Finally! The Government Is Fixing the Shitty Fathers Problem
So, while i know this is not a political blog, this gem touches on the problem that haunts so many of our sports heroes - as men and boys: absent or inadequate fathers. And since one of the right honorable gentlemen is an expecting father (again), I figured this needs to be passed on as a sort of FTLOSBW Public Service Announcement.
It's reassuring to know that the government will be leading a roadshow to neighborhood barbershops to help educate fathers on how to do things like, feed your kids, teach them to brush their teeth, and have positive conversations. I'm not kidding about any of this, BTW.
I'd suggest they have the first session at Travis Henry's local salon.
Now, I know what you're going to say: "I don't know what's more insane, that the government is actually spending money on this, or that they're doing it at barbershops". Or perhaps just, "Holy Fucking Shit!". But don't, because you're probably at work. Or in Jan's case, the shitter.
I'm just glad that, FINALLY, there's someone in the dark basement of a cement building in Washington putting pen to paper and finally blessing the soon to be or current fathers of America with the good news! Much like the books of old, the new gospels are being written by the Apostles (and federal employees) Laurie St. Single and her colleague Helen McToofatforkids, who have pooled their talents and your tax dollars to pull all the brilliant insights from the government funded studies illuminating us on such previous mysteries as what time to feed your children and how to prioritize your time as a father - (spoiler alert: they suggest you find a few minutes to read books or comics with your kids)***. We can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. This should be about as successful as the NFL's financial and family planning programs for its players.
***Just in case you wanted to get more details on this particular pearl of wisdom (or more likely that you don't believe me), I included the link to the site so you could see for yourself and get educated. But hurry up, because that suggestion is just this week's. From May 27-June 2, it was "Have fun outside and get exercise," so hopefully some of you got in on that action before the week ended. You pay for it, so let's get some eyeballs on that site guys! Hooray for being a the kind of dad your government says is good!
It's reassuring to know that the government will be leading a roadshow to neighborhood barbershops to help educate fathers on how to do things like, feed your kids, teach them to brush their teeth, and have positive conversations. I'm not kidding about any of this, BTW.
I'd suggest they have the first session at Travis Henry's local salon.
Now, I know what you're going to say: "I don't know what's more insane, that the government is actually spending money on this, or that they're doing it at barbershops". Or perhaps just, "Holy Fucking Shit!". But don't, because you're probably at work. Or in Jan's case, the shitter.
I'm just glad that, FINALLY, there's someone in the dark basement of a cement building in Washington putting pen to paper and finally blessing the soon to be or current fathers of America with the good news! Much like the books of old, the new gospels are being written by the Apostles (and federal employees) Laurie St. Single and her colleague Helen McToofatforkids, who have pooled their talents and your tax dollars to pull all the brilliant insights from the government funded studies illuminating us on such previous mysteries as what time to feed your children and how to prioritize your time as a father - (spoiler alert: they suggest you find a few minutes to read books or comics with your kids)***. We can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. This should be about as successful as the NFL's financial and family planning programs for its players.
***Just in case you wanted to get more details on this particular pearl of wisdom (or more likely that you don't believe me), I included the link to the site so you could see for yourself and get educated. But hurry up, because that suggestion is just this week's. From May 27-June 2, it was "Have fun outside and get exercise," so hopefully some of you got in on that action before the week ended. You pay for it, so let's get some eyeballs on that site guys! Hooray for being a the kind of dad your government says is good!
12 Comments:
I understand the easy target this appears to be and get where dtk's coming from, but a couple devil's advocate thoughts:
- the budget of the National Responsible Fatherhood Initiative annually probably approximates what we spend by the end of breakfast in Afghanistan daily.
- is anyone here disputing the following: (a) a third of American children, and half of African American children, grow up without their biological father in the household, and (b) that's a problem? OK. Clearly the invisible hand of the free market has not helped solve this issue. Then, what can we do about it? Nothing? Where's the optimism? Not every governmental program shows a tangible economic benefit immediately. The drag on our society from unproductive or incarcerated citizens is on the order of trillions of dollars of lost GDP annually, and it's well established that a large cause of that huge percentage of population that's unproductive or incarcerated is broken familial units. Why is it not an appropriate governmental expenditure to try to do something to change those conditions organically? I would think this program is a conservative's delight - inculcating traditional family values so that more and more of our citizens can flourish through them. For what it's worth, this is not just someone saying "Hey, let's do a series of workshops in barbershops, and Bang! Problem solved! Functional nuclear families for all!" It's part of a broader net of programs and initiatives designed to work together, and consists (from descriptions in the White House paper on this issue) of more education about available resources than preaching. It's not pulling in a bunch of gangbangers, sitting them in a chair and telling them about the virtues of responsible fatherhood.
- here's the subject of the first quarterly "buzz cuts" series: economic literacy. Can we really object to a couple hundred thousand dollars being spent on trying to bring a little bit of economic literacy to our less educated population? I would submit that the NUMBER ONE problem in this nation is a general lack of understanding of money, budgeting, and the economic system amongst 95% of its adult population. We should be spending billions on this subject in public schools, starting in about Grade 3. Can anyone really claim that our deregulated and coddled financial industry wouldn't have had a harder time bringing us the Great Depression v2.0 if we didn't have 85% of households not saving anything annually, and probably 75% of the country easily convinced they could afford a home with a mortgage that soaked up 50% of their post-tax monthly revenue, with no equity in?
June 19, 2012 at 11:05 AM
[Shockingly, I was too verbose. Remainder of response follows:]
- I honestly don't get the mocking of the barbershop locations. Is it not true that the corner barbershop was/is a central cultural clearinghouse in a lot of African American communities? It's like holding a meeting to discuss the newest advances in playground equipment for white folks, and choosing to do it at a Starbucks. That's where the people go. If Julius Peppers will show up at a barbershop and spend an afternoon handing out literature about resources out there to help returning vets or parolees reconnect with their families, I guess I just don't see why that's so worthy of mockery.
- this is housed in the Faith-Based Initiatives office. We may recall who created that. If we're going to rail against the nanny state, let's do so after attributing the nannying appropriately. Were we upset at past (and continuing) initiatives relating to supporting nuclear family units and aimed at not having millions of kids growing up fatherless and without sufficient monetary support? Or is there something different about this set of programs now?
- related programs seem to get a fairly good r.o.i.: for instance, the White House's fatherhood report linked from the article notes that for every dollar spent on the federal Child Support Enforcement Program, almost $5 in additional support goes to a child that needs it.
June 19, 2012 at 11:06 AM
I will chime in on the Bush point- bad job by President Bush. Conservatives are quite capable of wasting our dollars on things to ineffectively promote their own social engineering. Though I'm Not sure why if george bush did it, that's somehow makes the waste more excusable, but point taken. (btw, i'm guessing most proponents of this current work weren't as positive about the faith based initiatives programs at the time).
But I do take issue with the idea that by articulating that there's a problem that somehow anything that gets labeled as dealing with that problem must be worth doing. We can all agree that the Twin pitching sucks, and the current farm system isn't working, but that doesn't mean that trying to make them better by hypnotizing them is a good idea because somebody says that they'd be better if the hypnosis actually worked.
and if it costs $20 million and we were over payroll, i'd say we don't have the money unless we think it's more important than buying runs. And if i was told we should spend money on Joe the arm improving hypnotist because it's not nearly as much of a waste of money as what we spend on bad infielders, i'd say cut them both and put it towards making people's tickets cheaper because maybe then people would be willing to actually go to the game and then eventually we could afford to actually buy good players.
June 19, 2012 at 7:46 PM
Let's take Democrat and Republican out of this - basic premise that I have an issue with is should the government be doing this at all - whether it costs $5 to run this site or $5,000 is besides the point. Should your elected officials be spending resources on a website that gives tips on fatherhood in an effort to encourage the father's of a "third of American children" to not be shitty fathers? Just answer that honestly as both a taxpayer* and someone with a modicum of common sense. In my humble opinion, the answer is a resounding "no." Give me that $5's back so I can spend it at my local store or hire a policeman for 6 minutes of overtime.
Now, I'm for "economic literacy" being taught in schools but let's spend those billions in the Department of Education on that class right after the nation cracks the top 10 worldwide in just math (currently 25th.) As for the housing market, no, people didn't understand the loans they were getting into but that doesn't excuse them from the financial collapse when their rates jumped. When I don't understand something I say "Hey, can you write down on a piece of paper what my payments are going to look like over the next 7 years because of this ARM you're putting me in?" But I'm probably considered a fascist because I have an education. The idea that home ownership somehow became an American right is another story.
* "Taxpayer" is a loaded word as I'm guessing the people who are 'targeted' for this site are what I call the "47%ers" and don't actually pay taxes.
June 20, 2012 at 1:00 AM
Now we're cooking with gas, boys. If we had started with "This is kind of a waste of money and probably unlikely to have any real, valuable effect, so the federal government shouldn't be doing it" I would likely have agreed. "This is the dumbest bullshit in the history of the world and could only have been hatched out of corruption, idiocy and a mindless desire to waste money" just sort of led me to a Pavlovian compulsion to push back on the derision. Sorry.
Followup thoughts:
- If we're looking for places to cut money, this isn't specifically a bad place. In a priority of spending list, clearly this sort of "hopefully will have some macro effects somewhere down the road" line item has to be toward the bottom, especially in lean times and with a large deficit.
- However, we've been picking at the decrepit corpse of the 15% of the federal budget that's typically termed "discretionary spending" so much over the past 20 years, that's it's just hard for me to get too up in arms about programs like these when we're blowing hundreds of multiples more on wasteful military spending. I get the $5 is $5 point Jan makes. But if getting gov'tal spending in line is a priority, you can't get there fishing for minnows. The federal gov't employs no more people on a per capita basis today than it did in 1960, and while we've seen 27 consecutive months of private sector job growth, we've continued to hemorrhage public sector jobs. Current high deficit levels are overwhelmingly driven by low tax revenue (and historically low tax rates) and military, not this sort of thing. So, to a degree, I disagree with the idea that the actual cost is beside the point.
- Along the same lines, we still have a sticky high unemployment situation in our economy right now. Good Keynesian that I am, my desire to cut "wasteful" spending is tempered by a desire to keep aggregate demand up, through the means of not dramatically reducing gov'tal spending, and not implementing policies that inevitably lead to reduction in private consumption. I'm fearful of intentionally draining two of the four categories of overall AD by implementing policies that won't increase the other two at all.
- Basically, then, what I think I'm saying is that we should take the money out of the less obviously beneficial portions of this particular set of programs and redeploy it to somewhere more directly stimulatory. Like repairing crumbling bridges and bringing our electric grid up to current first world standards.
June 20, 2012 at 11:36 AM
Again, way too wordy. Apologies.
- I think it's important to properly characterize what this bundle of programs, websites, etc. is. I'm not going along with the rhetorical framing of calling this simply a website "to encourage fathers to not be shitty fathers" and then answering "yes" or "no" to whether that's a good thing. That unfairly delegitimizes the goals by not providing an accurate picture. Ask me whether I think the stated goals of these programs are important enough for gov'tal action, and whether the specific types of action prescribed, and their cost, will be cost-effective and useful enough to justify. (And I'll say "No.")
- Jan, don't fall for that Foxified line about 47% of people not paying taxes. You know it's not the case that fully half the country is shiftless layabouts looking for free t-bones. Remove retirees and students from the calculated percentage. And then reword like this: "approximately 30%ers and don't actually pay federal income taxes in addition to the payroll taxes, state income taxes, property taxes and consumption taxes they do pay, because we've made a policy decision that they don't actually make enough money to justify further burdening them." When the inflation adjusted median annual income hasn't increased in 40 years, it shouldn't be surprising that we find fewer and fewer people capable of contributing above and beyond the regressive forms of taxes they do pay.
- I totally agree that basic math skills should come first. Without that you can't teach economic literacy, anyway. We should keep in mind that we've all got postgraduate degrees and are in the top .5% of the nation in educational attainment here, so what we consider obvious isn't necessarily so for a lot of people. When you live in a society that is wholly dependent on maintaining a keep up with the Joneses, envy-consumption lifestyle to stay afloat, and don't teach most of the population how to just balance a checkbook, you're asking for trouble if you're just relying on common sense to keep them out of bad fiscal situations. Good point on home ownership becoming a basic right in too many people's minds. Basic underlying policy of encouraging a high ownership level, I think, is a good thing, but we went way overboard.
June 20, 2012 at 11:37 AM
Just a few quick followups -
- agree these programs are drops in the bucket of the overall problem. but they are still adding water,and i;m not sure why getting up in arms about these wastes of resources means you can't be up in arms about the others. I'm willing to cut the military too - sign me up for us getting out of the "Good War" in afghanistan. But I will point out, providing for the national defense is what the federal government is constitutionally required to do. It's its primary purpose. Helping individuals become better fathers or better at balancing their check books is not. Those may even be laudable goals, as would making sure people learn to swim, know how to perform cpr, become better neighbors or whatever thing people think is a god end. But something being a good idea doesn't mean it's something the government should be doing. and if the government doesn't, that doesn't mean that it's not important or that it won't get done. There are lots of services, websites, groups that help with all those areas. Some of them can even do it better, as hard as that may be to believe.
To defend Jan, I agree on the point that the 47%ers pay other taxes -- and i'm not singling them out for ridicule or suggesting they can afford more -- buyt payroll taxes, state income taxes, property taxes and consumption taxes are all decidedly different than federal income taxes. Consumption and property taxes go to state and local services, and presumably for whatever crap their community thinks necessary. (i would agree they are probably overtaxed there too for junk they don't need but it's not my job to take care of other states residents because their state overtaxes them). And Federal payroll taxes go to an essentially defined benefit that they get back in medicare and social security. they are not paying for all the other spending the government must do and therefore must be subsidized by other taxpayers (not to mention the contributions themselves don't cover the actual expense of either benefit-- so programs like the one in question become more of a burden on those who don't use them, who also must pay for the essential functions and continue to subsidize the essential safety nets. The point is not to place blame or be coldhearted - the point is there's a lot of people not paying for the things that we do need, so other people end up having to, and also end up paying for the extra "drops in the bucket". And now the account is WAY overdrawn. the least we can do is stop spending other people's money on shit we don't need.
June 20, 2012 at 6:35 PM
FTLOSBW is starting a debate team, who's in?
First of all, I have no handle on the facts so largely what I say comes from what I've read on the sides of buses and the sports page.
Secondly, I just don't think the government should do any of this. I'm no Ron Paul but I just don't think tax dollars should be thought of as "revenue" in any way. These people are bureaucrats, whether there are the same number of them since 1960 or not, they're in no place to run a fatherhood.com website or legislate my wife's womb or tell me I can't feed my child chips and a soda for breakfast. Ergo the cost is besides the point.
Finally, I saw a movie this past weekend (Wes Anderson's new flick, it was terrible) and during the ads before the movie started (how great is it that we have ads before movies) Rachel Maddow stood before some wind turbines to tell me that American ingenuity and drive were behind new energy sources and we can make them real options because we're Americans or something like that. If it had been Bill O'Reilly I would have had the same reaction - an audible guffaw. I guess I don't know why I bring this up other than to say I support Rachel Maddow's right to marry a woman.
June 20, 2012 at 10:38 PM
What is Wes Anderson's new flick?
Don't blame me I voted for Kodos. Or was is it Kang?
June 21, 2012 at 7:46 PM
Moonrise Kingdom. Snoozer.
June 21, 2012 at 8:15 PM
This is fun, and better than talking about sports.
My basic underlying philosophy on when governmental spending or regulation not specifically enumerated in the Constitution might be legitimate probably boils down to this: either (1) the states can't individually handle it, (2) the market or private enterprise can't or won't handle it efficiently (or exacerbates the situation), or (3) it's enough of an issue that it could lead to significant economic contraction, or economic or other destabilization if not salved. Call me a federalist. I guess I'm of the mind that in striving for the Platonic "just society," there must necessarily be a role for government. For the second category, however, I need a compelling public interest, or a decent cost/benefit ratio. Clearly, the issue of kids growing up without fathers has great cost to society, and just as clearly, no one else is combatting it effectively. There may be other websites out there, but clearly they're not working for shit. But, for me, I guess the direct cost/benefit ratio just isn't there in this case.
Here's where I'm coming from on the 47% or whatever the actual number is thing: it's primarily the result of a separate, serious politico-economic problem, not the problem itself or the cause of a problem.
Conundrum: We're far and away the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, and yet, we've somehow reached the point where a significant portion of the population doesn't make enough money to be included in the federal income tax roll, year over year, and real median wages literally have not advanced one iota in over 40 years. Which, obviously, you guys think leads to other problems due to freerider issues, etc. How do we deal with this?
I don't think doing nothing because it's not enshrined in the Constitution or because government is inefficient or whatever is the answer. Presumably no one would disagree that the last 30 years of public policy in the United States have included (i) lower income tax rates, especially at the higher margins, and (ii) significant increase in the burden of taxes on labor relative to capital, and that the effect has been an unprecedented increase in disparity of wealth amongst our citizenry. By the way, just yesterday, Larry Ellison bought Lanai. Not a bunch of land on Lanai. Lanai. One of the fucking Hawaiian islands is now entirely, 100% owned by one fucking person.
June 22, 2012 at 5:16 PM
Part 2 (again):
We will not reach the point where we bring more and more people back onto the federal tax roll by relying on the freer hand of the market. More of the same will lead to more of the same, and we'll get ever closer to Brazil in terms of our economic structure. And then the perception of freerider problem dtk mentions won't matter because all power, economic and political, will be concentrated in a select few, and eventually the rest of us will revolt or settle into banana republic status.
It also won't help to lower the cutoffs or drop exemptions in order to bring more of those households earning around $50k/yr to within the ranks. First of all, that's not doing anything regarding the underlying problem. They don't have enough to give, can't make much of an impact, anyway, and decreasing their post-tax revenue is contractionary to the economy and leads to further disparities in wealth distribution.
We could attempt to dramatically slash the budget, so that those who are paying in don't feel the limits of the social contract stretched and feel they're only paying for essential safety nets. Again, though, this has significant contractionary macro impact, which will disproportionately affect those on the lower half of the income scale.
What to do, then?
June 22, 2012 at 5:18 PM
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