Hello MOQers!
On 6/6/99 at 9:04 PM -0500, drose wrote:
> In the US, funding for schools is done at a state or local level. The US
> Constitution does not grant this power to the federal government. It
> does mandate that the US government provide for the common defense.
This doesn't seem to be completely true. I remember a huge appropriations
bill for education right before the break in 1998. It was structured like
the recent police officer bill. Education is also regulated to some extent
by the federal government (Dept of Education). As for the problem, perhaps
if we are so concerned with national education statistics, education should
be funded and controlled nationally.
> And we already provide assistance to mothers in this country through
> various federal programs. Let's not pretend we do nothing, okay?
I don't think we were. I was saying that we are doing the wrong thing and
that it was worse than nothing. In the US right now, you get a tax break
for being single and you get a tax break for using daycare and you get
money for not working. You do NOT get a tax break for being married and
trying to have one person stay home to be a parent while the other one
works (or while both work for that matter). For that better behavior, you
are in effect penalized.
If I sent my son to daycare, I would end up paying less taxes and making
more money since I could work longer hours. He would be parented by a
stranger who is responsible for 9-19 other children at the same time and
who is given little compensation for their work. That doesn't seem right,
yet it is State sponsored.
This is where Quality and the MOQ came in to the discussion. If parents
parenting is a better solution than daycare for the children and therefore
for society, why is the society supporting daycare and penalizing parents?
Isn't that wrong? What can we do about it?
> Mary wrote:
>
>>> You could structure the
>>> system, give it
>>> parameters such as time limits or limits on the number of children per
>>> woman (yes, per woman
>>> since it is a woman after all who actually bears the child!) In fact, you
>>> could follow many
>>> of the patterns already in use for military service to shape a system that
>>> gives everyone an
>>> equal opportunity at parenting.
>
> Which part of totalitarian did I miss? I believe the Chinese pioneered
> that approach to child rearing.
She did not propose a system of raising children, she proposed a system of
encouraging people to be parents instead of resorting to daycare. Also, it
is not forced birth control, it is a limit on the number of children
compensated for under the program she is proposing. In my thoughts on this,
I set that limit to 1.
You are twisting the term "system" to mean what you want (a
state-controlled method of handling children) and not what Mary intended (a
state-sponsored financial incentive to encourage parents to parent instead
of using daycare and working two jobs). Her intentions, however, seem clear
from her other posts and the rest of the one you quoted.
Cheers,
Mark
________________________________________________________________________
Mark Brooks <mark@epiphanous.org> <http://www.epiphanous.org/>
How do you know who wrote this? <http://www.epiphanous.org/mark/pgp/>
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