Half Changed World

Most of the attention being paid to the huge omnibus spending bill that Congress is trying to pass this week has been focused on two provisions added at the last minute, one allowing health care providers and insurers to refuse to provide or pay for abortions and one that would grant Congress access to tax returns.

The outrage about these provisions is perfectly justified, but I’m bothered by the fact that the actual spending provisions of this huge appropriations bill are sliding by essentially unnoticed.

Take, for example, the first sentence in the conference report under the Department of Education (page 172): "The conference agreement includes $14,963,683,000 for Education for the Disadvantaged, instead of $15,515,735,000 as proposed by the House and $15,500,684,000 as proposed by the Senate."  Usually, conference committees split the difference between what the House and the Senate propose, but this is half a billion dollars less than what either of them had recommended for Title I, the main federal education program that provides funding for low-income students.  And this is before the proportional across-the-board cuts that will affect all programs.  The pattern is true across dozens of programs.

And no one seems to be noticing.  The newspapers aren’t covering it.  The NEA doesn’t have anything about it on its website.  I only know it because I was reading the article on Congressional Quarterly (expensive subscription required) for work.  The Committee report is available on Thomas if you’re up for reading several thousand pages of dense appropriations language.  But don’t feel bad if you’re not; the Senators and Representatives voting on it won’t have.

And this isn’t because Congress ran out of time.  The Senate didn’t even hold hearings on half of the appropriations bills that are wrapped up in this.  This is a deliberate strategy to make budget decisions quickly, out of the public eye, and with Senators and Representatives only given the chance to vote up or down on the entire package.  And if anyone protests, the projects for their districts are cut.

It’s a lousy way to run a government.

I am totally fascinated by the question of how couples make joint decisions about money, especially when one earns more than the other. 

Today somone pointed me to the website of Equality in Marriage.  It’s got a lot of nice links and advice on how to talk about money, before, during and after marriage.  This organization was founded by Lorna Wendt, who became famous for fighting for half of the assets from her marriage with former GE CEO Gary Wendt even though just the 10 percent he offered her would have made her a very wealthy woman.  She argued that they were equal partners in the economic unit that was their marriage, and that he couldn’t have become the success he was without her support. 

(I remember reading about her in The Price of Motherhood, and asking my husband if he wanted a post-nuptual agreement before he quit his job to be an at-home parent.)

When my husband and I were both working for pay, we had three sets of bank accounts — his, hers, and ours.  We figured out how much we needed to cover our regular bills and save a bit, and divided that amount roughly in proportion to our after-tax incomes.  The remainder was ours to spend as we pleased.  Like our decision to both hyphenate our last names, it was complicated, but equitable.

We haven’t changed our formal system, but all the money going into the "ours" account comes out of my paycheck, and the amounts of money left in the "his" and "hers" accounts are smaller and smaller.   I don’t feel like I get more of a vote on how we spend our money because it’s my name on the paycheck, but I do have slightly more money that’s mine.  I pay more attention to how we’re doing at staying within our budget, so am more likely to be the one to say "whoa," but that was true even when my husband earned more than I did.  (Neither of us considers shopping a leisure activity, so it’s almost never a big issue.)

The conventional wisdom is that only breadwinning is valued in our society, that caregiving is overlooked.  And yet, one of the recurring complaints from the mothers on the email list for working wives of SAHDs is how little credit we get for breadwinning.  At best, we are seen as good mothers in spite of our employment, not because of it.

For most of today, I wasn’t focused on November 11th being Veterans’ Day.  It was my birthday, and a day off from work.  I went for a run, ran some errands, had lunch with a friend, went to see the Incredibles with my family.

And then, washing dishes, I heard this NPR story talking with the producer of HBO’s Last Letters Home.  And hearing people reading out loud from their loved ones’ final letters, I started to cry.  We don’t get HBO, so I probably won’t get to see the documentary, but that little sample was enough to remind me to be grateful for every night that I get to put my sons to bed, even if they sometimes make me crazy in the process.

Veterans’ Day is November 11 because it was Armistice Day after WWI.  A friend told me that in Canada some people still wear poppies — I’ve never seen anyone marking the day that way.   I was inspired to look up the "Flanders Field" poem, which I had never read in its entirety before:

In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
      In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
      In Flanders fields."

I was struck by how martial a memorial it is, especially that line "take up our quarrel with the foe."  Not for McCrae is the ambiguity of Archibald MacLeish’s offering: "Our deaths are not ours; they are yours; they will mean what you make them."

My thanks to all those who serve and served in our name, and to their families who share the burden.

During the campaign, you may have heard a candidate or two saying that all Americans should have access to the same health insurance program that members of Congress have, who can pick from a range of different plans.  Well, as a fed, I do have access to the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.  Our "open season," when we get to pick our plan for the next year, has started and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by it.

This year, the Office of Personnel Management is heavily pushing the new "consumer-driven" options, which combine fairly high levels of cost-sharing and deductibles with health savings accounts that allow you to set-aside money for health expenses pre-tax.  They differ from the more well-known Flexible Spending Accounts in that extra money isn’t lost at the end of the year, but can be carried over indefinitely.  The logic is that if patients share in more of the costs of health services, they’ll shop more wisely and help keep total costs down. 

Most reports that I’ve read about these plans suggest that they’re a good deal for young and generally healthy people; in fact, the main criticism I’ve heard of them is that they’ll result in adverse selection against traditional plans, by drawing healthier consumers out of the shared risk pool.  But every time I try to read through the benefits description for one of these plans, my head starts to ache and my eyes refuse to focus.  And I consider myself a pretty well-informed savvy consumer; if I’m having this much trouble figuring it out, I suspect that a lot of other people are too.

I therefore think I’m going to stay with the same HMO I’ve had for the past 8 years, even if I could save a little money with one of these new plans.  Fundamentally, the reason is that I have enough on my plate between my job and my family and volunteering and trying to carve out a little time for personal things I enjoy like writing this blog and taking photos.  I don’t need to be the "driver" of my health insurance — I’m happy to be a passenger.

I found some more maps of the Presidential vote at the Big Picture.   I particularly like the population density map, which adjusts the coloring for the density of people in different areas.  It’s a nice response to the people out there who seem to think that because the county by county map of the US is overwhelmingly red, that means the overwhelming majority of people voted for Bush.

I’m also getting tired of hearing journalists and bloggers say that the people who voted based on their values voted for Bush.  Some of us have values that include tolerance and social justice and peace and voted based on these values.

There’s a lot of discussion out there (see the New York Times and Salon for examples) about whether the gay marriage issue — and Gavin Newsom’s decision to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in particular — cost Kerry the election.  It may well have — and if it didn’t, it wasn’t because the Christian Right didn’t try.  I think Barney Frank is deluding himself in thinking that if Newsom hadn’t thrown open the doors of San Francisco’s city hall, the Christian Right would have quietly accepted the Massachusetts ruling.  The dramatic photos would have been in Boston and Provincetown and they would have been a few months later, but they still would have been front-page news, for better or worse.

And here’s a bit of encouraging electoral news that I had missed:  Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post that  "72 percent of the voters in the Bush state of Florida and 68 percent in the Bush state of Nevada voted on Tuesday for initiatives that raised the minimum wage."

I just want to share some interesting maps of the election results I ran across today.

This one has red and blue colored by county, rather than by state. It dramatically shows how much the red/blue divide is a rural/urban one — the map is overwhelmingly red even though the gap in the popular vote was just a few million. Ole Eichhorn also compares it to a similar display of the 2000 results.

This one shades each state somewhere on the Red-Blue continuum, depending on the percentage of the popular vote. It’s a visible reminder that there are people who supported both candidates in every state of the union.

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I’m officially looking for a new job. While I still think there’s a need for dedicated career civil servants to provide a continuity of knowledge across administrations, I don’t think I have the temperament to do it for another 4 years. If any of my readers have suggestions for places to look, I’d love to hear them.

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Jimbo commented that fillibustering isn’t an effective legislative strategy. I disagree — I think we’d be a lot worse off now than we are if the Dems hadn’t held the line in the Senate against the excesses of the Republicans in the House. And I don’t think the public ever really holds the minority accountable for lack of action. But it’s certainly not enough to stand against things — we need to say what we’re for as well.

And we need to pay more attention to local and state politics. The Hot Flash Report provides a nice summary of how the Christian Right started in the 1980s by getting their people to turn out for school board races, and built a base that has carried them forward to today. The closest Democratic equivalent is unions, which are getting weaker and weaker by the year.

Immediately after I wrote yesterday’s post on Is parenting a right?, I browsed over to Daddy Types, and read about a book discussed in this week’s New York Times Book Review, called “Should Parents be Licensed?” by Peg Tittle. I think this is a horrifying notion, and wanted to make sure that my post wasn’t read as an argument in support of Tittle.

To go all poli-sci, I reject Solinger’s argument that there is a positive right to be a parent, but I believe that — in most cases — people have a negative right to freedom from government involvement in their reproductive and parenting decisions. Tittle’s argument, as far as I can tell from this column she wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is that we shoudn’t recognize this negative right either.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Tittle is right that if we worked at it, we could develop a “contraceptive vaccine” that could be administered routinely and reversed at will. And let’s assume further that it could be proved not to have lasting effects on either the reproductive health of the people who receive it or on the well-being of the children they eventually conceive and bear.

Even if the technological capability to make this work existed, I still wouldn’t want the government deciding who does and who doesn’t get to have kids. Tuttle dismisses this as an argument about “the potential for abuse,” even as she acknowleges that she’s “seeing a theocracy coming ever closer.” What she doesn’t seem to get is the notion that even if I could be guaranteed that the government would use my standards to decide who gets to parent (which is highly unlikely), I don’t want this to be a decision for the government to make.

Tittle’s response is that we, as a society, have already accepted government involvement in parenting decisions under certain circumstances: we take children away from their parents when they have been abused, and we require adoptive and foster parents to go through extensive screening and training. (Tittle says that people seeking access to “new reproductive technologies” are also required to go through screening and counseling, but I don’t think that’s a government requirement; I think it’s because the clinics are afraid of being sued. Does anyone reading this know? And do fertility clinics ever turn away people who have the money to pay?)

So what’s the difference? My answer is that when a child is being placed for adoption or foster care, the government has already gotten involved and is responsible for the decision. It’s qualitatively different from having the government get involved in regulating the conception and upbringing of every single child.

Working women are the target constituency of the day for the Kerry campaign. It was a nice speech, although the accompanying policy paper is just a rehash of proposals that have been on the table for months — an increased minimum wage, reiterated support for social security, an expanded child care tax credit, and so forth.

There’s no surprise that the Kerry campaign should be targeting women — for years women typically are more likely to vote Democratic — the famous gender gap. It is interesting to me that they’re framing the appeal as to “working women” rather than “mothers” or “working mothers” or “workers” or “women.” (Women with no more than a high school education and unmarried parents are among the groups most reached by the voter registration drives this year.)

I got an email today about Parents’ Action for Children, the new name for what used to be called the “I am Your Child Foundation.” Their legislative agenda focuses on quality child care, preschool, and health insurance for all children. This overlaps extensively with the Family Initiative, which focuses on child care, preschool, and afterschool care. I think the main difference is that the Family Initiative comes out of the women’s movement, and is somewhat more oriented towards child care solutions that work for working parents, while Parents’ Action comes from a child-focused perspective. As long as we’re mostly in the consciousness-raising phase, they’re clearly allies, although I could imagine conflicts if we ever got to the stage of drafting legislation.

The Parents’ Action website also has parenting advice, which I think is in part a hook to draw parents in. That makes sense: Sara Horowitz used to argue that AARP was so successful as a lobbying group because of all the people who joined to get their discounts on drugs. I keep telling people that I think we should colocate all sorts of social services with laundromats, because they provide a captive audience that isn’t necessarily in a rush.

I’ve been staying up too late watching baseball, so today’s post is just a few links to things that have caught my eye recently.

I’m praying for Margaret Hassan, the director of CARE in Iraq, who was kidnapped on Tuesday by persons unknown. May she be released safely and soon.

The Tampa Tribune ran an editorial today, explaining why they’re not endorsing Bush. THis is newsworthy because they’re very conservative, and haven’t endorsed a Democrat since 1948. (They also declined to endorse Goldwater in 1964.)

I’m totally obsessing about the election, so I’ve been checking electoral-vote.com every day. Remember, the national polls don’t mean a thing; it’s the electoral college that counts.

I recently read Jason Lute’s Berlin: City of Stones. It’s a graphic novel, set in Weimar Germany, and it’s heartbreaking.

In Caitlin Flanagan’s March 2004 Atlantic screed “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” she suggests that upper-middle-class women are hypocritical in their calls for universal day care, because they would never use it — they all use nannies.

Flanagan’s a good writer, and she makes a persuasive case. But she’s completely wrong — in 1999, less than 5 percent of preschoolers were ever cared for in their homes by a non-relative. Even looking only at families with an employed mother, and family incomes of more than $4,500 a month, or $54,000 a year, the percentage only increases to 7.1 percent. Upper-income families are actually the most likely to use child care centers.

Flanagan concludes her article by arguing that professional-class working mothers (as usual, fathers are off the hook) should “devote themselves entirely to the real and heartrending struggle of poor women and children in this country.”

One of the great debates among advocates of public support for child care and other benefits is whether to push for programs targeted at low-income parents (who can’t afford them on their own), or if they should be universal. And, Flanagan notwithstanding, there are good arguments on both sides; there’s not an obvious right choice.

The arguments for a targeted program are:

1) It’s a heck of a lot cheaper to provide services for a few million low-income families than for the tens of millions of families who would use a universal program. In an policy climate where taxes are a dirty word, proposals for expensive new programs are unlikely to get very far.

2) It is hard to argue that middle-income families should be taxed in order to provide services to upper-income families. It’s especially hard when some groups — the childless, families with a stay-at-home parent — feel like they’re being taxed to support other people’s choices.

The arguments for a universal program are:

1) Programs that serve low-income populations are stigmatized as “welfare,” which makes people who qualify for them reluctant to take advantage of them. There are administrative costs involved in determining eligibility, and people may move in and out of eligibility over the course of a year.

2) Programs that serve low-income populations are typically underfunded and low-quality. Universal programs — such as social security — have deep popular support which fights any proposed cuts.

3) Any program that is means-tested has some sort of a cut-off above which families lose eligibility. This serves as a work-disincentive for families near the cut-off. Moreover, there is often deep resentment of means-tested programs from people who earn slightly more than the cutoff, but who are still struggling to make ends meet and who don’t qualify for any help.

4) Many advocates of universal public child care believe on principle that caring for children ought to be a societal responsibility rather than that of the individual families. They explicitly reject the notion that only those who choose to have children should bear the costs involved.