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From: mydog!gcf@hombre.masa.COM
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: (Sharing the costs of) Child making and rearing
Summary: Put first things first.
Message-ID: <9008191421.AA15964@uunet.uu.net>
Date: 19 Aug 90 20:09:17 GMT
References: <KFLETCHE.90Aug1204607@sun222.nas.nasa.gov>
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>In article <1990Aug16.163231.3503@ora.com>, kay@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu (Kay Wienhold) writes:
>> First, it pointed out that such broad-based programs as social
>> security are successful because there is no stigma attached to them
>> (because everyone participates), and because so large a segment of the
>> population benefits, there is virtually no opposition to it. ...

turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin):
>What do you mean by success?  Yes, social security is very
>popular, but it has also been very damaging to this nation.  By
>disguising a transfer of wealth between generations as a forced
>savings program, social security has effectively displaced a
>large portion of what Americans would otherwise save and invest.
>...

But if Social Security has caused a lower savings rate in
America, why hasn't it caused a lower savings rate in Germany,
one of those countries we admire so much?  Germany has quite a
bit of Social Security and the like.  Or why hasn't the lack
of social security in third-world countries encouraged a higher
savings rate?  There doesn't seem to be a direct correlation
between Social Security and personal savings.

Besides, the question is much more complex.  Redistributive
schemes like Social Security pump constant sums of money through
the economy, which is good for everyone, tending as it does to
level out boom and bust variations in other processes.  It's
possible that Social Security actually enhances the rate of
savings in the United States.  All effects are not immediate.

The political support for Social Security comes from the fact
that many, many people know that they are economically weak and
that the better-off people and the institutions with which they
must deal can squeeze every available nickel out of them under
certain circumstances.  The current spate of layoffs, for
example, will reduce many middle- and lower-income people's
savings to zero.  While the people may not know what's good for
the whole system, they often have acutely accurate knowledge of
their immediate circumstances, and they seem to feel that having
an entitlement they can't be done out of even by doctors and
lawyers is a good thing.

>> ... This is in contrast with such targeted programs as welfare,
>> which serve a much smaller proportion of the population, which
>> do stigmatize, and which do have a substantial political
>> opposition.

>Whether it stigmatizes or not, and whether it has a political
>opposition or not, the school lunch program (to name but one
>example) at least does a lot of good for the poor at a reasonable
>expense, unlike social security which does some good for the
>poor, but at a god-awful expense for society.  It strikes me that
>the authors of this article looked at things bass-ackwards.  It
>seems to me that the legitimate goals of welfare are first to
>keep poor people from suffering malnutrition and other dire fate,
>and second, to help poor people get a leg up on the ladder, so
>that in the future they do not rely on welfare.  Convince people
>that a welfare program does these things, and it will have
>political support.  Welfare programs have been losing political
>support because people are not convinced that they are well
>designed to do these things.  The authors you reference seem to
>place political support first....

As I mentioned above, political support _may_ mean that
something's working right.  The people aren't _always_ wrong,
especially about their own immediate business.

There are three very big problems with means-tested, as opposed to
universally available, welfare.  The first is the aforementioned
stigmatization, although it's quite possible that the stigma
comes first and the means test is simply used to confirm it.  The
second is that, if a source of goods arises under certain
conditions, some people will move to bring those conditions
about.  Thus, if welfare is given to "the poor", then some people
will enact poverty to obtain the welfare.  It becomes a job: being
poor for a living.  The third problem is that with means-tested
welfare, you have to have a huge, authoritarian body to do the
means testing and keep the welfare recipients in line.  This body
soon begins to act in order to keep _its_ business alive, that
is, it tends to preserve the conditions under which its work
arose: poverty, ignorance, and despair.

We have many, many examples of universal welfare, such as the
common defense, public roads, public schools, police protection,
and sanitation, to name a few.  Most of them have actually worked
pretty well; the more egregious failures have occurred when the
fabric of the community has been torn by ethnic, religious, and
cultural conflict.  The fact that many welfare recipients are
non-white seems to cause the population in general to feel that
they are not quite human; thus, no real effort is made to support
them in a reasonable manner, or, for that matter, to provide
adequate schools or police protection, with predictable results.
Countries with homogenous populations, such as Sweden, do not seem
to have this problem.

There are other areas in which "welfare" (communal financial
support) might be considered, not least of all the financial part
of child support.  Here is a piece of something I wrote in
another newsgroup:

   We can communize child support.  That is, the taxpayers in
   general would contribute to a fund which would supply every
   child, from birth to, say, eighteen or completion of education,
   a grant in the forms of money, school vouchers, medical
   insurance, food stamps, rent subsidies -- and so on.

   The person actually taking care of young children would dispose
   of this stuff, while the older children would have some voice
   in its disposition.  At 14 or 15 they could leave home, an
   important boon to those girls (and boys) who are regularly
   being raped, tortured, or enslaved at the family hearth.

   To keep the state from interfering in anyone's life, the grants
   would have to be distributed with complete equality: no means
   test, no ethnic or sexual categories, no regionalization, no
   oversight by social workers.  What I like about this is that it
   would finish off "the family", that pit of abuse and despair.
   (I wasn't referring to _yours_, of course.)

The need to produce another generation is just as general as the
need to defend the country, provide a pool of educated labor, and
pick up the garbage.  We like to pretend that individuals should
be responsible for these things, but where there is widespread
failure, it's time to look at other solutions.
--
Gordon Fitch  |  ...uunet!hombre!mydog!gcf