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The Feminine Economy and the Economic Man: Reviving the Role of Family in the Post-Industrial Age by Shirley Burggraf
“Wanted: Parents willing to bear, rear, and educate children for the next generation of Social Security taxpayers and to carry on the modern culture of learning and progress. Quality parenting preferred. Large commitments of time and money required. At least on parent must be willing to work a double shift and/or sacrifice tenure and upward mobility in the labor market. Salary: 0. Pension benefits: 0. Profits and dividends: 0.” -- Shirley Burggraf
While Richard Gill is busy analyzing the funeral industry, Shirley Burggraf tackles a major unrecognized problem in policy: In a modern economy chidden are a terrible economic deal for parents and a great economic deal for third parties, even while popular rhetoric says the opposite. The production of “human capital” is done mostly through parental time and expense while much of the profit goes to those who have invested little.
Burggraf argues that we should tax children’s incomes and transfer the tax to their parents.
Take two similar income couples:
· Couple A has no children and invests one million dollars for their retirements. If they get about a seven percent return on their investment, their investment will double every decade.
· Couple B has six children and invests one million dollars in raising the children and nothing for their retirements.
Couple A enjoys an extremely wealthy retirement. Couple B enjoys a retirement in near poverty. Yet it will be the labors and taxes of couple B’s children and the children of other couples that support the retirements of couple A. Without other peoples’ work and their children’s work, the retirements of the childfree and deadbeat parents would be impossible. Their savings and investments would be as Rolf George says, “worth less even than confederate dollars.” Children and parents eventually pay for every retirement through taxes or labor or both. Burggraf calls this the childfree “Yuppies free lunch.” A March 23, 1998 article in the U.S. News and World Report implies that the best self-interested career move a person can make is getting sterilized. Frugal parents produce children who end up supporting the wealthy retirements of wealthy childless people while the parents gain nothing from their efforts. And that does not include other benefits and benefits to other third parties. The interest payments of grown children on government debts created by others, for example, make the lives of these others much wealthier.
Consider a different example: Imagine parents who raise children to adulthood, then one of the adult children has children. Soon after the youngest child is born, thanks to screwed up values and environments, the deadbeat adult child leaves the children to the grandparents, going off to improve his career and invest in his own retirement. The grandparents adopt the children. The grandparents raise two generations of kids and they get almost no help or reward. No reciprocation here, folks. Yet when the adult child reaches retirement he can enjoy millions in economic benefits, and other non-economic benefits, provided for by other people’s children and the children he abandoned. Third parties gain labor, innovation and customers. This is so obviously wrong—harmful and unmerited—it is a wonder that our obsolete theories of justice have almost nothing to say on such matters. To its credit, this work takes a look at the really big picture. Burggraf considers this the largest economic rip-off in the history of humanity.
Economic policies—government debts, union contracts, fiscal policies, monetary policies—sign children, parents and the unborn up for contracts they never agreed to or would not have agreed to if just alternatives had been available. Almost all public and private retirement plans are welfare programs for the childfree, deadbeat parents and one-child parents. Private pensions, whether they are deserved or acquired primarily through the exercise of power, still have to be supported by the labor of others. Good parents are getting ripped off. The more people rip off parents and children, the fewer resources there will be in the future and the more parents and children will bear the costs of the future.
The family is the biggest contributor to the economy, and society in general. Parents make huge private moral, financial and physical efforts to raise children. Society pays a small amount in public education (about $100,000 per child for education according to Burggraf) and other smaller programs (which Burggraf fails to include). Society gains an adult who will earn millions, pay at least a half-million in taxes, contribute pay several hundred thousand for public pensions, contribute thousands more to support private pensions, contribute the moral and social benefits of his or her labors. Parents who pour their resources into children produce adults who pour their efforts into retirees and other third parties.
Convention believes that policies that benefit parents and children who are not wards of the state are pandering, not matters of growth, remuneration and good results, even among working class individuals who are worse off than wards of the state. If 100 policies in a row were unjust to parents and children, convention would not care, but if a policy benefits them, it is assumed to violate the laws of the universe. Parents are responsible for children for nearly two decades, but they are entitled to almost none of the wealth produced by children for the next half-century. Third parties are entitled. Wouldn't it be intriguing if twenty-somethings in 2030 went on strike and decided not to assign value to the pieces of paper held by retirees?
The biggest flaw with Burggraf’s recommendations to revamp retirement programs is that they don’t help parents when parents would benefit from them most: When their children are young. Her system would also have enormous transition costs.
Burggraf also supports parental-choice school vouchers, but there is a dirty little secret out there: Many parents do not care much about academic achievement. Ask teachers how often they get calls from parents about grades, social matters and extra curricular activities versus calls on academic content and learning. Some teachers never get asked about academic content. Who will protect children from edbeat parents?
Both liberals and conservatives care
little about good standards and enforcement of those standards. As I once read
in the Atlantic Monthly, liberals are opposed to policies with the word
standards in it and conservatives are opposed to policies with the word
national in it. They both favor low, unspecific, irrelevant, pathetic
standards. So we end up with "standards" as merely a buzzword for
politicians to
get elected so they can pursue other policies once they get elected.
The author’s plan is too regressive. It provides too much benefit for wealthy parents, benefits that would have less utility for them. Her system holds parents accountable for bad kids when other factors are to blame. A thoughtful, hard working parent should not be punished for what peers, schools, media, politicians, demagogues, low-lifes and unlucky genes do. See the Nurture Assumption for more on this topic.
Her bloated stats are useful as illustrations of points, not as precise economic analysis. She does not include other social costs of children such as Medicaid and does not include other social benefits such as supporting private pensions, other taxes paid, defending South Korea, keeping dictators from invading nations at will.
Burggraf should be credited with addressing a major issue and present some good arguments in favor of change, even if some of her proposals are inadequate. She sees the big picture of a country slowly, relentlessly redesigning itself to serve the interests of adult pleasure seekers. Let’s hope that someday individuals come along who will be able to break through the power market hegemony in economics, individuals who do not acquiesce to vile rhetoric and lose themselves in distractions. Recommended. Book review by J.T. Fournier. 304p (H) 1999
—J.T. Fournier
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