How to Help Juggler Families
In the new issue of Democracy, Karen Kornbluh details the rise of juggler families – families with two working parents or a single parent – and the challenges they face from stagnating wages to health insurance to unemployment. She then does something extraordinary: she tells us how to help them.
For these families, juggling to make ends meet and so dependent on the mother’s income, time off to care for a sick child or a new baby can result in devastating income interruptions and even job loss. In addition, these workers are often denied the flexibility they need to get home in time for dinner or take off on a sick day. … They lose jobs as a result of a child’s illness; they take part-time, contingent, or other nonstandard jobs; and they sacrifice wages, benefits, and job security if they can’t do shift work.
So what can we do about it? Kornbluh has four proposals:
- First, reform the Social Security spousal benefit, which currently excludes single parents (mostly single mothers) who work and pay taxes.
- Second, Social Security retirement benefits should be reformed to end the penalty for parents whose average earnings decrease, often because they take time off to raise children.
- Third, unemployment insurance must be reworked and made available to workers who quit for family reasons, who are looking for part-time work, or who have been in the workplace for a short period of time.
- Fourth, America needs a family insurance system that will prevent the catastrophes that hit families from sending them into bankruptcy.
Kornbluh’s article goes into much greater detail on each of these proposals - it's well worth reading.
Those are good suggestions. The third one, sadly, does against the premise of "welfare reform," which was passed partly in order to eliminate the overstate phenomenon of "welfare queens," who supposedly had children and refused to work in order to claim larger benefits from the public. "Welfare queens," were never a real problem (from the broad view) but the idea served to turn the American public against social insurance and it worked (even on Democrats).
There's also the problem that the tax code currently, and unfairly, favors people with children over people without them. There's real anger over that issue. That anger needs to be addressed, though I'm not sure how.
I'd like to see us simply admit that, at all levels of the economy (federal, state and local) that the economy is mostly consumer driven now and that are growing sectors are in the service industry. If we admit that fact, then we have to admit that it's the consumer, rather than the entrepeneur or capital provider, that really drives the economy. That naturally leads to a "trickle up," theory where you cut taxes for people in the middle class on down (even giving credits to the lowest income classes) in order to drive the economy by doing your best to enrich the vast majority of the country (who are, by definition, upper-middle class on down the income ladder).
You make up the deficit by being downright punitive on the upper income classes. Sure, some will tell you that upper-income taxes over 70% or so will just cause the upper classes to stop contributing to the economy, but that's not really the case. Even if those folks are paying nutty taxes, they still want to be rich. In the short term, they'll withdraw. In the long term, they'd rather have 30% of multimillion dollar income than nothing. In short... they'll deal.
To me, the issue isn't about who has to care for children or not. It's about who has what resources. It's a consumer-driven economy. The people who, in aggregate, consume the most, are memebers of the upple-middle class on down. If you want a tax structure that supports that economy, you have to reward the consumer and "trickle up," rather than follow our long tradition of trying to "trickle down."
Annother "trickle down," problem, by the way, is that bits of whatever falls from the top are invariably grabbed by people along the way.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
October 1, 2006 5:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Third, unemployment insurance must be reworked and made available to workers who quit for family reasons, who are looking for part-time work, or who have been in the workplace for a short period of time.
The cap on unemployment payments also needs to be radically adjusted upward to acount for inflation. 30 years ago $1100 a month (approximately what is; it varies a little by state) was a strained but livable middle class income. Today it is sub-poverty. If you're looking why so many people fall into financial calamity with even temporary job loss, the appalling erosion of unemployment benefits is probably the chief culprit.
October 2, 2006 6:01 PM | Reply | Permalink