My Main Page with Links to My Other Book Reviews

The War Against Parents

by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West

Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West begin by telling their personal stories. They then deliver a mixed bag argument. They make the good point that more should be done to get AWOL fathers involved rather than merely ignoring or excoriating them. They point out that the subsidies for racehorses are larger than what parental economic rights for raising children. Yet racehorses do not benefit third parties. Third parties gain from parental labors and in the future from the labors of their children.

They argue against the view that families and communities are something that just happens—spontaneous generation.

Public institutions depend on private institutions. Private institutions depend on public institutions. Yet those who support a family with low wage work get rewarded with regressive payroll, state and local taxes. Payroll taxes are the worst taxes ever invented in the nation’s history. In 1990 dollars the median income of young families with children declined from $23,705 in 1970 to $16,219 in 1990, a 32 percent decrease. Regressive taxes skyrocketed during that period.

Some of this is socially conservative—that is if social conservatism is defined as setting up a social environment where individuals and families flourish. If social conservatism means spouting empty slogans while engaging in destructive policies, then those parts are not socially conservative. Much of it consists of ultra-liberal nostrums and is poorly targeted. The authors attack all managers, a wrong target. Most managers are not in the top one percent. Managerial work is difficult and has more responsibilities than the union jobs the authors lament losing. Millions of managers earn less than union employees with cushy jobs. The childfree are a better target. Couples without minor children are already the wealthiest family group in America. They have a mean disposable income six times the mean disposable income of families with children. Single citizens are increasingly becoming committed to little more than consumer toys and sucking what they can out of parents. We have nation revamping itself to serve the well being of adults without minor children, not to mention the revolts of the rich and the revolts of the distracted.

They go too far excusing men for abysmal family behavior. The authors rely on polls that were framed to produce the desired result, lumping eight separate issues into the false dichotomies. Nurture assumptions also make appearances in War. Adoption assistance, head start, daycare, wage subsidies, longer school years are among many issues in here worthy of further study and argument.

The authors deserve credit for offering a lengthy list of prescriptions—the “Parents Bill of Rights.” Unlike other writers, they deliver policy more than empty bromides. Unfortunately, the prescriptions are not well designed. Oddly, the plan is too darn regressive. Part of it could be called the single child tax relief plan or the Bill McKibben tax relief plan. They recommend eliminating payroll taxes for “working parents who have children under the age of six.” A two income, one child family earning $130,000 a year would gain about 20 thousand dollars in reduced payroll taxes. Parents with three children and income of 30 thousand dollars would gain about $4,500 in reduced payroll taxes. Third parties gain the more from parents in proportion to the number of children parents have. Three children will provide three times as many benefits to retirees and so on as one child—all other things being equal. The three-child family would also benefit much more from the money because of declining marginal utilities. The two-parent family with one child also has the greatest ratio of caregivers to children at 2/1. The three-child family has a 2/3 ratio. Worse, if the $30,000 dollar had three children under the age of six, they might be eligible for less than a decade. By having children at six-year intervals a $130,000 family could collect $20,000 a year for over two decades.

(Payroll taxes are currently 15.3 percent on earned income, meaning work income. Stocks and other non-work income are not subject to payroll taxes. Nor are incomes above $65,400. Work is the largest source of social benefits, yet it is the thing taxed the most. We have virtue taxes more than sin taxes. The best thing to do with payroll taxes is to completely eliminate them and replace them with taxes that cover spending or all sources of income. The best way to fix payroll taxes is to eliminate them and replace them with a national value-added tax large enough to generate similar revenues. This would catch all income levels, including the top five percent, and all forms of income, including drug dealers and similar shirkers who pay no income taxes of any type.)

Overpopulation is hardly a concern because the concern because the current total fertility rate of 1.85 is well below the replacement level of 2.11. Anyway, ripping parents off is an evil way to control fertility. If overpopulation in the United States were a problem, education and other policies are a much better way to reduce fertility. Using an economic vice to discourage births is a horrible means to that end. It is a way to make the children who are born grow up lacking resources. It may even be worse than official state policies that specify how many children a family may have.

Their universal paid parental leave recommendation is too expensive and it benefits high wage parents too much. Their prescriptions contain the word free numerous times, but alas, free things also have their prices. National Parents Day and vague exhortations directed at Hollywood won’t accomplish much and represent more of the useless rhetoric we are already drowning in. This is not as bad as the prescriptions offered by Gallagher and Popenoe, but it is still too regressive and unjust. They all provide insufficient reward to middle-class, working class and working poor parents.

A vicious cycle is being created. The more the childfree and elite families can tailor the world to their goals, the more unattractive parenting becomes, adding more power to Faustian adults and making parenting even more difficult.

Parents get a double bill from the anti-parent cult of power. They have to pick up the tab for freeloaders and they suffer when their children are turned horrible by crap culture. Unfortunately, this book is poorly targeted. Not recommended.

—Book review article by J.T. Fournier

My Main Page with Links to My Other Book Reviews