Half Changed World

Today, for the first time this year, it felt like spring here in the DC suburbs.

We live in a townhouse, and have a tiny little backyard, just big enough to hang our hammock when the weather gets warm.  I plant tomatoes each year, even though there’s not really enough sunlight for them to thrive.  This morning D. found a packet of carrot seeds I had bought last year, so we planted those.  I repotted our houseplants too, giving them fresh dirt, and apologizing to them for forgetting to water them on a regular basis.

I plant seeds pretty much the same way I write to Congress — because I believe in the process, without expecting too much in the way of a harvest.

We’ll see how everything does.

The Zero Boss asked why I oppose private accounts in Social Security.  It’s a reasonable question, and he asked nicely, so I’ll try to answer it.  And maybe I’ll get some more links.  (That’s a joke — Shakespeare’s Sister reports that one of the reasons the leading male bloggers don’t link to women is women don’t write about Social Security.  Via Feministe.)

Let’s start with a graph that I’ve showed on this site before:  http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/poverty03/pov03fig04.pdf  What this shows is that Social Security has been remarkably successful in reducing poverty among the elderly.  As late as 1967, 30 percent of all the elderly in this country were poor; today it’s just over 10 percent. 

So, what’s the problem?  Well, there’s no immediate problem at all.  For some years to come, even without any changes, Social Security taxes will bring in more revenue than the program pays out in benefits.  And then, as the baby boomers start to retire, there will be a period where the benefits exceed the revenues, but the program is paying out from the surplus that’s been built up over the years.  And then, finally, there will come a date when the surplus is all gone, and the benefits that have been promised still exceed the anticipated revenues.  This is estimated to occur somewhere around 2040, plus or minus a few years depending on whose figures you’re using. 

This is a problem, but not one that seems insurmountable if anyone was really motivated to solve it.  We put off the retirement age a few more years; we raise the cap on the amount of wages that are subject to Social Security taxes; we fiddle with the inflation adjustment; it all works out.  (The problem of health care costs for the elderly is much more intractable, but somehow Bush has decided that Social Security is in crisis and Medicare isn’t.) 

Diverting some of the taxes towards private accounts only makes the funding gap worse.  And while Lindsey Graham has indicated that raising the cap might be on the table, the Administration still says it’s not.  So, the only way that they’re willing to consider closing the funding gap is to cut benefits — and the private accounts proposal just seems like a smokescreen to try to hide that.

Moreover, it’s important to remember that Social Security isn’t just a retirement program.  It also provides both disability and survivor’s insurance.  And while a private account might add up to a reasonable amount of money after 40 years, it’s not going to provide anything significant to the person who is disabled or dies in their 30s or 40s.  Americans face more economic risk in our lives now than at any point in decades; it seems crazy to me that the President wants to shift even more risk onto individuals and families.

I’m thinking of moving my money away from Charles Schwab, due to their support of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, which in spite of its Orwellian name is a group that lobbies for Social Security privatization.  Can anyone recommend a brokerage firm that has low fees, decent service, and isn’t involved with any such groups?

Matthew Yglesias argues that the withdrawal of the Financial Services Forum from a related lobbying group is "probably the most important Social Security development of the day."  Unions have been putting a lot of pressure on these firms — by organizing pickets and letter writing campaigns, but also by threatening to pull their pension accounts.

I promise, this is going to be my very last post about Judith Warner and Perfect Madness.  When I wrote about her articles, I said that I didn’t think she had made a convincing case between the problem she identified and her solutions, but I thought the missing links might be in her book.  Well, I’ve read the book now, and I’m pretty disappointed. 

I think Warner is making three basic arguments, of which I agree with maybe one and a half of.

The first argument is essentially psychological.  A great deal has been written already about how Warner is only writing about an extremely narrow — and privileged — slice of American society.  Well, I’m in that slice.  I’m at the tail end of the generation she’s writing about.  I live in suburban Washington DC, where Warner did most of her "research."  And while she never defines what she means by "middle- and upper-middle class," I’m probably in that too.  And even so, I found myself thinking "what the heck is she talking about?" much of the time.  In a typically overwraught paragraph, she writes:

"Our baby boomer elders often call us selfish, but in doing so they miss a larger point: that what our obsessive looking inward hides is at base a kind of despair.  A lack of faith that change can come to the outside world.  A lack of belief in our political culture or our institutions.  Our outlook is something very much akin to what cognitive behavioralists call ‘learned helplessness.’"

Oh fercripessake. 

Warner’s second argument is that there’s a severe problem of the commons, in which good health care, good schools, recreational opportunities are not generally available, but left to each family to obtain on its own.  Warner writes:

"It would be easy (and comforting too) to dismiss the pervasive parental anxiety of our time as so much media-stoked nonsense… But to parent in such a state of grace, you have to be able to believe that things will, if you let them fall into place, basically turn out all right.  And, frankly, at this point in time, in our winner-take-all-society, there is much reason to believe that they will not."

I find this an infuriating argument, because I think it’s probably true for everyone EXCEPT the upper-middle class women whom Warner is talking about.  Warner herself points out that the whole body of early brain research, which has been used to sell all sorts of crap to anxious parents, is largely based on the experiences of highly deprived children.  Perry Preschool dramatically transformed the life courses of the very poor kids who attended it; my kids — and those of Warner’s subjects — will almost certainly be fine whatever preschool we send them to or if we send them to no preschool at all.

Warner’s final claim is that American society gives mothers an artificial choice between inflexible, often more-than-full-time, work and isolating full-time motherhood.  Many women would prefer something in between.  This is essentially a version of what Joan Williams has argued about good jobs still being based on an ideal worker who either doesn’t have kids or has an at-home spouse to take care of them.   (Warner seems to ignore the fact that there are plenty of part-time jobs out there, if you don’t care about things like benefits or decent pay.  But it’s true that many of these jobs are not worth the effort for women whose husbands make as much as those of Warner’s subjects, so I’m not going to quibble.) 

My bottom line: if you’ve read the articles, don’t bother with the book.  Do read Phantom Scribbler’s Self-Evaluation Test and Angry Pregnant Lawyer’s discussion of one mom’s reaction to that NYTimes article.  (Warning: the second link isn’t work- or kid-safe.)

Last week, I wrote about the Senate Finance Committee’s welfare bill.  Both of the comments that readers posted said, basically, that they don’t think this Congress or this President can do anything right.

These comments made me think about the ways in which I’ve been affected by spending the past 4 years working for this Administration.   The biggest impact is that I can’t demonize the other side as much as I might once have.  There certainly are Republicans who think all receipt of government benefits is inherently evil and who are willing to sacrifice a generation or two in order to "send a message."  But I also know Republicans who sincerely believe that it’s an abdication of responsibility to let people struggle by on meager welfare benefits.

And while I’ve had some pretty discouraging moments lately, my absolute low point in government service was during the Clinton Administration.  I discovered that the fact that the President himself said, in front of reporters "welfare reform shouldn’t mean you have to drop out of college" didn’t mean that HHS was going to do a darn thing to make that true.  Because Bruce Reed thought that doing anything to promote education would make the Administration look "weak on work."

Lauren at Feministe wrote this week that she expected people who knew her in real life who read her blog to let her know.  She explained:

"It is important that as a friend, relative, co-worker or whatever you may be to me, your presence at my weblog does not impede my ability to express myself…. If I did not personally provide you with my URL, this is probably because I may not want you to read certain things I might write about you or others you care about, in order to spare your feelings, avoid drama, or maintain their privacy."

I’m coming from a different position.  While this blog doesn’t have my full name on it, anyone who knows my name can find it pretty easily.  In the past couple of weeks, two long-lost friends have contacted me through the comments.  And I’ve given the URL to my family and friends.  Yes, it means that there are some topics I’m somewhat inhibited about writing on.  But I’m not really the type to talk about my sex life on the internet. And it’s nice to get emails and calls of concern when I post that my kids are sick or I had a really lousy day.

So why don’t I publish this under my name?  If you disagree with my writing, I want you to respond by telling me where I went wrong, not dragging my life into it.  And I don’t want any nutcase who I might piss off showing up at my doorstep, or at my kid’s school.   I’ve provided enought detail that someone who was sufficiently obsessed could probably figure it out, but I don’t need to make it easy for them.

Lauren goes on to say:

"If I make my opinions public, I am held accountable for them. I have to own my words, be willing to take responsibility for what I have said, admit flaws and quibbles in my rhetoric. I have to pay attention the particulars of language, how punctuation and word choice can shift an entire argument."

I think that’s an important lesson.  Earlier this year, one post I wrote got a lot of attention, mostly hostile.  I thought that I had been misunderstood, and considered deleting the post.  But I decided that would be intellectually dishonest.  I can take the heat.

That said, I don’t typically edit what I blog.  If I did, I’d post a lot less often.  I’m often figuring out what I think about an issue in the process of writing.  This is a first draft, not a polished product.  (Maybe that’s why Lauren gets several times more hits per day than I’ve gotten in my lifetime of blogging.)

It seems to be my turn to be sick, so I don’t have the energy to write anything coherent tonight. And I owe people responses to their thoughtful comments on some recent posts.

So, I’m just sharing some resources tonight:

1)  Via the Sloan Work and Family Research Network at Boston College, I learned that the November issue of the ANNALS of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science, on "Mommies and Daddies on the Fast Track", edited by Jerry Jacobs and Janice Fanning Madden, is available for free until the end of March.

It looks like there are a lot of interesting articles there, including:

The Long Road to the Fast Track: Career and Family, By Claudia Goldin
Family-Friendly Workplace Reform: Prospects for Change, By Amy L. Wax
Fast-Track Women and the "Choice" to Stay Home, By Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy
Marriage and Baby Blues: Redefining Gender Equity in the Academy, By Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden
Overworked Faculty: Job Stresses and Family Demands, By Jerry A. Jacobs and Sarah E. Winslow
The Mommy Track and Partnership: Temporary Delay or Dead End?, By Mary C. Noonan and Mary E. Corcoran
Mothers in Finance: Surviving and Thriving, By Mary Blair-Loy and Amy S. Wharton
The Evolution of Gender and Motherhood in Contemporary Medicine, By Ann Boulis
Mommies and Daddies on the Fast Track in Other Wealthy Nations, By Gwen Moore
Elite Careers and Family Commitment: It’s (Still) about Gender, By Scott Coltrane
Where We Are Now and Future Possibilities, By Joyce P. Jacobsen
Policy Alternatives for Solving Work-Family Conflict, By Heidi Hartmann
The Contemporary Myth of Choice, By Rosanna Hertz

2)  Next Friday, the Center on Law and Social Policy is having an audioconference featuring Kathy Edin, co-author of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage.  Edin’s last book, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work dramatically changed the dialogue about welfare, forcing lots of liberals to acknowlege that many welfare recipients were in fact working but not reporting their earnings, and conservatives to acknowledge that it’s all but impossible to live on welfare benefits.  I’m very interested in hearing what she has to say about her new book.

3) Someone I know through an email list is helping put together a panel that will address gender equity in Math/Science for the NY United Federation of Teachers. The panel is May 21 and the conference is in Manhattan (NYC).  They are looking for a couple of speakers/panelists who are in science/medicine/engineering who are esp. willing to address the infamous Larry Summers comments re: women in science, and can pay for expenses.  If you’re interested, email me and I’ll pass your message on.

Ampersand at Alas, A Blog, writes approvingly today about a "primary caretaker" standard for child custody, instead of the nebulous "best interests of the child" standard that is currently used.  As he explains: "The idea is that in child custody cases in which one parent clearly was the child’s primary caretaker (measured by such things as who made doctor appointments for the kid, who took the kid clothes-shopping, who drove the kid to soccer practice, etc), that parent should have a presumption of custody."

There are clearly problems with the "best interests" standard, at least as currently implemented.  Ampersand’s post is inspired by an article by Jack Stratton, which is mostly about why abusive fathers should never have custody of their children, even if the abuse was directed at the mom rather than the kids.  Stratton argues that the presumption in the courts this days is so strongly in favor of joint custody and visitation rights that men convicted of assaulting, or even murdering, their wives are generally allowed visits with their children. 

But I also have some concerns about the "primary caretaker" standard.   If there was a well-established standard that the primary caretaker would always get custody, I think it might discourage women from negotiating for a more even share of parenting duties.  I could see mothers feeling that they had to make sure they did at least 60 or 70 percent of the caregiving, just in case.  (I say 60 or 70 percent since it seems that men generally get more credit for the parenting that they do, because society’s expectations are so low.)

A more extreme case is that of reverse traditional families.  I’m on an email list of women who are the wage earners in families where their husbands are the primary caretakers.  The topic of how this arrangement would be viewed by the courts in the case of a custody dispute has come up more than once. 

It’s a matter of great fear for some members that if they were divorced they’d lose custody.  They would have loved to have been able to be the at-home parent, but their husbands didn’t have careers that made that possible.  If the primary caretaker standard was well-established, some of these women might opt to put the kids in daycare, pushing their husbands to get any job, rather than jeopardize future custody.  And this is among the already small population that is currently willing to consider reverse traditional arrangements.

The bottom line is that I don’t think we’re ever going to come up with a nice clean rule that makes sense in all cases.  Families are just too complicated and messy.  There are always going to be exceptions.  While I know judges don’t always make the best decisions, I don’t think we’re really going to improve matters much by trying to replace nebulous standards and human judgement with simple rules.

(For the record, absent a psychotic break or something, I think my husband, who is the primary caregiver, would deserve primary custody if we divorced.  Kain ein horeh.)

I’m writing about welfare today.  Since I do work on this issue, I feel compelled to state  — just in case it’s not blindingly obvious — that this is my personal opinion, and not that of the Administration or any portion of the federal government.  I’m writing it on my own free time, on my personal computer.  OK?

The Senate Finance committee reported out a welfare bill today.  Or, rather, the Finance committee having rules and procedures unlike anyplace else, they reported out a description of a bill which staff will later fill in with actual legislative language.

The welfare law actually expired in September 2002, but Congress has been too deadlocked to pass a new law.  So they’ve been passing 3 and 6 month extensions to keep it running ever since.  This is not necessarily a terrible thing, as Bush and the House Republicans are the only people in the world who think welfare reform didn’t push recipients to work hard enough, so they’re trying to make it tougher.

But it’s hard for states to run a program never knowing what the rules are going to be next year, and the proposed bills also include some important child support reforms that would encourage states to pass through more of the money they collect from non-custodial parents to the custodial parents and kids, instead of keeping it to offset their welfare costs.  And, in the current budget climate, locking in the block grant at current levels for another 5 years is looking like a smarter and smarter idea.

The bill the Finance committee reported out has bipartisan support, which is a rarety these days.  It makes the work requirements somewhat tougher, and includes money for marriage promotion, which is one of the Administration’s big priorities.  But it also includes an increase of $6 billion over 5 years for subsidized child care, which has been a huge priority for Democrats.  It’s not perfect, but it’s probably about as good a bill as I could hope for in the current Congress. 

So, the big question is whether the Republican leadership is willing to bring this bill to the floor for a vote by the full Senate?  And if so, will the Democrats vote to refer it to conference committee, without some sort of agreement that they won’t get screwed over in conference?  My best guess is no.  So don’t expect this bill to become sausage,  I mean law, any time soon.

Sidenote:  I googled the quote about "Those who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either being made."  Different sites attribute it to Mark Twain and Otto van Bismarck.  Anyone have an authoritative citation?

So I had a PTA meeting tonight.  (Yes, I’m the PTA secretary even though my kids aren’t school age.  Some of it is that I’m a compulsive joiner; some of it is that it looked like there might not be a PTA this year if some of the preschool parents didn’t help out.  And I figured it would help me decide whether I wanted to send my kids there.)

The bombshell of the evening was that the principal’s husband has taken a job in Florida, and she may or may not be coming back next year.  If not, the school will be having its fifth principal in six years.  I can’t imagine the teachers — especially those who followed her from her previous school — will be happy.  This could really be a blow to a school that was just getting on its feet.

We’ve got another year before we need to make our decision, but I’m feeling a lot less confident than I was on Saturday.