As a conservative, pro-life Republican, I love the idea of regular cash payments to parents of children. In fact, I'd like to see more. Ideally, I would replace all forms of public assistance, i.e., Food Stamps, Section 8, TANF, unemployment insurance, and so on, with cash payments. You'd save a fortune on bureaucracy and remove barriers to people continuing to get assistance. No more trips to the welfare office every month or so to prove eligibility. No calling into unemployment offices that don't answer the phones.
Sure, but Kaus posts is within the context of the current welfare system. In this case, one has think of marginal impact. The case against this bill would be much weaker if it was as you wrote above: merely a replacement of all forms of public assistance.
Always glad to get your take Mickey. Certainly don't always agree with it and I am glad to get it. I wish you would write more in your pieces on what you would do differently than what you are opposing. I would also like to know more about who you are reading and who you are following that informs your thinking. For example, I learned about unherd.com as a result of you being involved with BloggingHeads.TV which has interesting takes mostly on the conservative side but not always.
While you're focusing on the importance of work, you may want to improve your own with a little spell check. I've never seen so many typographical and spelling errors in a supposedly professional article and it's not like you're a spring chicken at this, I've been regrettably happening across your content since I was a teenager in the early 2000s.
That aside, it's interesting to me that so many people who claim to be pro-family are not so interested in families being headed by single or divorced parents, or concerned about their children going without basic necessities, etc.
What exactly is the problem with a single mother who stays home with her children moving to greying, dying small town communities in Mississippi and Texas and breathing new life into them with their children? I have a feeling you're using the phrase "single mother" as a dog whistle to indicate to white southerners that this will bring black and brown people to their neighborhoods. I suppose I should be comforted that with Trump out of office people like you feel the need to return to dog whistles instead of outright saying what you mean.
Kaus is making a bigger point. A cultural point. Culture is contagious. What could be a single mom not working now could culturally engulf whole parts of the country in 20 years. Look at Raj Chattys work on how even marital make up of a community affects mobility. I grew up in Compton, Ca....and this article directly speaks to me. Id rather have some kids growing up in poverty today, than creating a culture of poverty that multiplies that to many many more children in a generation or two.
I don't know - "towns with poor-but-stay-at-home single moms" sounds better than "towns with poor-and-absent-moms and lots of latchkey kids running around unsupervised and uncontrolled. If local institutions - community voluntary groups, churches, sports leagues, etc. - were very strong and well-supported they *might* be able to pick up the slack. But the store of 21st Century America so far is the complete annihilation of the prestige and reach of such groups as the internet feeds the latest and greatest from NYC, LA, DC, and wherever else you could want to be straight into everyone's pocket. The only local institutions which aren't leveled by this outside cultural force (because able to draw on the public fisc) - public schools - are obviously not able to stand in true loco parentis for kids (we've been trying it for decades with little success other than turning inner city schools into borderline fortresses). It may suck, but helping parents to try and raise their own kids instead of slaving away making widgets or flipping burgers or checking in dialysis patients is basically the one thing we haven't tried recently.
Imagine asking "Where's Donald Trump?", still wanting him around, after he gifted the Democrats the Senate by depressing Republican votes in Georgia, the very reason Biden is able to push through this garbage along party lines in the first place. Where is he? Attacking the GOP. That's where he is.
You know who doesn’t work is the capital class. They just earn income from investments. Weirdly you aren’t to concerned about massive subsidies they get
What does "working" mean? Does it need to be a certain number of hours/week? Is there a compromise here? Seems like ideally you would want to allow part time work to satisfy a work requirement so as to allow flexibility in how people balance work and parenting. But it also seems like it would not be too hard to satisfy a minimal part time work requirement for even new single parents. Does that match up with either current policy or any proposals?
Parenting should count as working. How about paying parents and caregivers and all hourly workers a $7.75/hr wage, on top of their hourly wage paid by their employer? Like a UBI of $310 a week, but only for people putting in 40 hours of work. Subsidizing wages will encourage employers to hire workers to grow their business and improve their services.
The problem with that that there is no way to monitor work on parenting. In addition, part of the utility of a work requirement is that even with part time work the person is still a part of the labor force and maintains habits that make it easier to ramp up to more work if one's situation changes, e.g. kids are in school more, there is a coop arrangement for childcare, etc. I'm just saying, why not be flexible in the amount of work requried?
Perhaps there ought to be a way to monitor work on parenting. I was thinking an iphone App or online timesheet to record how the time was spent, entered every night, up to 6 hours a day, 7 days a week, could be helpful tool for parents too.
The big difference is it is PER PARENT, not per child. That's they way it ought to be, because children have always had to share one pool of income, no matter how many brothers and sisters and others were in their family. Yes, at tax time, parents get a per child tax deduction, but that's not something the kids notice, the way they would notice their parents getting a per child cash allowance. That would give them bad habits I think.
We should pay all hourly workers a bonus for working at a job, in addition to time spent parenting. An extra $7.75/hr on top of their wages would be enormous help for low wage workers, make it worth working at low wage jobs. It is worth something to society to have people working at jobs and businesses able to hire them and to promote habit of working.
You seem much more concerned with parents not working or working less than children avoiding poverty. Who cares if single mothers don’t work. Such an ignorant post. Do you have any idea how many children go hungry each day and you want punish them because of their parents.
Culture is contagious. What could be a single mom not working now could culturally engulf whole parts of the country in 20 years. Look at Raj Chattys work on how even marital make up of a community affects mobility. I grew up in Compton, Ca....and this article directly speaks to me. Id rather have some kids growing up in poverty today, than creating a culture of poverty that multiplies that to many many more children in a generation or two.
Yes it’s children’s fault that hypothetically their parents won’t work. You know how many jobs have been lost in last year? Still more people file for unemployment.
Children living on edge of poverty because in this bizarre hypothetical scenario that parents don’t work enmasse clearly see benefit of salary. The issue in real world not in your fantasy is that we’ve lost millions of jobs in 2020. Jobs for people without a college degree are very low paying and grueling and there’s not enough of them.
As a conservative, pro-life Republican, I love the idea of regular cash payments to parents of children. In fact, I'd like to see more. Ideally, I would replace all forms of public assistance, i.e., Food Stamps, Section 8, TANF, unemployment insurance, and so on, with cash payments. You'd save a fortune on bureaucracy and remove barriers to people continuing to get assistance. No more trips to the welfare office every month or so to prove eligibility. No calling into unemployment offices that don't answer the phones.
Sure, but Kaus posts is within the context of the current welfare system. In this case, one has think of marginal impact. The case against this bill would be much weaker if it was as you wrote above: merely a replacement of all forms of public assistance.
Always glad to get your take Mickey. Certainly don't always agree with it and I am glad to get it. I wish you would write more in your pieces on what you would do differently than what you are opposing. I would also like to know more about who you are reading and who you are following that informs your thinking. For example, I learned about unherd.com as a result of you being involved with BloggingHeads.TV which has interesting takes mostly on the conservative side but not always.
While you're focusing on the importance of work, you may want to improve your own with a little spell check. I've never seen so many typographical and spelling errors in a supposedly professional article and it's not like you're a spring chicken at this, I've been regrettably happening across your content since I was a teenager in the early 2000s.
That aside, it's interesting to me that so many people who claim to be pro-family are not so interested in families being headed by single or divorced parents, or concerned about their children going without basic necessities, etc.
What exactly is the problem with a single mother who stays home with her children moving to greying, dying small town communities in Mississippi and Texas and breathing new life into them with their children? I have a feeling you're using the phrase "single mother" as a dog whistle to indicate to white southerners that this will bring black and brown people to their neighborhoods. I suppose I should be comforted that with Trump out of office people like you feel the need to return to dog whistles instead of outright saying what you mean.
Kaus is making a bigger point. A cultural point. Culture is contagious. What could be a single mom not working now could culturally engulf whole parts of the country in 20 years. Look at Raj Chattys work on how even marital make up of a community affects mobility. I grew up in Compton, Ca....and this article directly speaks to me. Id rather have some kids growing up in poverty today, than creating a culture of poverty that multiplies that to many many more children in a generation or two.
I don't know - "towns with poor-but-stay-at-home single moms" sounds better than "towns with poor-and-absent-moms and lots of latchkey kids running around unsupervised and uncontrolled. If local institutions - community voluntary groups, churches, sports leagues, etc. - were very strong and well-supported they *might* be able to pick up the slack. But the store of 21st Century America so far is the complete annihilation of the prestige and reach of such groups as the internet feeds the latest and greatest from NYC, LA, DC, and wherever else you could want to be straight into everyone's pocket. The only local institutions which aren't leveled by this outside cultural force (because able to draw on the public fisc) - public schools - are obviously not able to stand in true loco parentis for kids (we've been trying it for decades with little success other than turning inner city schools into borderline fortresses). It may suck, but helping parents to try and raise their own kids instead of slaving away making widgets or flipping burgers or checking in dialysis patients is basically the one thing we haven't tried recently.
Imagine asking "Where's Donald Trump?", still wanting him around, after he gifted the Democrats the Senate by depressing Republican votes in Georgia, the very reason Biden is able to push through this garbage along party lines in the first place. Where is he? Attacking the GOP. That's where he is.
You know who doesn’t work is the capital class. They just earn income from investments. Weirdly you aren’t to concerned about massive subsidies they get
What does "working" mean? Does it need to be a certain number of hours/week? Is there a compromise here? Seems like ideally you would want to allow part time work to satisfy a work requirement so as to allow flexibility in how people balance work and parenting. But it also seems like it would not be too hard to satisfy a minimal part time work requirement for even new single parents. Does that match up with either current policy or any proposals?
Parenting should count as working. How about paying parents and caregivers and all hourly workers a $7.75/hr wage, on top of their hourly wage paid by their employer? Like a UBI of $310 a week, but only for people putting in 40 hours of work. Subsidizing wages will encourage employers to hire workers to grow their business and improve their services.
The problem with that that there is no way to monitor work on parenting. In addition, part of the utility of a work requirement is that even with part time work the person is still a part of the labor force and maintains habits that make it easier to ramp up to more work if one's situation changes, e.g. kids are in school more, there is a coop arrangement for childcare, etc. I'm just saying, why not be flexible in the amount of work requried?
Perhaps there ought to be a way to monitor work on parenting. I was thinking an iphone App or online timesheet to record how the time was spent, entered every night, up to 6 hours a day, 7 days a week, could be helpful tool for parents too.
The big difference is it is PER PARENT, not per child. That's they way it ought to be, because children have always had to share one pool of income, no matter how many brothers and sisters and others were in their family. Yes, at tax time, parents get a per child tax deduction, but that's not something the kids notice, the way they would notice their parents getting a per child cash allowance. That would give them bad habits I think.
We should pay all hourly workers a bonus for working at a job, in addition to time spent parenting. An extra $7.75/hr on top of their wages would be enormous help for low wage workers, make it worth working at low wage jobs. It is worth something to society to have people working at jobs and businesses able to hire them and to promote habit of working.
You seem much more concerned with parents not working or working less than children avoiding poverty. Who cares if single mothers don’t work. Such an ignorant post. Do you have any idea how many children go hungry each day and you want punish them because of their parents.
Culture is contagious. What could be a single mom not working now could culturally engulf whole parts of the country in 20 years. Look at Raj Chattys work on how even marital make up of a community affects mobility. I grew up in Compton, Ca....and this article directly speaks to me. Id rather have some kids growing up in poverty today, than creating a culture of poverty that multiplies that to many many more children in a generation or two.
What type of children are being raised if they think that work isn't necessary?
There's a benefit in the struggle.
Yes it’s children’s fault that hypothetically their parents won’t work. You know how many jobs have been lost in last year? Still more people file for unemployment.
Do you think people can work if they want to?
Seriously you’re a bunch of callous idiots.
Doesn’t matter whose fault it is. It’s still true. If we raise a generation of kids who think work doesn’t matter, it’s all over.
Children living on edge of poverty because in this bizarre hypothetical scenario that parents don’t work enmasse clearly see benefit of salary. The issue in real world not in your fantasy is that we’ve lost millions of jobs in 2020. Jobs for people without a college degree are very low paying and grueling and there’s not enough of them.