JCecil is giving his thesis on what will save marriage, which is socialism.
Here’s an excerpt:
What about the living wage concept? How do we fit this into the picture?
This one is actually simple conceptually, but requires the expertise of an economist to implement. We already have minimum wage laws. Those minimum wages need periodic adjustment. The minimum wage should be established based on a thirty hour work week and produce enough income for a single worker to support an average family.
If the size of an average family increases or decreases, the wage would be adjusted accordingly. If inflation or deflation occurs, the minimum wage would be adjusted accordingly. The adjustments would occur on a quarterly basis about as often as changes to the prime interest rate. There could be a built in EGA factor to account for different economies in different geographic regions. Employers who fail to pay the minimum living wage on an hourly basis should be penalized financially to ensure compliance.
To provide adequate food, shelter, clothing and healthcare, we would also continue to do much of what we already do with Social Security, Welfare, Medicaid and Medicare. However, health care coverage made available through the state will need expansion. Social service aid would continue to be awarded based on certain indications of involuntary poverty. In other words, most people would continue to gain access to these services through their employers, but the safety net to the poor would exist so that nobody in America is without certain minimum necessities to sustain life. The expansion in health care I envision would not be substantially different than the moderate Kerry plan, which appears very doable in our economy.
Who will pay for all of this?
Business may try to pass the cost on to the consumer, but it won’t work. If inflation occurs, minimum wages go up with it. If business tries to pass the cost of expanded social services to the consumer, this too will raise the minimum wage. Indeed, any attempt to raise product prices will have a corresponding effect on the minimum wage. Business leaders will truly be forced to find other ways to gain efficiencies than price gouging.
What if employers simply move all jobs overseas?
I would respond in two ways to this – one as an American, and the other as a Roman Catholic.
As an American, I would argue that a potential solution is exactly what John Kerry argues, though I am not positive it would work. The idea is to use tax incentives and disinsentives that remove any economic advantage from moving work off shore.
Secondly, as a Roman Catholic, I would argue that the Church ought to use its global power to push this agenda global as a human rights issue and a defense of the institution of marriage.
The justice advocates of the Church could join forces with the conservative defenders of marriage and push for hourly wages that pay overtime at the 30 hour mark in every single nation on earth. The justice advocates working in conjunction with conservatives could be pushing for safety nets for the poor everywhere. The justice advocates in a coalition with the conservative defenders of marriage could use even use minimum wage criteria established in the United States as a benchmark for what the minimum wage should be globally!
Indeed, piggybacking off the Vatican’s enthusiasm for international institutions such as the United Nations in recent years, I would look forward to the day when a reformed and strengthened United Nations could enforce the principles outlined here globally so that multinational corporations have nowhere to go on the entire planet where they can defraud workers of their wages and destroy marriage in the process!
What we have proposed so far will allow married couples the economic resources and the time to spend with one another and their children that I believe will eventually reduce divorce by reducing the stresses of time and money on being married. It will also reduce unemployment rates. However, this still leaves us with the question of what we can do to encourage people to marry younger and bear more children?
My solutions require some imagination and will-power. They may not be the only solutions, but if we, as a society, decide that marriage is a valuable institution worthy of being saved, I think these ideas could form the basis of a plan that could work.
First, change the way we do education. The best classes I ever took in my life were always practicum courses with an internship component. What if the education community, the political community and the business community formed a partnership to develop a paid internship program that could begin around the age of 16 or so at the minimum living wage. An employee would increase his or her earning potential by progressing through ever higher training applied to real projects that add value to business. It’s a win-win for everyone, and allows people to start earning enough to marry at a younger age, and continue learning throughout life.
Instead of sitting children and adolescents and young adults in classroom lectures where they remember very little of what they learn because it seems impractical, let them get on the job training and let this model continue through life. Then, pay workers for the time they spend learning and doing throughout life, using our thirty hour model above and the idea of a minimum wage based on a living wage.
The idea would be that during your standard thirty hours at work, you may be in a classroom or seminar environment for up to 10 hours or so, and the remaining 20 hours would be spent applying what you have learned. Career advancement would depend on the level of skills mastered and the value added to the organization by those skills. The process may begin as young as sixteen or seventeen and would continue until retirement age – which could be raised to help save social security.
The second thing I would do would be to create tax incentives to being married and having children. I don’t mean a small credit to offset the cost of childrearing. I mean a large enough credit to make it somewhat profitable to have children.
My idea would also be that FMLA would be mandatory for both men and women – all 12 weeks must be taken if you have a child (but you get paid for the whole 12 weeks). This may initially sound like it would halt the career advancement of the couple who decides to have a child every year. After all, if a couple has a child every year for four years, they’d have missed a whole year of work at the end of the four year period.
Here’s how I would propose it should work. Not only should the entire 12 weeks of FMLA be paid, but there ought to be a substantial tax credit that would encourage people to have children. Remember, too, that career advancement is partially based on gaining new skills and introducing innovative and productive ideas through what you learn at work. Some one who is really smart and productive at work could theoretically pass up a single person with no children simply by virtue of studying and working smarter or harder per hour.
Such a person, being smart, will also want the tax credit and paid time off work. You’d be a fool not to take it if you can figure out how to do more in less time. We’d be rewarding people for working smarter rather than working longer.
What would happen over the long run is that people would marry and start having children as soon as they are legally able. Since on the job training is a life-long process, there is no need to wait till graduation to “grow up”. You will never “graduate” in the sense that people graduate schools today. The transition to adulthood could be restored to a single ritual at the appropriate age determined by society, such as the age of sixteen or so. It would happen at the age we, as a society, determine is a marriageable age.
Marrying early and having children as soon as possible is the surest way to maximize your tax credits and get a guaranteed 12 weeks per year off from work. And it won’t stunt your career growth as long as you keep honing new skills when you are at work.
To further ensure that couples marrying so young do not get divorced out of immaturity and go through serial monogamy, we could repeal the idea of no-fault divorce, and/or even reduce the marriage tax credit available to a second marriage that was not due to death of the first spouse or some grave fault such as physical and sexual abuse.
By the way, we could toughen laws against rape, incest, and spousal or child abuse, which is very important to supporting marriage and desired by feminists as well.
Basically, we as a society would be saying that we value marriage as an institution enough to make people think twice about why they are getting divorced. We’re not making it impossible to divorce – just difficult enough to make a person think twice.
What about gay marriage? Where does this fit in?
Basically, I see gay marriage as no real threat to the institution of heterosexual marriage. In other places, I have also argued that I see not theological reasons to oppose gay unions, whether we call it marriage or not.
I have already outlined that I believe that the causes of rising divorce rates and later marriages (with the result of more cohabitation) lie in economic factors. By removing those economic factors, we will have saved marriage. Thus, we could make gay marriage legal and give gay couples the same tax credits for child rearing as heterosexuals if they opt to adopt!
I have pointed Jcecil in the direction of the article The End of Marriage in Scandinavia until I’m sure he’s sick of it. Nonetheless, they basically propose the same thing but with different results than JCecil is hoping for.
Two things prompted the Swedes to take this extra step–the welfare state and cultural attitudes. No Western economy has a higher percentage of public employees, public expenditures–or higher tax rates–than Sweden. The massive Swedish welfare state has largely displaced the family as provider. By guaranteeing jobs and income to every citizen (even children), the welfare state renders each individual independent. It’s easier to divorce your spouse when the state will support you instead.
The taxes necessary to support the welfare state have had an enormous impact on the family. With taxes so high, women must work. This reduces the time available for child rearing, thus encouraging the expansion of a day-care system that takes a large part in raising nearly all Swedish children over age one. Here is at least a partial realization of Simone de Beauvoir’s dream of an enforced androgyny that pushes women from the home by turning children over to the state.
Yet the Swedish welfare state may encourage traditionalism in one respect. The lone teen pregnancies common in the British and American underclass are rare in Sweden, which has no underclass to speak of. Even when Swedish couples bear a child out of wedlock, they tend to reside together when the child is born. Strong state enforcement of child support is another factor discouraging single motherhood by teens. Whatever the causes, the discouragement of lone motherhood is a short-term effect. Ultimately, mothers and fathers can get along financially alone. So children born out of wedlock are raised, initially, by two cohabiting parents, many of whom later break up.
There are also cultural-ideological causes of Swedish family decline. Even more than in the United States, radical feminist and socialist ideas pervade the universities and the media. Many Scandinavian social scientists see marriage as a barrier to full equality between the sexes, and would not be sorry to see marriage replaced by unmarried cohabitation. A related cultural-ideological agent of marital decline is secularism. Sweden is probably the most secular country in the world. Secular social scientists (most of them quite radical) have largely replaced clerics as arbiters of public morality. Swedes themselves link the decline of marriage to secularism. And many studies confirm that, throughout the West, religiosity is associated with institutionally strong marriage, while heightened secularism is correlated with a weakening of marriage. Scholars have long suggested that the relatively thin Christianization of the Nordic countries explains a lot about why the decline of marriage in Scandinavia is a decade ahead of the rest of the West.
Are Scandinavians concerned about rising out-of-wedlock births, the decline of marriage, and ever-rising rates of family dissolution? No, and yes. For over 15 years, an American outsider, Rutgers University sociologist David Popenoe, has played Cassandra on these issues. Popenoe’s 1988 book, “Disturbing the Nest,” is still the definitive treatment of Scandinavian family change and its meaning for the Western world. Popenoe is no toe-the-line conservative. He has praise for the Swedish welfare state, and criticizes American opposition to some child welfare programs. Yet Popenoe has documented the slow motion collapse of the Swedish family, and emphasized the link between Swedish family decline and welfare policy.
For years, Popenoe’s was a lone voice. Yet by the end of the nineties, the problem was too obvious to ignore. In 2000, Danish sociologist Mai Heide Ottosen published a study, “Samboskab, Aegteskab og Foraeldrebrud” (“Cohabitation, Marriage and Parental Breakup”), which confirmed the increased risk of family dissolution to children of unmarried parents, and gently chided Scandinavian social scientists for ignoring the “quiet revolution” of out-of-wedlock parenting.
Despite the reluctance of Scandinavian social scientists to study the consequences of family dissolution for children, we do have an excellent study that followed the life experiences of all children born in Stockholm in 1953. (Not coincidentally, the research was conducted by a British scholar, Duncan W.G. Timms.) That study found that regardless of income or social status, parental breakup had negative effects on children’s mental health. Boys living with single, separated, or divorced mothers had particularly high rates of impairment in adolescence. An important 2003 study by Gunilla Ringbäck Weitoft, et al. found that children of single parents in Sweden have more than double the rates of mortality, severe morbidity, and injury of children in two parent households. This held true after controlling for a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic circumstances.
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