Reading a little item in our local alt-weekly, which details how day care subsidies have taken yet another hit in our county, I’m reminded of the many glowing NPR stories that I heard back in the 90’s about welfare reform. The idea, championed by some Republican governors as well as Democrats, was to subsidize daycare for uneducated single moms, who could then afford to work a job or go back to school.
Maybe that was just a dream or a flashback from an ill-timed experiment with Ecstasy. No matter, the Republicans aren’t pretending anymore, and even if the Democrats would like to do it, they aren’t trying very hard.
I always thought that subsidized day care was one of the few “bi-partisan” areas of agreement that made sense. Republicans could like it because it gets the lazy poors to work. Democrats could like it because they’re giving some tough love. It’s a win/win. Unfortunately, the last time anyone thought like that, Jodi Foster was playing Clarice Starling and Kurt Cobain was recording In Utero.
Southern Beale
Was joking with a friend about how the Republicans don’t like day care and his response was, “They oppose every word that ends in care. Except the word scare.” I thought that was apt.
Yatsuno
But but but…TAXES! SOCIALISM! INDOCTRINATION OF DA YOOTZ! Heard all of these as why day care centres are evil, not to mention you might encourage those uppity women to get out of the kitchen.
Belafon
But you’d be taking my hard earned money – OK, I’m not earning anything because I’m on Medicaid – ain’t noone ever done anything for me – but you would be taking it – and using it to help those lazy blah people.
/wingnut
About the only thing the left and right agree on now is that the right doesn’t want to run the country. The right’s just proud of that fact.
Southern Beale
Gummint sponsored socialized daycare paid for by good hard working American whites just encourages those slutty ladies to slut themselves around the projects instead of getting married and staying home to homeschool their kids and do the laundry like it says to in the Bible. If I have my Wingnuttia correctly, that is.
Suffern ACE
If women work, why would they get married? If you have a child out of wedlock, you should lose that child rather than try to support it.
Now we’d pay for those orphanages out of our tax dollars, but those are bastard children we’re talking about here.
Yatsuno
@Southern Beale: Durn you. You said it better than me. I’mma gonna go pout now. Or leave snide comments over at your place. :P
Marc
Except it encourages the wimmens to get out of the house, and we can’t have that.
Southern Beale
@Yatsuno:
Just shocking how well we both speak Wingnut.
slippy
@Yatsuno: I used to try to rationally respond to that kind of crap, but these days I’m so sick of people’s lazy, sloppy, shitty, stupid brains that I kind of fly off the handle when I realize I’m talking to a fucking bone-head moron. I just can’t be nice about it anymore. Stupid fucking people are stupid. End of story.
catclub
Anyone else hear the long NPR story on how Oklahoma (Oklahoma!?) has the most complete 4 year-old pre-kindergarten? I wonder if the OK GOP heard that and now wants to repeal.
Sooner?
Another Holocene Human
Daycare goes to these home day cares or even larger businesses largely staffed by low skilled, low income women (who are also typically fattity fat). It doesn’t have the sanctified gleam of Section 8 money which subsidizes well heeled slum lords who donate to local Republican candidates for office who promise to roll back burdensome regulation like the requirement to keep running hot and cold water in those bum’s units.
LanceThruster
I’m starting to understand that goppers see the underclasses as weeds to be hindered at any cost lest they spread.
It’s bad enough that certain elements rise above the historical preset limits to run the entire shebang (in their mindset) but if more of “them” prosper, our American way of life (of white privilege) is down the toilet!
LanceThruster
@Southern Beale:
STOP! – office belly laughs might get me in trouble!
xD
Roger Moore
The idea, as the Republicans understood it, was to use expanded daycare as an excuse to cut welfare, and then later turn around the break the deal by cutting the subsidized daycare. It’s classic bad faith bargaining tactics: negotiate for an immediate benefit in exchange for a long-term promise, and then go back on the long-term promise once enough time has elapsed that people don’t remember the original promise and you can claim you’re giving something for nothing.
gelfling545
Funds for daycare here in Erie County dried up last summer BUT they kept taking applications &, since the parent had to already be working to apply, their kids were already in daycare. The county chose not to publicize the lack of funds, however, leaving low income parents with sizable daycare bills they had been led to believe the County would help pay. My niece’s daycare provider finally tracked down a person in County Hall who told her all this after they waited and waited for the approval to come through that was never going to arrive. The nice lady at the County said they “figured it would get around by word of mouth”. Now the daycare, which was relying on these funds to make budget and the parent, now stuck with a much larger bill than anticipated (on a $10/hour salary) both have trouble.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
You weren’t imagining it. It really did happen. It may have been a shell game to get welfare reform and then also reneg on the daycare part, but that was the argument back then. Who needs daycare, though, when you’re pro child labor? Make the little fuckers work is their attitude these days.
Suffern ACE
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: yep. It’s part of the idea that we shouldn’t punish the children for the sake of shaming those no good parents who’d have jobs that paid well if they weren’t so (insertwhatever). The problem is that liberals tend to believe that other people believe that. That children shouldn’t be starving and should be in school instead. However, there’s far fewer out there that do believe that than we’d care to think about.
fuckwit
I have to stop reading this site, and political news in general, or I will lose all hope.
Anger is toxic. Anger and frustration and powerlessness are even more toxic. Hearing about this stuff is just not making me want to participate in… anything, really.
Rethugs are and have been trying to kill the poor. Your tag “fuck the poor” is a euphemism. They really are all about eugenics– slow, painful, decades-long, systematic murders of anyone who does not have money, education, a penis, or the correct skin color.
You have to really follow the “fuck the poor” thinking to its natural conclusion. What do they expect the people they hate so much to actually DO? Just go away? Well the only “away” is into the ground. The platform is really KILL the poor, and Jello Biafra had it right, over 30 years ago now.
rdldot
@Roger Moore: Yes. And multiply that to every other ‘reform’ that the GOP has offered. It’s always the same crap, over and over again.
RSR
Building prisons is more lucrative.
But at least the dems get to grift off education reform. But you need a pipeline of poor, under educated 5 years olds heading to the local public school.to make your ‘don’t look behind to curtain’ charter school seem a better alternative.
Lee
@catclub:
He’s like Beetlejuice. It has to be 3 times.
SOONERGRUNT, SOONERGRUNT, SOONERGRUNT!
Seanly
Subsidized day care? 27% of the country don’t even want to pay for roads & public schools.
Joel
If you’re a working family making less than say, 50K a year, daycare is brutal. If you don’t have family, you can gamble with an in-home daycare option, but the cheaper ones can be unclean, unsafe. Regulated daycare centers are expensive, as they should be, given the minimal staffing requirement and the need for something remotely resembling a living wage.
Mike G
subsidize daycare for uneducated single moms, who could then afford to work a job or go back to school.
Like Regan and the CA mental hospitals, the idea is to use the subsidies as a fig leaf to destroy the system. What remains is the punishment mentality without the assistance.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Republicans might have wanted the lazy poor losers to work in 1996, and some of them might still want them to work today, but overall, it’s a new kind of party. In truth, it’s less a political party today than some kind of organized sadism cult. They don’t really care whether poor people work at all any more; they just want to hurt them. I don’t pretend to even begin to understand it, but that’s what we’re dealing with. As always, the quintessence of this savagery was the Republican presidential debate in late 2011, when the audience cheered at the thought of some sick guy without insurance dying. That, right there, is the purest distillation of Republicanism in the early 2000’s.
Hunter
In the 1990s, there were still jobs. It’s harder to justify subsidized day-care so mothers can go to work when there’s no place for them to work.