You’re late, you’re late, for a very important date

Published Monday, 13 August 2001 7:50PM CST by in Politics

0

The Individual Retirement Account (IRA) window slammed shut in 1986. Here’s the sound of that slam trickling down for many women: “Now, ladies, be good citizens. Make sure you travel off to an office eight hours a day in your new SUV. Don’t forget to stop off on your way for the caf魬atte to get your bleary eyes through the morning’s meetings at your Fortune 500 job. By all means, pick up the family dinner at the nearest fast-food outlet because there’s going to be less than four hours upon your return home before the kids have to be in bed—with their schoolwork already done, and everyone’s clothes prepared for the following day. Oops, you forgot to pick up the dry-cleaning? Well, never mind, you remembered to pick up your infant at day care, didn’t you? So, you’ve done your fair share for the gross domestic product (GDP) today. But, be sure to set your sleep alarm for five o’clock, so you get to the pancake breakfast fundraiser for your volunteer assignment by seven o’clock. Do keep in mind, that if you happen to be 35 and single, you already need to have accumulated $55,000 in your personal retirement account. And, of course, earning your age isn’t enough for your family now, so you’re earning $50,000 annually—aren’t you? But, Merrill-Lynch and Fidelity have said you must.” Is this scenario not enough to make an exhausted “mad-hatter” of every woman juggling family, work, and community?

In July of 1981, Senator David Durenberger (R-MN), cautioned fellow members of Congress that “Wives and mothers should not be forced to choose between pension security and raising a family.” (Congressional Record, July 17, 1981, p. S-7854) Durenberger, a true moderate in my opinion, has since been forced from the ranks of the Senate.

Ten years is not an uncommon length of time for women to stay home. However, various actuaries have estimated that staying out of the work force for just seven years can cut Social Security retirement benefits in half. During those seven years, it’s also estimated that a homemaker would lose the seniority and skills that lead to promotions. Well, let’s see: it takes at least two to three (of those seven) years for children to be articulate enough to attempt to share what happened at the day care center. Common sense tells us that toddlers and infants would then be the groups most at risk for abuse in day care. Yet, if a mother stays home until her child is ready for first grade, nearly half her Social Security retirement benefits are already shot! So, who in a nation that’s tending toward near-worship of its stock market, is going to choose to have and to raise children when the economic consequences of doing so are carried largely (sometimes solely) by a nation’s women?

Let’s also consider that some children have greater physical, mental, and emotional challenges. The greater the challenges, the more likely both parents could find themselves involuntarily off a payroll for an unpredictable length of time. Many a mother (and even some fathers) who has stayed home with one to several kids in tow for more than a couple of years also knows the joy of finally escaping to an office. The countless daughters who have sacrificed careers to care for aging parents might sometimes be the first to applaud women with successful professional careers. Wives who are forced to return home to care for an ailing spouse might actually prefer to keep their jobs and current level of income.

Congressional leadership and current Social Security formulas, however, appear to have inadvertently created a situation in which the contributions of both professional and non-professional women to their families is significantly less valuable than their contributions to the national GDP. In other words—for the sake of our economy—please place your children in day care; your parents or your failing spouse in a nursing home; and do try to remember that volunteer work in your community won’t increase the GDP that’s so important to our rising stock market. Well, this might all prove to be fine someday, I suppose, assuming we could agree on a standard of care that represented this elusive thing we call “quality;” for such care would always entail definitions of quality.

There’s absolutely no intent here to demean individuals that manage to have it all; careers, volunteering, and taking care of dependent parents and children. More than one member of my own family experiences similar circumstances, so my hat is truly off to all our unsung heroes. I’m rather asking, at what cost, are our nation’s leaders furthering a society in which both parents are required to work full-time in every year to earn a sometimes barely livable wage; and for those same parents to then not have resources viable enough to escape poverty in their old-age? I’m asking at what cost do we institutionalize our elderly, our poor, our children, and any other vulnerable population for the sake of a high GDP we believe so necessary to a rising stock market? I’m asking how it is that every other major industrialized nation manages to do more for families with children than our mighty USA?

A September 2000 Government Accounting Office (GAO) report to the Social Security Advisory Board focused largely upon the impact and response of employers to a reformed Social Security plan, not upon a nation’s need to protect citizens. Employers’ responses will certainly impact the citizens’ trust fund considerably, along with small and large business. Yet, to further demonstrate the needed range of issues the Social Security Advisory Board might want to address this fall, let’s consider this: After extensive research,

I did not find significant discussions regarding issues impacting the large number of women who never married, were divorced or remarried. Many of these women have supported children of male workers who had much higher income bracket than they themselves did before and/or after the birth of a child. A large number of women continue to raise children uncompensated by absentee fathers.

“Single-heads-of-households” (the fastest growing category of workers, according to the latest U.S. Census) simply does not aptly describe the circumstances today in which a woman might have raised a worker’s child with a new (but less healthy or less financially viable) husband, with no husband, or even with other immediate family members. That woman’s income, her ability to achieve, her child, her extended family’s income, and/or her new spouse’s income, may all be impacted. Is it fair to that woman, her spouse, her child, and her family, for this mother and child to be ineligible to benefit in some way from the absentee parent’s accumulated Social Security benefits?

Policies that ignore such circumstances are not only moot, they perpetuate placing the entire emotional and financial liabilities of bearing children upon women—and at a time when reproductive “choice” is under assault. Why are we not asking, “What’s fair?” Should the Social Security Administration be empowered to capture a percentage of both biological parents’ payroll tax for placing in trust for that child until the child reaches the age of majority? Should the Social Security Administration forward payroll taxes to the custodial parent for a specified but immediate benefit of the child? How can we better prepare young people for parenthood and educate them about the consequences of their actions? Would men of all ages take note if their benefits were reduced by 50 percent while making the mother eligible to access 100 percent of their benefits should they fail to compensate the mother for care for their child?

Social Security currently provides support payments to children whose father’s are deceased, but makes absolutely no provision for children who have been financially (and typically, emotionally) abandoned by a biological parent. Such scenarios were much less common when Social Security was originally conceived. Opening this new can of worms might prove beneficial to the country in general, however, if all workers knew that their individual Social Security accounts could be diminished later in life. Would parents poised for such financial flight think twice about simply passing on their parental and financial obligations to other, more willing—but not necessarily more able—parties? Yet, even this does not address the needs of a child whose father assumes he will never live long enough to collect Social Security himself. Thus, this father might never perceive any benefit in marrying his child’s mother.

Children whose fathers are deceased are certainly entitled to be compensated by Social Security. Then, is it fair for children who are already emotionally and financially abandoned to see no benefit at all—regardless of whether the mother was married to the biological father or not? Especially in the past, pursuing child support frequently meant a mother had to file a lawsuit in a distant state. It has meant prevailing in paternity tests (when the father could be located). For women that prevailed in such suits, collecting the support then became an entirely different matter with even further costs—as states finally managed to discover. But many an adult child of such men (and yes, some women) has already experienced set backs in life that could never be addressed by a reformed Social Security Administration. Does this mean then, that we just shouldn’t even try to be fair to these mothers and children? Where does the root of such poor circumstances for mothers and children lie and how might effective policy-making address the challenge?

In the time since former Senator Durenberger’s caution, we have all become ever-more silent witnesses to the explosive growth of corporate welfare and excessive benefits for those in the upper echelon of management; the demise of corporate pension funds and an overall decline in employee benefits; and the desecration of Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA’s) for average workers, small business owners, and homemakers. We have watched our government’s leaders borrow from the Social Security Trust Fund to fund both the truly viable and inept programs via the general spending fund to the tune of $1.1 trillion. Now, they are late, they’re late, for a very important date. Where will this all end?

Related links:

0 responses. Comments closed for this article.