From: orville%weyrich@uunet.uu.net (Orville R. Weyrich)
Subject: Re: Why do Americans get so little vacation time?
Reply-To: uunet.uu.net!weyrich!orville
Organization: Weyrich Computer Consulting
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 92 21:52:22 GMT

In article <greg.718083871@saltydog> greg@saltydog.dpsi.com (Gregory R. Travis) writes:
>In <BvIItA.HK7@world.std.com> ttraub@world.std.com (Terry Traub) writes:
>
>But really, anyone, male or female, or a family as a whole must
>perform basic domestic chores to maintain a home and those chores are most
>certainly work.  No one is arguing with that.  On the other hand, the
>performance of those chores often requires real cash to buy
>food, cleaners, lawn ornaments, etc.  Few families live on farms these
>days and so they must buy the real goods with which to make a home
>and to survive.

But the point is that many of the chores that the domestic engineer did in the
past are now contracted out -- e.g., how  many folks pluck their own chickens
these days? Instead of doing these things themselves, they use thier cash
to pay someone else to do it for them, or to buy an appliance that makes
it easier. This frees up their time for other activities, but increases their
need for cash. So they use their newly freed time to worki outside the  home.

Economic theory suggests that this increased exploitation of "comparative" 
advantage" will result in an increase in the standard  of living, as compared
to the domestic engineer staying at  home and being a jack/jill of all trades.

The problem is that  what you do for yourself at home is not taxed, but if you
work to earn money to pay a specialist to do something, you get taxed on
it, thus reducing the advantage. Why do women prefer to work and pay
taxes and pay someone else to do much of what the home-makers of earlier time
stayed at home and did without pay or taxes? Doing this grunge-work at home is
simply not as rewarding, and even after taxes, there still remains  some
comparative advantage.

>Unfortunately the presence of only one breadwinner is no longer sufficient
>to buy these things in the quantities or quality of the past.  In the
>"traditional" family BOTH heads are now forced to work both to gain 
>simple capital to work at home in the domestic sphere.

Not true -- if you want to maintain the standard of living of the past, you
can probably get by just fine with a single "bread-winner" plus a full-time
"home-maker".

>Bush's mean-spirited and cynical veto of the Family Leave bill makes
>this even more acute as families wishing or forced to expand are faced with
>a number of rather unattractive choices:
>	1.  A minimum sick leave for the mother during birth and the
>	    maintenance of salaried surrogates afterwards.
>	2.  The possible loss of the mother or father's job as they
>	    take an unpaid leave to care for the child.
>	3.  Indebteness or loss of savings so that one parent may have
>	    the priviledge of being an unpaid domestic engineer.

Personally, I see nothing mean-spirited or  cynical about it -- the  economy
simply has no resources to pay for this without eliminating some other
fringe-benefit. Personally I would like to see direct tax credits to families
to pay for lost earnings due to maternity leave for the first two children
born to a woman. And I would pay for it by castrating/sterilizing those on the
public dole that have more than two children.

>>It would be nice if the average family could exist on one person's
>>income; what's your solution?
>
>1.  Lowered educational requirements for all jobs and cash incentives to
>    those who choose to and are successful in entering the labor pool
>    permanently after their sixteenth year of schooling.

Pay folks to drop out?  Declare that they don't need to know so much for their
jobs? Sounds like the dang-fool state legislature that considered passing a
law stating that the value of pi was the ratio of two small integers?

>2.  National Health Care.

Paid for by whom?
You have to pull the resources to pay for this out of some other part of
the economy, which will lower some other aspect of the standard of living.

>3.  Paid family medical and crisis leave of up to one year.

Paid for by whom?
You have to pull the resources to pay for this out of some other part of
the economy, which will lower some other aspect of the standard of living.

>4.  Depopulation through tax credits and direct payment to families
>    choosing to have one or fewer children.

That would probably cause more problems down the road than it solves now.
We should actually aim for a STABLE population  -- baby booms and busts  
cause all kinds of trouble with providing the goods and services  required
by the changing population demographics. Not to mention the effect on the
social security system.

Every family should have the right to two children. And they should be taxed
heavily on more than three -- or castrated if they are on the public dole.

>5.  Penalties on companies that relocate overseas if they have received
>    and exploited tax or other government incentives to build plants
>    in the United States.

Good idea. But the implentation would be a legal nightmare.

>6.  Mandatory minimum five week vacation.

Paid for by whom?
You have to pull the resources to pay for this out of some other part of
the economy, which will lower some other aspect of the standard of living.

>7.  The abolition of tenure in the education system.

I'm not sure what ax you are grinding here, but I don't think that tenured
professors make up a significant proportion of the U.S. work force.

>8.  Tax advantages for the single-breadwinner family vs. double-income
>    homes.

There already is a tax penalty for both members of a marriage to earn
wages  -- pushes them into  a higher tax bracket, plus the amount of
social security taxes  paid before the cutoff point is doubled.


orville

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Orville R. Weyrich, Jr.                        Weyrich Computer Consulting
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