Mr. Gary L. Bauer,
Under Secretary of Education,
400 Maryland Ave., S.W.,
Washington, D.C. 20202.
Dear Mr. Bauer:
Thank you for your letter requesting public policy ideas on how to strengthen the role of the family in our society. I am glad that President Reagan appointed you chairman of a panel on the family, and it’s encouraging that you are seeking recommendations from outside the federal bureaucracy. Herewith is my response:
1. Administration officials, including the President and the Secretaries of Education and Health and Human Services, should use their opportunities on the public platform to speak up for the family (with its traditional roles of mother and father) and against the androgynous currents that are so chic today in the media and in academia. Of course, federal officials have no authority over individual choices or over the selection of materials in the media or academia, nor should they.
But the “pulpit” of the public platform is a significant tool. Important government leaders can encourage the public to accept fashions in culture that include the work ethic and personal responsibility for sexual behavior, in-family child-care by a resident mother, and a father’s financial responsibility for his family. What families can do for themselves is infinitely greater, quantitatively and qualitatively, than what government can do for them.
2. Every piece of legislation (federal and state) should be evaluated in advance as to its family impact (just like evaluations for cost impact or environmental impact). Before every bill is voted on, we are entitled to know the answer to this question: Does it provide incentives or disincentives to mothers taking care of their own babies?
Quite apart from societal and ethical reasons for such an inquiry, we simply cannot ignore the financial consequences. The cost to society of hiring “care-providers” to do the work of caring for pre-school children—which mothers now do from love and commitment—should be fully explained to the taxpayers before government undertakes new programs.
3. The value of a child in the income tax code should be restored to what it was 35 years ago. Obviously, children are just as valuable today as then (arguably more valuable because of the declining birth rate), and the cost of raising a child has increased far more than inflation over the same period.
For a child to have the same relative value in the federal income tax code as 35 years ago, the dependent’s exemption should be raised to $5,500. The much-publicized Packwood tax reform proposal raises it from $1,000 to $2,000, which is a small start. But the exemption for children (if not adults) should be raised much, much more.
4. The concept of the “family wage” as a social goal should be revived so that in the ’80s a man can, by applying himself to the work ethic, realistically look forward to earning enough as a single wage-earner to support his wife and children in their own home. This was the prevailing socio-economic pattern of America from the 1920s to the 1970s and, with present economic growth and prosperity, we should make it a realistic goal again.
5. The Federal Government should embark on an all-out search for innovative ideas to remedy our costly welfare apparatus’ fundamental defect: providing financial incentives to make mothers irresponsible and fathers irrelevant. As succinctly explained by one young man when asked why he didn’t support his children and their mother, “She don’t need me; she’s got welfare.”
The dogma of liberalism stands permanently indicted by the way it used the taxpayers’ money to give financial incentives to illegitimacy and to the breakup of the family unit. We must reform welfare to make illegitimacy painful instead of profitable, and to restore fathers to their role of provider and protector.
6. The Secretary of Education should speak out forcefully and frequently against the attacks on the family that emanate daily from public schools in a variety of ways: the personal hostility toward parents who try to protect the values of their children from offensive classroom materials, the curricula that teach children that parents are old-fashioned and that the home is a dangerous environment, the courses that normalize promiscuity and “alternatives” to marriage, and the vocational guidance materials that teach androgynous falsehoods seeking to eliminate or belittle the natural desire of little girls to be mothers and homemakers.
Sincerely,
Phyllis Schlafly.
