made is that they believed that they could keep marriage as is, with men seeking to commit for life, and add to it a government-provided safety net that would catch them if the men they freely chose fail to perform. Instead of getting serious about consulting with their parents, and choosing the right man for the responsibilities of marriage, women followed their hearts, and hoped to transform the wrong men using mystical powers. Somehow, they believed, premarital sex coupled with peer approval and an expensive wedding ceremony could transform a man who was not qualified for marriage at all into the perfect husband and father. When all of this failed, women refused to point the finger at themselves, and instead voted for more and more government social programs to equalize all households, regardless of their decisions about men. After all, men are so unpredictable! And courting intelligently and chastely is “too strict”.

This is why the typical mother in the UK spends 19 minutes per day with her children, and the average father spends even less. If everyone has to work to pay taxes for the welfare state, then there is no money left in the family for a stay-at-home parent. This is exactly what the feminists wanted – the end of marriage, and it’s unequal sex roles for wives and husbands. And the only way to go back to the way it used to be is for women to stop outsourcing the roles of the husband and father to government, and start marrying the right men for those jobs.