Monday, April 14, 2008

Welfare Reform and Pro-Marriage Initiatives

This nation has a problem. Yes, poverty is a problem too, but that is not what I mean. Our problem as a nation is that we continuously treat the symptoms and not the disease. The disease, as it so commonly is, is discrimination. Women are paid less than men on average, even today. Women receive full custody of their children far more often than men do as well as the economic burden that stems forth from having extra mouths to feed and a lower paying job to boot. This is the problem. Welfare reform and pro-marriage initiatives were bastardized solutions set forth not only to try to fix these symptoms, but also to ignore the real problem.

Welfare reform provides sustainability for families for five years and only five years. After that, they are on their own. If we really, as a nation, wanted to reform welfare, it would have been done differently. Instead of focusing on a “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” Hoovierian method (some good that did with the Depression), we must focus on public assistance. People do not want to be poor. They do not want bad jobs for low pay. They do not want to starve. They do not want to lack health care. They do not want their children to continue on this path indefinitely. They want the opposite. The problem is that they do not know how to do it. Teach them how to do it. Teach them how to get a good job or better pay. Teach them a trade or a skill. Teach them about education options for their children. Teach them about the services, even those already available, that exist to help them under the new system. Give them a hand up not a hand out.

Likewise, pro-marriage initiatives are another basically conservative idea. It is a prop for the conservative family values agenda, which I am more than happy to say is failing miserably. Why is it failing? Because it cannot work. Logically, it should not work. The idea behind the theory is that if you give women (primarily) the economic incentive to get married they will and in this family, they will have two incomes, therefore they will be able to pull themselves out of poverty. This is pure fantasy. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who are in two parent families who are still below the poverty line. And more so, this does not solve the problem. They still do not have good jobs, still do not have the know-how to get their children out of the cyclical poverty system in this nation, still do not have the ability or the freedom to live the way they want or do what they want with their lives.

In the end, pro-marriage initiatives and welfare reform were victories for the conservative demagogues in this nation. They put up a front making it appear as if they care about families, making it look as if they care about children, making it look as if they give a damn about whether John and Jane Doe are actually out of poverty or still members of a subservient lower class whose labor, up until recently drove this nation's industrial and agrarian economies and still drives this nation's service economy. They did not fix the problem. They fixed the symptoms. If you treat the symptoms of cancer, you are still going to die. It is as simple as that. Conservative politicians made it appear as if they were doing something, when in fact they were simply ensuring that they continued to have a class of cheap labor and a government of non-action and non-assistance just so that they could continue to pad their overly and overtly cushy bottom line. It was not reform it was regression.

No comments: