The same people attempting to balance the budget on the backs of America’s poor and middle class were protesting not long ago that we couldn’t take away tax breaks from people making over $250,000 a year because they could hardly be considered rich in today’s economy. Yet somehow, public employees and teachers making – if you include benefits – about $70,000 a year are fair game to have their income reduced.
One argument made was that we couldn’t restrict the amount of obscene compensation the people on Wall Street, the ones who tanked our economy, receive because they would quit if we did and we’d lose their special talent. Yet we don’t seem concerned about losing the talent of good teachers if we force them to near poverty level in order to continue teaching.
The other argument I’ve heard made by some is that these bankers and stockbrokers had a contract guaranteeing them a specific compensation and to suddenly reduce it would leave them in the financial bind of not being able to pay debts they’d incurred based on that expected pay. So why does that same logic not hold true for union employees with a contract? Given how much we gave of our hard earned tax dollars to bail Wall Street out, those people took more of our money than any public union employee ever did.
But the real obscenity came for me when Congress moved to defund Planned Parenthood because it provides some abortion services while at the same time drastically cutting funds for low income health care for women and children and nutrition programs for low income children – in effect, just about every program that would help the poorest women and children in our society.
Rather than burdening the rich with helping to cut the budget deficit, we would balance it on the backs of those with the least power – poor women and children. And most especially, we would balance it on the backs of children who will be born into a life of poverty because their mothers had no choice.
There are proposals floating around in the conservative political world that would require a woman seeking an abortion to first see a sonogram of her fetus. The thinking is that the woman would be so taken aback by how beautiful the fetus is that she would not be able to go forward with an abortion.
So my question is how that same ultra cute fetus some politicians are so bound and determined to see born becomes an unconscionable burden on society once it emerges from the womb. It is no longer cute. It is another mouth to feed in a society that no longer feels it has the wherewithal to feed it. This group seems to want to see that every baby conceived is born and then wants nothing to do with or for that child afterwards.
In an ideal world, children would only be conceived within a setting in which the parents had carefully planned for the additional costs of child rearing and had the ability to care for the child. Too bad that world doesn’t exist. Teenagers get pregnant and have babies that they can’t support. Couples find themselves with an “oops” pregnancy that is beyond their means to handle. The current thinking seems to be that we force them to have the child while withdrawing all support they might need to provide the child with a healthy upbringing. Brilliant plan.
What I’d like to see is every group opposed to all abortion all the time offering food, health care, shelter and day care to every child born with a need for those services. For every Planned Parenthood clinic crippled in its ability to provide a full range of services to a woman in need, I want these groups to provide a place a woman can go to get the medical and nutritional care she’ll need for the child some would insist she bear. Because, quite frankly, if we want to get into a woman’s most private and personal space and force her to carry forward with an unwanted pregnancy, then we should be forced to admit some responsibility for the resulting child.
The current attempt to balance our budget on the backs of the poor and middle class is the very definition of obscenity. Have we really become that society?