The still photograph above comes from the video “It’s Free Swipe Yo EBT”. I would not watch the video unless you are quite able to take a video with profanity, etc. I quit watching it early in the video. The video is a satiric video that takes on the all too common obsession with welfare queens. But, there is a reason I bring this up. Recently a needed debate has come up on women. A Democratic consultant made a statement about Mitt Romney’s wife that was so reprehensible that all parts of the political spectrum rose up to say that she was wrong. In fact, they rose up in such unanimity that the subject has actually dropped off of the news media radar! I never thought I would see that happen, and I am certainly not complaining.
But, it does leave me with a question. If mothers do work to equal that of a woman working full-time in an office, then why is it so bad if the State chooses to help single mothers out by means such as food stamps, welfare, WICK, and other programs of that type? It strikes me that there is a horrendous contradiction between the public support that insists that we must be all for stay-at-home moms and the classic anti-welfare line that typecasts every single mom who receives assistance as someone who is morally corrupt and simply attempting to rip off the moral and hard-working taxpayer.
Frankly, it is only possible to pull off the contradiction by typecasting welfare recipients as either being black, drug-using, and riding a Cadillac or white and trash. But, this mysteriously means that we laud the stay-at-home mom while at the same time trying to do away with programs that allow single women to be stay-at-home moms. In fact, in the current climate, it means that the true stay-at-home mom is either upper middle-class or rich. Or, they are in a family that has chosen voluntary poverty (or at least a very lower middle class) in order to make sure that the mom gets to stay at home.
Think about it, if being a stay-at-home mom is a full-time job, then why is it so wrong to help out such a mom financially? After all, would we then not be paying her for her work? If you are paying someone for work, then that is not charity, is it? And, there is the contradiction. We cannot keep saying that work-at-home moms are full-time workers and then claiming that giving them money to fulfill that job is a charity give-away because they are not working full-time. Which is true, moms are full-time workers or moms are not full-time workers?
In passing, yes, I am all for measures that try to prevent the misuse of money that is given away. But, here is yet another problem. It is impossible to prevent a certain degree of waste in any enterprise. That is why every company, even such as Wal-Mart, builds in a percentage for loss, breakage, etc. So, those opposed to welfare will always be able to point to wastage in the system and to real and actual welfare cheats (both male and female). But, if welfare is done away with–not just simply try to trim wastage, but really do away with it–we will clearly end up with women, who will be called good and moral, who will not really get to raise their child(ren) in the way in which we claim is vital if we want children who are good, faithful, true, and all those virtues about which we preach in our Sunday sermons lauding stay-at-home mothers.
This is why I argue that we need to preserve aid to single mothers. It is because we are paying a full-time worker to do what we claim is so vital, to raise a next generation of children who have a mother at home, even if not a father.
The amount of money that stay-at-home moms would earn if they were compensated for their work in/around the home has been calculated and comes to a nice salary she would earn if in the paid workplace. Having been a stay-at-home mom, I often thought how nice it would be for someone to acknowledge that work with a monetary reimbursement….
you have a good point there!
Father, your liberal views on welfare fit hand-in-glove with your conservative views on abortion.
I like that.
Ted:
To coin a phrase: “Ditto!”
Abortion is the great contradiction in contemporary American politics, as pro-life Democrat Bob Casey pointed out some time ago.
Yeah now Glenn beck was on kelly saying wrongly that being a mom is the hardest job in the world, a lie, sure its not easy at times, but its not like mining in third world countries and fetching water for miles in the desert and being on deadliest catch.
Romney says and the GOP’s forced mothers on welfare to go to work, because they aren’t “working”, but of course oddly child-care is work, if they babysat another child’s children they get paid and vice versa, even better than state would pay foster parents who give up children for adoption because they don’t want them, or hint hint unwanted pregnancy results in adoption and foster caring at taxpayer expense, especially if child is severely disabled.