Chapter Five:  Children As Pets

1.      The care for your pet benefits just you, but the care for the kids of another family will also benefit you when you reach old age. They perpetuate a workforce.

The Public Good Concept:

           “Child-rearing provides important public benefits.” (110 )

2. What is often over-looked:

“…most families currently living in poverty are there because the private costs of raising children are so high.”    (U.S. has one of the highest rates of children living in poverty among industrialized countries)

      United Nations: “The nation shall provide appropriate assistance to parents in child-rearing.” 110

3. The well-being of families with children has declined relative to childless couples because of the decline in the real value of the dependent tax exemption.

[The dependent tax exemption would have to be $7,000 to be the same percentage of median family income as in 1944. Instead it’s just $2,700.]

4. But things are changing – the EITC provides benefits to working families who don’t qualify for TANF (real benefits which have declined in real terms & force a work requirement on recipients).

• But it’s still true that affluent families get about as much in tax benefits as poor do – the re-distributional results are negligible.

5. Middle-class and affluent families forget how much they receive in federal assistance:

a.      mortgage interest deduction. This is federal housing assistance – just as if they were poor.

b.      A family in the 31 percent tax bracket got $1,352 in per child tax credits. A TANF family got $1,630 per child in 1999.

c. Work requirement & time limit for eligibility apply to TANF recipients but not affluent family – if a parent drops out of work, the affluent family could claim another $800 because of the additional dependent.

d.      Medicare, tax exemption for employer provided health care and tax credits for child-care expenditures (only more affluent families qualify), dependent care pre-tax accounts set up by employers (up to $5,000 exempt from income & payroll taxes)

“[In 1993] the cost of these (and other benefits to affluent families) programs far exceeded federal expenditures on programs for low-income families.” 118

But families above the poverty threshold but earning less than $40,000 are cut out of most of the programs that subsidize child-rearing.  

Folbre points out the contradiction of conservative commentators who harp on the debilitating impact of dependency when children in poverty get that government check each month, but not on the surviving widow who receives gov. checks, the rich coupon clippers, or the trust-fund recipients who receive those checks in the mail every month.  

Although certain program benefits have increased in recent years, the emphasis is still on the implicit message that raising children is not “legitimate work.” Only paid work in the marketplace is legitimate.  

Key Chapter Point: The real value of all aid to the poor has declined over time.  But, in the mean time, the real value of the minimum wage has declined even more. So, it still pays more to stay on welfare than to work full-time at a minimum wage job.  

When women on welfare are required to work, they often take community service jobs that, when dividing their monthly benefits by their hours at work resulted in minimum wage of $2 per hour.

Read pp. 125- 126  (America)         and         pp. 132-133 (France)