Lies Parents Tell Themselves About Why They Work
Few topics are as important--and involve as much self-deception and dishonesty--as finding the proper balance between child-rearing and work
For other women, having a husband at home would provoke jealousy over time their husbands got to spend with the kids. "My husband kids me every so often saying 'I'd love to be Mr. Mom and stay home,' " says Mary Beth Backof, a partner with Price Waterhouse LLP, who is quoted in I Work Too, by Cathy Feldman. But she insists: "We both work or no one works. I couldn't handle all the extra fun [he'd] be having. I don't know if I could deal with me being the only one who worked."
Lie #5: High taxes force both of us to work When 86 percent of parents in a survey last year said that cutting taxes would make it easier to raise their kids, Republican strategists smiled. As hard-pressed voters come to connect tax burdens with "family values," the GOP sees an opportunity to recast the fiscal debate on its own terms. At least that's what rising Republican star and budget chief John Kasich hopes as the budget wars heat up. He is determined to link balanced budgets and tax cuts more directly with flesh-and-blood family concerns.
As Kasich, who increasingly shows grander ambitions than being the nation's bookkeeper in chief, puts it, "The single biggest problem we have in the country today [is that] you've got to have two people working, and this has had the most profound impact on our culture." As an answer, the GOP is working to bring back the days when two-earner couples were an option, not a necessity. Rep. Peter Hoekstra makes the connection to taxes. Thanks to "reckless" Democratic spending, he says, "one person is going to work to support the family, the other person has to work to support government." Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson thinks the two-earner lament can bridge the GOP's factions, appealing to social conservatives who want moms to stay home and to antitax supply-siders. "There's an emotional reaction to this whenever we test it," says GOP pollster Frank Luntz. The biggest reaction comes from married women, which suggests that this pitch could help narrow the GOP's infamous gender gap.
There is only one problem with this analysis: The charge that liberals have taxed mothers into the workplace doesn't stand up. The share of married women (with and without children) who work has soared, but mostly, experts say, this is because of better opportunities, pay, and schooling. The total tax bite on the average family has changed little in 20 years; income tax rates have gone down, but payroll taxes have gone up.
The biggest tax change, in fact, was the drop in marginal rates facing wealthy stay-at-home wives in the 1980s, whose first dollar of earnings had been taxed on top of their husband's 50 percent or higher rate. But, as University of Southern California Prof. Edward McCaffery explains in Taxing Women, the tax cut sent well-off wives rushing into the job market--exactly the effect that supply-side economists would have predicted, and exactly the opposite effect of what social conservatives had hoped for.
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