Lambert’s got a post up about how we would change things if we had the power to do so. And do I have some ideas for you…………

(Quin- this is what i meant by a wiki think tank- jump in!)

1. Corporate Taxes: One of the most profound things I ever read was in a biography of the first socialist Swedish Prime Minister, Tage Erlander. Horribly paraphrased, his idea was that a company that could not afford to pay it’s employees a high enough wage that the employees could then pay income taxes, was a failure as a company. Business’s 1st and most important function for the state is the taxes it brings in, either through straight corporate taxes or the payroll taxes its employees pay.

We’ve fucked up that idea somehow and forgotten that both business and government work FOR the people, not the other way around.

So I would eliminate all corporate tax deductions except: living wage rate wages paid to employees (not including CEOs) and deductions for materials, etc that are made in the US. We shouldn’t be giving tax breaks on money spent or kept outside the country.

I don’t have any illusions that all employers would pay their employees enough to live on, but this would give employers who treat their employees fairly a competitive edge and an incentive to give raises.

2. Fair Trade: Once we’ve cleaned up our own abysmal pay problem, we allow free trade only with other countries that have living wage rules in place. For poor countries that are trying to enact progressive labor policies, we give liberal trade assistance to get them up to speed faster.

There is little likelihood that we can keep jobs in our country as long as there is cheap labor to be had around the world, but we don’t have to be complicit in the downward pay spiral. Countries that do not and will not set fair wage laws will be charged import tariffs on any goods and services brought into this country.

3. The Social Safety Net: I would eliminate Welfare and Unemployment and roll them into Social Security. The I would put in place a mandatory minimum income (indexed to inflation) that gives anyone whose income falls below the poverty line enough money to make up the difference. I would use the IRS and a person’s tax returns and eliminate the nanny state investigations of the poor. I would also include the ability use this safety net for parental leave or FMLA reasons.

4. Universal, quality childcare. Maybe using the French model so that families have a range of options from straight up preschool to subsidies for inhome care.

5. Universal higher education with subsidies to poor students for living expenses and extra classes, tutoring as needed. With the loss of manufacturing jobs there is no way to earn a living in this country without a college education and we are desperately in need of doctors, nurses, and other high skill professionals. The people to fill in these positions could come from the uneducated ranks with a little extra help.

That’s all I’ve got on a day with no coffee. What’s your big idea?

ETA- Oh Oh Oh DAMN me and my non caffeinated brain. I forgot bodily autonomy.
New constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to control your own body. This includes access to abortion but also an end to pointless drug laws. Free up the prison and put the money into treatment for those that choose it. I’d also structure it so that giving someone false information that results in bodily harm (say abstinence education or falsified drug research) is a criminal act and a violation of civil rights.

And for Lost Clown- Of course there would be universal healthcare.

If you listen to WOC talk about reproductive rights, you get a profoundly different view from the dominant white feminist talk that centers on abortion. For poor women and brown/black women, choosing to parent is seen as an affront to decent society.

There is a long and sad history of eugenics and forced sterilization of “undesirables” in this country. While white babies are considered a treasure, brown babies are considered a burden on society. You could even posit the idea that the insanely high prison rates for black and brown men is an underhanded attempt at keeping them locked up so that they cannot reproduce.

But there are more obvious racist and classist eugenics programs that are already in place. And several of them spring from Welfare reform. Ronald Regan started the idea of the Welfare Queen, a woman so diabolical that all she did all day was spread her legs so she could pop out more babies to suck on the government teat. Welfare reform decided to deal with this mythological beast by putting in blocks to additional aid when a woman already receiving assistance gets pregnant while on assistance. If you are a poor single mom on TANF and you get pregnant, you will not receive any additional money. And as I’ve written before, it’s not like TANF gives you all that much to begin with. In WA state the amount for a mother and child is $440 per month and it’s been the same for decades. And we’re one of the higher states. $440 doesn’t cover rent anywhere, it barely covers the cost of diapers and laundry soap. Add a 3rd person into this budget, and kids are spending a long time in a wet diaper simply because there is no more money for clean ones.

But it doesn’t stop with TANF. The same rules apply to housing grants.

Now part of Welfare reform did include provisions to provide post-pregnant women with birth control. But it’s only birth control. If during the course of a routine pelvic/papa smear to get you the pill they discover cancer- you’re SOL. They don’t actually care about keeping you healthy. They just care that you don’t bring anymore snot nosed brats into the world. And don’t you forget it.

Besides- we all know that birth control is infallible. Right?

Very few states have figured out that it is cheaper to pay for abortions for poor women than it is to not pay for them. Washington is one of them. If you walk into a Planned Parenthood in WA state to take a pregnancy test, and you are poor, they help you apply for Medicaid. If, during the application process you tell them that you want to have an abortion, the application is speeded up. But you still get Medicaid, temporarily, whether you decided to parent or not. As soon as you are not pregnant either via birthing or abortion, you lose all medical coverage except for birth control.

Personally- I think having the option of abortion is a good thing. And it’s one of the things the WA state does right. But for a majority of states, abortion is not covered by Medicaid. As a poor woman you have the choice of finding a way to pay for it yourself (upwards of $400 for an early procedure, substantially higher the later you go- and remember that most women on Welfare receive less than $400 a month to begin with.) or having a baby. But if you choose to have a baby, you won’t get any additional money from the state. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t position. And that’s before we even get into personal choice.

I can guarantee you that no one would applaud a poor black woman’s choice to knowingly have a downs syndrome baby like Sarah Palin did. The first thing they would say is that she was trying to milk the government for extra money for the disabled kid. And the kind of hoopla surrounding Bristol Palin’s pregnancy would be changed to something about how young brown women are too lazy to get an education and opt out with pregnancy instead.

But if we really do believe in choice, then the poor have just as much right to choose parenthood as everyone else does. If we put a mandate that people can only have the number of children that they can afford right now, then the entire world would depopulate within a generation. In an ideal world, we would all get to parent only when we wanted to and with enough resources to raise healthy, well educated, future paragons of society. But this isn’t an ideal world. And pretending it can be isn’t much different from fundies thinking that they can brow beat everyone into heterosexual marriage where everyone stays virginal till the wedding night.

What we can do is provide the resources so that only women who want children have them, and that they have enough resources to raise their children without the violent punishment of increased poverty.