A couple of new bills pertaining to child care have just been introduced into Congress which would give more cash benefits to employed mothers who hire child-care services performed by strangers while denying benefits to mothers who care for their own children. These bills are outrageously insulting to American mothers, and it’s time to rise up in righteous indignation against such shameless shenanigans.
Senators and Congressmen, how dare you devise yet another blatant discrimination against mothers who care for their own children? These new bills would compound and extend the discrimination against a class of women who are already more mistreated than any other segment of Americans today.
If a mother is employed and hires child-care services performed by strangers, she can take a credit on her income tax return of up to $720 for one child and $1,440 for two or more children (figured on a complicated scale with variables of income and expenditures). If, on the other hand, the mother devotes full time to raising her children, she is denied this significant cash benefit.
This child-care credit clearly provides a financial advantage for mothers who enter the paid labor force and a financial detriment to mothers who work in the home. The Congress of the United States has no constitutional, legal or moral right to legislate such an irrational and unjust difference of treatment between the half of mothers of small children who are in the paid labor force and the half who work in the traditional family pattern.
This financial discrimination is not based on any financial need of the employed mothers who are thus rewarded. Congress simply made the ruthless, insensitive decision to dole out cash benefits to women who enter the paid labor force and pay strangers to take care of their children, while treating fulltime homemakers as second-class women.
In fact, most of the benefits of this child-care credit flow to the more affluent two-income couples at the expense of the less affluent single-income families. Single-earner (traditional-family) couples have an annual family income approximately $11,000 less than the dual-income couples who receive the child-care tax benefits.
Two-thirds of the taxpayers who claim this credit have family incomes above the median. The child-care credit, therefore, amounts to a net income transfer from the needier to the more prosperous.
It also discriminates against families that have more than two children. The child-care credit makes the arbitrary assumption that two is enough, and benefits are denied to the third and later children.
The law is even highly discriminatory about whom the employed mother hires to care for her children. If it is grandmother or some other family member, that doesn’t count! To get the cash benefits of the law, the employed mother must hire someone not related, who engages in child care on a commercial, strictly-for-hire basis.
The cost to the taxpayers of these cash benefits to employed mothers who turn their children over to a hired caretaker is constantly increasing because of the financial inducements to do exactly what the law subsidizes. The child-care credit cost the taxpayers $2.6 billion in 1984 and rose to $3.1 billion in 1985.
The fulltime mother is also victimized by the income tax law’s regulations about Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs). She receives only one-eighth the tax benefits that an employed woman receives. Congressmen, how dare you decide that the fulltime homemaker needs only one-eighth as much money in her senior years as the employed woman?
Now, to add insult to injury, some Senators and Congressmen are pushing new bills to toss more billions of dollars of cash benefits in the laps of employed women who hire strangers to take care of their children, while denying benefits to fulltime mothers who care for their own children. A Senate bill introduced by Senator Chris Dodd and a companion bill introduced in the House by Congressman Dale Kildee would give $2.5 billion in benefits to the same favored segment of employed mothers while discriminating even further against fulltime mothers.
Senator Dodd and Congressman Kildee, don’t you dare to talk about taxing fulltime mothers another $2.5 billion to give more cash benefits to employed mothers who hire strangers to care for their children! Unless and until you universalize the child-care credit so that fulltime mothers are treated equally with employed mothers, you deserve to be branded as anti-children, anti-motherhood, and anti-family.
