“A Matter Of Economic Necessity”: Thanks To Republicans, Moms Must Work
You want to talk about a war on stay-at-home moms? How about Republican economic policies that prevent women from ever becoming one.
I’m talking about policies, for instance, like the equal-pay-for-equal-work law that embattled Governor Scott Walker just shot down in Wisconsin, thus guaranteeing that when Badger State mothers do go to work to put food on their family’s table they’ll now have to spend more time away from their kids in order to do it. Three cheers for Republican Family Values!!!
Republicans have always understood better than Democrats that a good offense is the best defense. And so, with the gender gap between Democrats and Republicans approaching Grand Canyon proportions, it’s no mystery why Republicans are eager for a replay of the Mommy Wars of the late 1960s and early 70s when bra-burning feminists squared off against Mrs. Beaver Cleaver and her tastefully arranged string of white pearls.
And so, there was Mr. Etch-a-Sketch himself, chief Romney PR flack Eric Fehrnstrom, tweeting after a left-leaning CNN talking head put her foot in her mouth: “Obama adviser Hilary Rosen goes on CNN to debut their new ‘kill Ann’ strategy, and in the process insults hard-working moms.”
Some things never change. Eric Fehrnstrom is still a thug and Democrats are still incurable weenies.
Hysterical that someone might think calling Mrs. Romney a pampered plutocrat who never worked a day in her life was an implied slur on apple pie and motherhood, the rush by Democrats — up to and including the First Couple – to degrade themselves running away from Hilary Rosen and her ill-chosen words shows just how much Democrats are counting on that 19-point hole Republicans have dug themselves into with woman.
Republicans, as we’ve learned the hard way, are terrific when it comes to starting wars on false pretenses. So, if Democrats applied even a fraction of the strategic thinking Republicans use all the time to the Republican’s made-up War on Homemakers, they’d see Republicans have given them a golden opportunity to go on the attack and pivot back to their signature issue in this campaign: economic justice.
Social conservatives like nothing more than to assert it’s liberals and feminists who are pushing women into the workplace against their will by making those who’d rather be homemakers feel inadequate and unfulfilled for their politically incorrect choice of careers. But the truth is most of these moms couldn’t stay home even if they wanted to since working isn’t a career choice but a matter of economic necessity.
That’s why the idea of casting millionairesses like Mrs. Romney as self-sacrificing stay-at-home-moms is, when you think of it, laughable if not ludicrous.
By now we know the statistics by heart. Over the past 40 years, only incomes in the top 20% have seen any growth at all. During this time, average incomes for most Americans have either stayed level or declined. Whatever wage increases average households have earned in the past generation were made by women entering the workforce. And this at a time when incomes for those in the top 1% grew from an average of $500,000 a year to more than $2 million.
These trends haven’t changed even since the Wall Street-engineered collapse of the global credit markets in 2008.
As Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post, “three years after economic growth resumed the real value of Americans’ paychecks is stubbornly still shrinking.”
Profits by the S&P 500 are up 23% since 2007 while cash reserves have increased 49% during that time, in large part because firms are neither hiring in the US nor raising worker wages — even though on average workers are generating nearly $50,000 more each year in revenue than just three years ago, says Meyerson.
So where is all the extra income going? According to University of California economist Emmanuel Saez, all income growth in the US in 2010 went to the wealthiest 10% of households, and 93% to the wealthiest 1%.
“Profits and dividends are up largely because wages are down,” says Meyerson. Indeed, as JPMorgan Chase chief investment officer Michael Cembalest wrote in an investor newsletter last year: “US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.”
Even in today’s fragile recovery, Meyerson says most of the jobs being created are in low-wage sectors, where 70% of all job gains in the past six months were concentrated in restaurants and hotels, health care, retail trade, and temporary employment agencies.
Construction still has an unemployment rate of 17% in part due to Republican reluctance to commit public funds for basic infrastructure construction.
The disconnect between conservative praise for full-time motherhood and conservative economic policies that prevent more women from actually being full-time moms is the same contradiction we see in the abortion debate, where pro-life conservatives talk about the sanctity of life while saying it would be just terrible for the government to lend a hand to single women forced by restrictive pro-life laws into becoming mothers against their will.
Republican charges ring hallow when they accuse Democrats of disrespecting the hard work women do to raise a family, because at the end of the day choice and self-determination for women (as well as men) are liberal values, not conservative ones.
When conservatives are not demanding strict conformity to ancient and rigid gender roles based on 5,000 years of Judeo-Christian doctrines, or whatever, they are hiding behind a false “individualism” that allows a few privileged multimillionaires to take away the real individual freedoms of the millions these plutocrats are thus able to defraud, exploit and abuse.
Republicans talk a good game about the virtues of motherhood. But when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are and fighting a real war on behalf of moms who want to be moms, the Republican Party, like always, has gone AWOL.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, Salon, April 13, 2012
“Markedly Different Circumstances”: The Real War On Moms And Republican Manufactured Outrage
Welcome to the surreal phase of the campaign where Republicans, mindful of facing a gender gap – nay, a chasm – try to nominally out-feminist Democrats, but only insofar as it comes to respecting the right of a spectacularly wealthy woman to raise her children without a job outside the home (or, perhaps, to join an exclusive golf club). But make no mistake: This is not about the so-called Mommy Wars, where mothers with a paycheck sneer at the ones without one – a binary simply not reflected in women’s lived experience. It’s about class and about how government policy compounds its impact on households with kids.
The Romney campaign may not know what it’s getting into here, since this is where plenty of progressives live, which is how they had a bunch of substantive questions at the ready. “I will tell you that Mitt said to me more times than I can imagine, Ann, your job is more important than mine,” Ann Romney said on Fox News today. But is this about nominal celebration or actually helping parents? If the Romneys “value women’s domestic work so much,” tweeted feminist author Jessica Valenti, “when will they discuss their plan for national paid parental leave?” And Slate’s Matt Yglesias wondered, “Do Mitt & Ann Romney think unemployed single moms have a full-time job? Do such moms deserve a living wage?” Or healthcare? You could almost fantasize for a minute that this campaign season jockeying of faux outrage is going to somehow lead to a substantive conversation about those oft-neglected policy issues, which force women and men into unhappy choices about how they’re both going to provide for and care for their families.
“Choice” was the word on Ann Romney’s lips in her Fox News appearance this morning. “We need to respect the choices that women make,” she said several times, adding, “Mitt respects women that make different choices.” “Choice,” of course, is a word that represents in other contexts, like abortion rights, a negotiated truce on rights and liberties of women to live within and without their traditional roles. But Ann Romney’s use of it shows how limited it is as a trope: Is it a relevant “choice” for the vast majority of American women to decide whether to use their degree in French in the workforce or rationally rest on their husband’s millions to focus on five children – six, according to Ann, if you count mischievous Mitt?
The more pertinent “choice” involves a series of unappealing options when it comes to affordable childcare or workforce opportunities. According to the census, the proportion of mothers with a recent birth in the labor force increased during the recession, from 56 percent in 2006 to 61 percent in 2008. And another Census Bureau report suggests that the 5.6 million stay-at-home mothers, a minority among mothers, have little in common with Ann Romney. They tend to be younger, Latina and foreign-born – and they are less likely to have graduated from high school or attained a bachelor’s degree. These women face markedly different circumstances from the more publicly visible stakeholders in alleged Mommy Wars, the ones who opted out of the workforce and who have the ear of people making movies and writing novels, but the women with the luxury to live on a single income at their expected standard of living are a statistical and demographic blip. The bulk of stay-at-home moms have characteristics that correlate to lower earnings in the workforce, and for them, with the high cost and inaccessibility of childcare, the “free” childcare offered by staying at home is also a rational economic choice.
Did these women feel acknowledged when ultra-wealthy Ann Romney said on Fox News, “I know what it’s like to struggle,” if they heard her say it at all? The Romney campaign is counting on the fact that such women, and maybe other women who have felt the tug between home and the workplace, will be more moved by the unfortunate phrase “never worked a day in her life” than by the fact that the Republican Party’s policies disproportionately impact these lower-income mothers, from their access to reproductive healthcare to cutting the public-sector jobs that tend to be held by women. They hope that Obama will effectively be blamed for structural job losses to women, without being able to point to a single Democratic policy that drove it, even as women are supposed to be mad that an alleged Obama surrogate only values employment outside the home.
All of this started because Mitt Romney said that he knew what women care about because his wife had told him: “She reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy, and getting good jobs for their kids and for themselves,” he said last week. Apparently, he is unable to speak to these alien creatures himself, or to understand that women’s interest in the economy includes how to balance their economic responsibilities with their family ones – since the latter still disproportionately falls on women – or how controlling their fertility is an economic issue. But maybe there’s a policy prescription that’s to augment the elaborate umbrage at the alleged disrespect to Ann Romney and women everywhere. Let’s hear it.
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, April 12, 2012
“An Unethical Salesman”: The Anatomy Of A Mitt Romney Lie
Mitt Romney’s meaningless 92.3 percent statistic about women and job losses has been thoroughly debunked pretty much everywhere, but let’s take one last look at his original statement:
There’s been some talk about a war on women. The real war on women has been waged by the Obama administration’s failure on the economy. Do you know what percentage of job losses during the Obama years of have been casualties of women losing jobs as opposed to men? Do you know how many women, what percent of the job losses were women? 92.3 percent of the job losses during the Obama years have been women who’ve lost those jobs.
In large part because of its absurdity, Romney’s misleading92.3 percent claim became the focus of attention after he delivered his remarks. When you reread his original statement, however, it’s clear that the bogus statistic wasn’t really the main thing he hoped to communicate. Rather, he offered it as evidence to support his core accusation: that “the real war on women has been waged by” President Obama.
As it turns out, the 92.3 percent stat failed to provide any support whatsoever for that claim—even though it was technically accurate. That’s important: Romney’s 92.3 percent claim wasn’t itself a lie, rather it was a meaningless factoid offered in an attempt to mislead his audience about something else. That’s a time-honored tactic of unethical salesmen, and the fact that Mitt Romney decided to take such a sleazy approach to the issue is a pretty big clue that he was in the middle of telling a pants-on-fire lie.
Sure enough, that’s exactly what it was. Mitt Romney and his Republican Party are waging an all-out assault on Planned Parenthood, birth control coverage, reproductive rights, and even Obamacare’s guarantee that women won’t be charged more for insurance than men just because they can get pregnant. That’s what you call a real war on women. It’s being led by Romney and the Republicans. And when they blame it on President Obama, that’s a lie.
By: Jed Lewison, Daily Kos, April 12, 2012
“Warrior Against Women”: Romney Plays With Fire In Effort To Recapture Women
Last week, Romney campaign press secretary, Andrea Saul, set off a firestorm when she tweeted, “FACT: Women account for 92.3 percent of jobs loss under @BarackObama.”
Before you knew it, the Romney campaign had locked onto the statistic and made it the centerpiece of their effort to turn the corner on the mass defection of female voters to Obama—a stampede that, should it hold up, will make it very difficult for the Governor to defeat the President in November.
The strategy is a tricky one—although it certainly doesn’t hurt the Romney meme that Ms. Saul’s statement is factually true.
However, there is a great deal more to the story and—should women become acquainted with the facts rather than the bumper sticker—Governor Romney may find that he has dug the hole deeper by trying to pull a fast one on female voters. Unlike we male troglodytes, women tend to pay closer attention to the facts because…well…because they are smarter then men.
To get to the truth behind the numbers, we begin with Gary Burtless, a labor market expert with the non-partisan Brookings Institute, who highlights what took place during the recessionary period that began in December 2007.
I think males were disproportionately hurt by employment losses in manufacturing and especially construction, which is particularly male-dominated. A lot of job losses in those two industries had already occurred before Obama took office. Industries where women are more likely to be employed – education, health, the government – fared better in terms of job loss. In fact, health and education employment continued to grow in the recession and in the subsequent recovery. Government employment only began to fall after the private economy (and private employment) began growing again.
Burtless’ perspective is borne out by data that reveals that men lost 5,355,000 jobs during the recessionary period that began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009 when things began turning around, albeit unconvincingly. During that same period, women lost 2,124,000 jobs. Thus, during the recession, roughly 72 percent of all the jobs lost were taken from the men.
Oddly, it was not until things started moving in a better direction that women began experiencing the lion’s share of the pain.
There is a reason for this. What followed the recession were the deep cuts in state and local government jobs—jobs that tend to be filled by women in far greater numbers then men.
According to Joan Entmacher, vice president and director of family economic security at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C., while the private sector has added more than 2.5 million jobs since March 2010, state and local government jobs have been cut by 500,000—the majority of these jobs once belonging to women.
What’s more, it turns out that this pattern of men getting fired first followed by women losing their gigs just when men are beginning to return to work is a pattern that has held in previous recessions.
So, can you rationally blame this female job loss problem on President Obama?
Some could argue that had the President’s policies brought about a more emphatic recovery, states and localities would be racking up greater tax receipts, giving them more money to spend and, as a result, would not have found it necessary to cut so many of the jobs that have put women out of work disproportionately.
But to make that argument, you would necessarily have to support keeping or returning women to their state and local government jobs.
This is a problem when one acknowledges that it is the Romney side of the political ledger that makes ‘small government’ a hallmark of their reason for being. Thus, even if there were more dollars available to fund government at all levels, it seems fair to point out that conservatives would strenuously argue that the money should remain in the pockets of the taxpayers and not be shuttled off to government coffers to be spent on more public workers.
This is where it gets a bit sticky for the Romney camp.
It’s awfully hard to pursue a position that conflicts with your central reason for being—let alone making it a major campaign plank. If you support smaller government, you necessarily support fewer government employees. If those employees happen to be women— because women make up the majority of people who hold these jobs—you can’t really grouse about their job loss when the very act of their losing the job is a fulfillment of a critically important piece in your political platform.
And if you do decide to grouse, you run the risk of being exposed for a measure of hypocrisy.
It is no secret that a great many of the government job losses have come in education where states have cut back spending dramatically in response to budgetary problems. It is also no secret,as the following chart reveals, that the teaching profession—overwhelmingly dominated by women—has taken a major hit during the recent, post-recession years.
So, do we blame Obama for the firing of so many teachers?
Education budgets are controlled by the states. Of the top ten states that have made the deepest cuts into education, eight of them are under the firm control of Republicans.
Oops.
Meanwhile, reviewing the only three states that have increased funding for education during the past year—Maryland, South Carolina and Massachusetts—we find that two are led by Democrats. Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina is the only Republican governor in the nation to increase spending on education.
Now, one can again suggest that a more robust recovery would have allowed these GOP governors and legislators to hold onto more of the teaching workforce. However, when it comes to cutting state and local jobs, blaming the President is somewhat akin to blaming him for the state proposals we’ve seen over the past few months attempting to subject women to vaginal ultrasound testing before an abortion is permitted.
At the end of the day, there is simply no rational basis to pin the loss of women’s jobs following the recession on the President. When taking in all the information, the argument just does not hold up.
In some respects, I have sympathy for Governor Romney in having to wear the mantle of a ‘warrior against women’. He didn’t start this. Indeed, there is ample evidence that he has not discriminated against women throughout his career and campaign.While right to life supporters might take issue with my cutting the governor such a break, given Romney’s flip-flop on the subject of abortion, I remain convinced that Romney is, in reality, no more opposed to abortion rights than he was when he was the Governor of Massachusetts.
Of course, the governor didn’t help himself with his milquetoast response to Rush Limbaugh’s attack on Sandra Fluke just as his campaign did him no favors yesterday when it appeared they had never heard of or, at the least, yet to form an opinion when asked about the Lilly Ledbetter Act—the first piece of legislation signed into law by President Obama and one aimed at improving women’s access to the courts to redress pay discrimination.
Fair or not, as the party standard bearer, Governor Romney takes on the troubles caused by Limbaugh and the many GOP state and federal legislators who have come up with some pretty bizarre, old century ideas that are the stuff of the “war against women.” If he’s going to overcome the handicap, I suspect he’s going to have to do much better than attempting a little misdirection in the effort to fool female voters.
Why?
Because if the women of America are anything like my own wife—and I strongly suspect that they are—the Governor’s ploy is a non-starter that will easily be found out.
If Romney wants the women to come back, he’s going to have to do much better.
By: Rick Ungar, The Policy Page, Forbes, April 12, 2012
Mitt’s “New Concern For Women”: Hard For Romney To Claim Obama Is Waging A War On Women
As part of Mitt Romney’s ongoing attemptto project all of his weakness onto President Obama, the presumed GOP nominee is accusing his general election opponent of waging a “war on women.”
Democrats have used the same charge to highlight Republicans’ systematic attacks on women’s rights, but Romney flipped the claim at a rally last night night, saying, “The real war on women has been the job losses as the result of the Obama economy.” He continued the attack on Fox News this morning, where he repeatedly went out of his way to attack Obama’s record on women:
ROMNEY: Over 92 percent of the jobs lost under this president where lost by women. His policies have been really a war on women. … Women in particular suffered under this presidency. Watch it: http://youtu.be/F7H_FcJifM0
The “92 percent” statistic that Romney cites is highly misleading. For one thing, it attributes to Obama job losses from January 2009 — a terrible month for jobs — before he was even sworn in as president, and long before his policies were enacted. If you count the entirety of the recession beginning in 2007, 39.7 percent of the jobs lost — less than half — were lost by women.
The reason women’s job losses are skewed towards the end of the recession is that the earlier job losses were largely in male-dominated industries such as construction. Women, meanwhile, tend to work in industries that have been hit harder on the back end of the recession, such as education and health care — public sector jobs that have been decimated by GOP austerity budgeting. Princeton University Professor Betsey Stevenson told Politifact that “in every recession men’s job loss occurs first and most, with unemployment rates for men being more cyclical than those of women’s.”
Meanwhile, Obama has enacted policies to help women, like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, designed to help close the pay gap between the genders. This morning, Romney’s campaign wouldn’t say if their candidate supports the law, which was blocked by Senate Republicans. In fact, the campaign couldn’t offer any coherent explanation for how Obama has waged a “war on women” at all.
On health care — which polls show is women’s number one issue, beating even the economy — Obama’s health reform law includes a number of provisions to help women women, such as free preventive services and better access to contraception, both of which were enacted over opposition from Republican lawmakers. Meanwhile, Romney has called for eliminating Planned Parenthood and restricting access to contraception.
Romney’s concern for women is a new development, likely spurred by very bad polling for him, as just last month he told a college student concerned about losing access to her insurance-covered contraception, “vote for the other guy.”
By: Alex Seitz-Wald and Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, April 11, 2012
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