Like other White House conferences of previous years, the White House Conference on Families (WHCF) was designed to engage in “national planning,” that is, to devise legislative proposals clothed in the trappings of grassroots participation. The 50-state WHCF conferences held early in 1980 will culminate in three national WHCF conferences during the summer in Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles.
The WHCF conferences are shaping up according to a rather simple self-serving scenario. Teams of government employees and social workers will identify “problems,” guide and control the conferences, and then come up with the “solution” that federal bureaucrats should serve as Big Papa and Big Mama — of course at a Big Price in higher taxes and more federal control.
The “solutions” will be very expensive in taxes, and socially expensive in taking control away from parents and transferring it to government.
The legislative demands expected to come out of the three WHCF conferences include: (1) a multi-billion dollar agency to provide babysitting and federally-controlled “devel – opment” for pre-school children (a reincarnation of the discredited Mondale-Brademas- Cranston Child Development Bill), (2) socialized medicine for all children — and then for all families, and (3) how-to-do-it courses in normal and abnormal methods of engaging in sexual activites (under the subterfuge that “sex education” is the “solution” for teenage pregnancies).
In the economic sphere, the legislative proposals of the WHCF conferences are expected to include (4) a taxpayer-guaranteed annual income paid for by higher taxes (under the subterfuge of coping with inflation which the government itself has caused), (6) federal control of wages (under the subterfuge of “equal pay for work of equal value,” so that federal bureaucrats could decide that a secretary must be paid the same as a plumber because her work 7s of equal value), and (6) wages for housewives so that the federal tax collector would get a second tax bite out of the same hus- band’s income.
How are all these expensive services to be financed — especially in the era of Proposition 13 when the American people will not permit taxes to be increased?
By the two hidden methods which provide windfall tax revenues to the federal government: (1) by increasing federal deficit spending and (2) by pushing millions of wives and mothers out of the home into the labor force.
Federal deficit spending causes more inflation, which in turn pushes everybody into higher income tax brackets where we pay not only higher taxes but a higher rate of tax. Inflation is immensely profitable to the tax collector and will produce a $38 billion windfall to the federal government this year alone.
When a wife joins the labor force and becomes the second wage-earner in the family, government takes anywhere from one-fourth to two-thirds of her income in federal taxes, primarily through direct income taxes at rates imposed on top of her husband’s taxes, and also through taxes paid on all the additional items a working woman buys which a wife in the home did not.
The social planners who believe all economic decisions should be made by a bu- reaucratic elite have a check list of methods to induce most of the wives and mothers out of the home: (1) by more inflation, so that wives will feel compelled to take paid jobs to pay for the groceries and make the high-interest mortgage payments; (2) by providing financial and tax inducements to mothers to turn the care of their child- ren over to public or private institutions; (3) by increased “affirmative action” for women (reverse discrimination under which the government forces companies to hire or promote the less-qualified woman in place of the more-qualified man under the subter- fuge of remedying alleged discrimination of past years); (4) by eliminating the dependent-wife’s benefit in Social Security (under the totally fraudulent subterfuge of “giving” the wife her Social Security “in her own name”), thereby punishing the traditional family in which the husband is the breadwinner and the wife the homemaker; (5) by using the energy crunch to promote the four-day work week, knowing that few husbands and fathers can support their families on four days of work.
The result would be state socialism marketed under the label of “helping families cope with their problems.”
