It just amazes me that people keep electing people like this.
“Republicans Think This ‘Paid’ Family Leave Plan Is a Part of a Social Safety Net
What if you looted your retirement fund so you could afford to have children?
Senator Mike Lee, the konztitooshunal skolar from Utah, and my new old friend, Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, have come up with an idea, and it’s not just any idea. No, sirree, bob. It is an idea that is the quintessence of the conservative Republican concept of a social safety net.
Yes, dear friends, it’s that bad. Let them tell you about it. From CBS News:
‘Republican Senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee are unveiling a new proposal for paid family leave. The Cradle Act would allow new parents to tap into their Social Security savings, and later delay their retirement, to take paid time off after the birth or adoption of a child.
“I think most people would look at this as an opportunity that they might not otherwise have, an opportunity to benefit from payments that they’ve been making already for years,” Lee told CBS News chief congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes.’
This couldn’t be any more Heritage Foundationish if Jim DeMint himself came out of retirement, stripped naked, and rubbed it all over with bacon fat. By this plan, parents would be encouraged to…wait for it…rob their own Social Security to pay for child care. In other words, according to Mike and Joni, they are proposing to give you paid family leave that you pay for!
Not only that, but their proposal is also a backdoor way to get people to believe that Social Security is some sort of government benefit for them to use however they want, and not a social insurance program into which they paid their own money. That thinking leads inevitably to the notion of privatizing the whole program, which only has been a Republican goal for over eight decades.
But sub rosa shenanigans aside, this proposal is breathtakingly cynical. Lee and Ernst and every other Republican who is neither Louie Gohmert nor Matt Gaetz looked at the results last November and realized that the gender gap now more closely resembled the Hellespont, and that American families were looking around the world and seeing all those countries with actual paid family leave and asking that essentially American question, “Me some too, yes?”
Already, Senator Professor Warren has proposed a whopping new program to provide actual paid family leave, and to fund it with a wealth tax on the most pluto-y of the country’s plutocrats. All of this is enough to throw Republican thinkers like Ernst and Lee—to say nothing of their donor class—into a panic. They needed to find…a Republican alternative.
Voila! Another dead fish that’s going to lie there on the floor of the House of Representatives until it stinks so much that somebody throws it away.
It just amazes me that people keep electing people like this.
“Republicans Think This ‘Paid’ Family Leave Plan Is a Part of a Social Safety Net
What if you looted your retirement fund so you could afford to have children?
Senator Mike Lee, the konztitooshunal skolar from Utah, and my new old friend, Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, have come up with an idea, and it’s not just any idea. No, sirree, bob. It is an idea that is the quintessence of the conservative Republican concept of a social safety net.
Yes, dear friends, it’s that bad. Let them tell you about it. From CBS News:
‘Republican Senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee are unveiling a new proposal for paid family leave. The Cradle Act would allow new parents to tap into their Social Security savings, and later delay their retirement, to take paid time off after the birth or adoption of a child.
“I think most people would look at this as an opportunity that they might not otherwise have, an opportunity to benefit from payments that they’ve been making already for years,” Lee told CBS News chief congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes.’
This couldn’t be any more Heritage Foundationish if Jim DeMint himself came out of retirement, stripped naked, and rubbed it all over with bacon fat. By this plan, parents would be encouraged to…wait for it…rob their own Social Security to pay for child care. In other words, according to Mike and Joni, they are proposing to give you paid family leave that you pay for!
Not only that, but their proposal is also a backdoor way to get people to believe that Social Security is some sort of government benefit for them to use however they want, and not a social insurance program into which they paid their own money. That thinking leads inevitably to the notion of privatizing the whole program, which only has been a Republican goal for over eight decades.
But sub rosa shenanigans aside, this proposal is breathtakingly cynical. Lee and Ernst and every other Republican who is neither Louie Gohmert nor Matt Gaetz looked at the results last November and realized that the gender gap now more closely resembled the Hellespont, and that American families were looking around the world and seeing all those countries with actual paid family leave and asking that essentially American question, “Me some too, yes?”
Already, Senator Professor Warren has proposed a whopping new program to provide actual paid family leave, and to fund it with a wealth tax on the most pluto-y of the country’s plutocrats. All of this is enough to throw Republican thinkers like Ernst and Lee—to say nothing of their donor class—into a panic. They needed to find…a Republican alternative.
Voila! Another dead fish that’s going to lie there on the floor of the House of Representatives until it stinks so much that somebody throws it away.
We repeat—paid family leave that you pay for!
Brilliant. Just dead fcking brilliant.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26801271/paid-family-leave-mike-lee-joni-ernst-republicans-social-security/