Paul Ryan Said Women Should Have More Babies
Paul Ryan's recipe for a robust economy: Have more than babies
Firm Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Printing)
2017 draws to a close. "Feminism" has been declared the discussion of the year. And House Speaker Paul D. Ryan has but urged women to have more than babies for the good of the state.
A joke? An outtake from "The Handmaid's Tale"? Alas, neither. At his weekly news briefing Thursday, Ryan (R-Wis.) suggested that the most important way to shore upwards the economy was for Americans to take bigger families.
"This is going to be the new economic challenge for America: People. . . . I did my part, but we need to have higher birth rates in this state," he said equally part of a riff on how Republicans planned to tackle entitlement reform in 2018. "We have something like a 90 per centum increase in the retirement population of America just only a 19 percent increase in the working population in America. Then what do nosotros have to exercise? Be smarter, more than efficient, more than technology . . . still going to demand more people."
And we all know whose task that is.
It's not that Ryan is wrong, exactly. The United states is in the centre of a baby bust, perhaps one more dire than nosotros realize. Last year saw a record-depression fertility rate, and an even sharper drop is predicted for 2017. To blithely instrumentalize the miracle of life in homage to the House speaker: We'll need more bodies to proceed the economy humming.
Fifty-fifty and so, Ryan's comments are shocking in their hypocrisy, not to mention obliviousness — at best — to the context in which they'll exist received.
To exist clear: The prospect of having more than children is not necessarily off-putting to women. True, Ryan's comments feel particularly ill considered at this moment, given the creepy Congressional Surrogacy Surprise that emerged from the part of former House Republican Trent Franks (Ariz.) last week. And it is more than a petty insulting to allude that to "practise their part," women need to prevarication back and think of America. That said, research has shown that many women in the United states of america accept fewer children than they would like to accept and begin having them after than they would adopt.
But this suboptimal state of affairs is directly related to policies the speaker and his political party have pursued. If Ryan wants more babies to prop up the United states, mayhap he and the rest of the GOP should consider making it easier to live in America with 1.
The reasons for delaying family formation are ofttimes economic. When those of kid-bearing age spend their entire stagnant incomes on rent, debt and health care, the prospect of having a baby recedes into the distance. The event is most acute for women, who are often least able to beget housing, whose incomes are likely to sink after breaks for childbearing, and whose wellness risks increment with motherhood. (Maternal bloodshed is on the ascent in the Us, yet the GOP's proposed — and mercifully failed — wellness-care reform considered cuts to pregnancy-related benefits.)
Yet rather than promoting policies that might ease the economic pressure, Ryan and his political party are peddling a "taxation reform" bill that prioritizes fiscal favors for corporations, which cannot accept children, over everyday citizens who tin. And once passed, the pecker volition cripple our country's power to pay for the sort of safety cyberspace that could brand a new baby a crusade for commemoration rather than warning.
If nosotros must have taxation reform, why not at the very least implement a more effective child taxation credit that is fully deductible for those at the lowest income brackets? That would give those citizens generously contributing new "people" to our economy some support to help make ends meet. Or why not promote a real paid-leave proposal that encompasses both maternal and paternal exit, to make it easier to combine child care and work? The paltry provision attached to the bill is a gift for corporations, not parents.
Of course, peradventure Ryan does actually intendance about our demographic difficulties but doesn't want to become about fixing them through economic means. If and so, there is the obvious solution of liberalizing immigration, even so Republicans from superlative to bottom have refused to consider it.
When it comes downwards to it, in that location is a raft of policies that could help mitigate the problem of falling birth rates. The fact that they remain unimplemented suggests that perhaps Ryan hasn't "done his role" as well equally he thinks.
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/paul-ryans-recipe-for-a-robust-economy-have-more-babies/2017/12/15/dcd767b4-e1dc-11e7-89e8-edec16379010_story.html
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