Seems to be what you do your figuring with.
Where you get these bizarre notions about me I have no clue, and where you get off plastering them on me in public I have even less of a clue.
sums it up...if they DON'T contribute to the GDP in ways you receive a benefit, then fuck'em, right?Well, since you asked (not that you were actually asking; you were purporting to represent what I said/think, and your representation was false): no.
Let's look again at what I did say:
Not to mention that I'm really not particularly interested in paying my own taxes to support someone who decides to knock off work for a decade or so (benefits paid until last child enters school, right?)On edit -- and let's add back in the bit you carefully edited out when you quoted it, thereby altering the entire meaning of what I said:
... to do something that I don't happen to think is of social value, and that I (and not just I) actually happen to think is less beneficial to the individual women and children involved, and to the public, than early childhood care/education outside the home.Why you would read this as meaning that I must receive a benefit if I am going to agree to contribute to someone else's upkeep, well, I have no clue.
If someone is unable to work because of disability or absence of employment, I have no problem contributing to his/her upkeep.
If someone simply chooses not to work for some personal reason of his/her own -- let alone a reason that I happen to disagree with -- then I have a problem.
The notion that someone should be maintained at public support because he or she
chooses to stay home, ostensibly to care for children, is not one I agree with.
And the interesting thing about that notion is that it is an utterly bourgeois one. Never, before the last couple of generations, did working-class women stay home to look after children. Before a few decades ago, when women began working outside the home in factories and the like, women worked at home. Those women stayed home to WORK -- to produce: the family's food, by growing it (and tending livestock) or at least preparing it from raw materials; the family's food, the family's clothing, the family's soap and candles, and so on and on. The idea that they were at home to look after their children would have surprised the hell out of them. In fact, it was most common for older children (those not already out at work themselves, as they all were by about the age of 12) to look after younger children while the women did that work.
You might want to pick up a book like this and learn all about it:
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/item.asp?Item=978155285717&Catalog=Books&Ntt=housewives&N=35&Lang=en&Section=books&zxac=1
"A cultural history that looks at Canadian housewives from 1600 through to the 1950s and includes amusing anecdotes, quotes, recipes, household hints, excerpts, period ads, and historical illustration."
There was a review in the Globe or the Star last week.
The relegation of modern-day women to stay-at-home-mawm status is not progress. It is just about the worst evil perpetrated against women in the last century. It resulted from the effort to find employment for demobbed male members of the military post WWII, and it came with charming little rules like the one that got my own mother fired from her fed govt job when she married in 1950.
So thanks but no thanks; you can keep your little bourgeois fantasies of mummies and their 2.4 kiddies in their happy little nuclear families in their happy little isolated households. I'm not buying. And I'm not supporting social policies that encourage people to play them out, to the detriment of everyone ... and that sound a gosh darned lot like something we might hear from the rightest wing of Mr. Harper's caucus, oddly enough.
They're just lazy, they dropped out, "the slut had a kid too young and why should I pay for it", etc etc..I assume you're speaking in your own voice, or in the voice of someone heard only by yourself.
Anyone who is
unable to support him/herself and his/her children is deserving of assistance. Assistance should not be dependent on previous employment status or income -- you see, I don't actually like the idea of "maternity" leave (or any other parental leave) being paid out of UI funds. I'd prefer a separately funded program to allow for parents to take time out of the labour force for a short time after birth of a child; of course, that might not make some of those high-earning parents happy, since we could hardly pay them more to stay home than we'd pay someone taking time off from Wal-Mart, could we?
Utterly amazing...you pass right over substantive issues like relative value of womens' work and declare your undying support for the free market mechanisms to sort out the relative merits between deserving and undeserving women. How progressive!!How false. And how telling that you're not quoting anything I actually said.
But I'm sure curious what substantive issue there might be in respect of "relative value of women's work".
(Sidebar: In Canada, at the turn of the century, there were women who decried the fact that there were NO suitable nannies in Canada and feared leaving their children in the care of the Asiatic!! Jump to 2006 and YES, there is enough daycare spaces, but to many in the middle classes, not enough GOOD ones, as defined by them...psst in Vancouver, race is a subtlely hinted even among brash self-empowered women who HATE guys like me reminding them of the 'anti-racism zone' stickers on their possessions)I dunno; maybe proof-reading would have helped. I don't know what you're on about. There are enough daycare spaces? Yeah, if you relish leaving your kids at places like the one down the street from me. Oops, the proprietor (i.e. homeowner, operating an unlicensed and illegal childcare facility) is "Asiatic" ... as are the kids she allegedly cares for (like a majority of my neighbours) who are usually to be found milling around in the roadway, as was the one she lost a couple of summers ago. It'll be those "Asiatic" kids I'm concerned about. Their daycare spaces are not good enough
for them, as defined by anyone with a grain of decency.
Moreover, the historic privilege of the rich to hire people to teach and instruct their children is now a noble social model? I understand this arg. if it is applied to literacy and developing a modern industrial workforce...but suggesting for a single minute that those 'other' women should be pressed into feminist goals of full proletarianization is a little much.See above; working-class women (and their predecessors, farm women, wives of blacksmiths, etc.) didn't hire people to look after their children, indeed. Childcare was provided by their mothers (for women just starting families, and for those pre-industrial women who worked in other people's homes) and by their older children as soon as they were out of diapers, while
they worked. Childcare in the home
has never been a job for working-class mothers of young children, and it is not a job now.
I don't think you've actually heard me proposing subsidized childcare for women who choose to do nothing (although given that it is
in the children's interests to have it, I actually would), so I'm not sure where these rich nanny-employing women of the past come into things. Their husbands weren't exactly gainfully employed, in large part, either. Their husbands hired people to tend their properties, so they didn't have to pull the weeds and shovel the snow and muck out the stables, and in fact hired the nannies so
they didn't have to see the brats, too.
None of this has much of anything with the need of
working people for childcare nowadays, given as how work is mainly done, nowadays, in remote locations rather than on the farm or around the blacksmith's shop or at the washing machine in the kitchen where urban working-class women did other people's laundry, and how we don't tend to like the idea of children milling around in the roadway while their parents work.
That need has nothing to do with the habits of the idle rich in days of yore, it has to do with the fact that while
women have always worked and
childcare was never the substance of their work, the nature of women's work has changed and the needs of children have changed, both as a result of the changes in the nature of women's work and as a result of changes in the world those children live in.
Your taxes are paying for a lot of deadweight...seems pretty rightwing in that you begrudge some woman living off of 426.00 a month a couple of hundred bucks, while waiting for ME to point out the massive subsidies going to the patriarchical oil industries.Yeah ... if only we'd been talking about the oil industry; who knows? I might have said something about it.
I have no idea who this is whom I'm supposedly begrudging something, and what I'm even supposedly begrudging her. You're really just making shit up, aren't you?
A sole-support woman and her children (and couples with children, I hasten to add) should always be provided with enough funds to live decently, unless and until she is able to acquire them for herself by working. But let me say it again: it is IN NO ONE'S INTERESTS to provide those funds to someone who IS able to provide (at least partially) for herself and her children by working, and making childcare available and affordable is one way of ensuring that she is able to do that.
And what you're not doing is offering any argument as to why it is in anyone's interests to do otherwise, or why anyone's personal preference not to work, when supports like childcare are available and employment is available, ought to entitle him/her to be maintained at public expense.
LOL...um...well I'll stick to my socialist creds like, 'a loaf of bread costs the same for a poor woman as it does for a female MP'...Still don't know what you're on about ... but I'll just say that a loaf of bread costs the same for a woman in the workforce as it does for a woman staying at home, and that people who are capable of paying for their own
and no reason not to do so just have no claim on my wallet or the public purse. Women leaving the work force for a decade
doesn't benefit me, or the public, or their children, or them.
And hey, it's not like you've actually offered any argument that it
does benefit any of those parties. You've just smeared me by dredging up bogeywomen from the past and allegedly from your own acquaintance who have nothing to do with anything I said.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
