Is David Brooks trying to sell Bush's marriage promotion plan? [View All]

America Needs More Stay at Home Moms and More Children

Sounding like something straight out of the Bush book on family values, David Brooks’ column “Empty Nests, and Hearts” advocates that more women should stay at home and have kids. Because women have “more choices” now, there are just not as many kids and there in lies our problems with Social Security and Medicare.

I suspect that if more people had the chance to focus exclusively on child-rearing before training for and launching a career, fertility rates would rise. That would be good for the country, for as Phillip Longman, author of "The Empty Cradle," has argued, we are consuming more human capital than we are producing - or to put it another way, we don't have enough young people to support our old people. (That's what the current Social Security debate and the coming Medicare debate are all about.)

Is it possible that David Brooks is trying to help sell the plans “within the Bush administration to spend more than $1 billion over five years on programs to promote marriage among low-income couples?”

Administration officials say they are planning an extensive election-year initiative to promote marriage, especially among low-income couples, and they are weighing whether President Bush should promote the plan next week in his State of the Union address.

For months, administration officials have worked with conservative groups on the proposal, which would provide at least $1.5 billion for training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain "healthy marriages."

After all, if women start staying at home and giving up their dreams of an education and a career, then we will have another baby boom and all those privatized retirement accounts, that Bush longs for, will flourish. So, I get it… instead of teaching my daughter to go for her dreams of good education and a career, I should start looking for her future husband and stressing the values of being a stay at home mom. Not.

http://www.lightupthedarkness.org/blog/default.asp?view=plink&id=230