Posted on 08/30/2007 5:12:57 PM PDT by Lorianne
WASHINGTON - New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a divorced, billionaire dad, said Tuesday that unwed fathers increase poverty and the government should take steps to get them back with their families.
The potential presidential candidate who maintains he's not outlined his prescription to fighting poverty in a speech at the National Press Club.
The mayor said welfare reform in the 1990's was driven largely by pushing single poor mothers into the workforce, but that to further reduce poverty, government must now turn its attention to fathers by withholding tax refunds from those who don't pay child support and increasing tax credits for low-income parents.
"Fathers have been missing from the table," said the mayor, a divorced father of two who made a fortune creating an eponymous financial data firm. "We have to do more to connect fathers to jobs and to their families."
Bloomberg wants to broaden eligibility for the earned income tax credit, or EITC. The mayor wants to make more single tax filers eligible for the credit, raising the income ceiling for the credit from $12,000 a year to $18,000.
He also called for an end to the so-called "marriage penalty" for the credit, which offers less money to married people than singles.
Making those changes, he argued, would push more low-income fathers back to their families, resulting in less poverty.
In New York, Bloomberg's changes would affect nearly half a million people. Nationwide, it would make 10.5 million newly eligible for the tax credit, at a cost of about $8.5 billion to the government.
The mayor argued it is time to experiment with new ways to reduce poverty, including a novel effort he has launched to pay city students for passing tests or good attendance, and pay others to go to the doctor.
Bloomberg said the idea, based on a similar effort in Mexico, is worth trying, even if it fails.
"You have to be willing to stick your neck out, I think, on policies where results are unknown. I don't know whether this program will work," he said.
Yep, and a stopped clock is right twice a day.....
No, really? Pat Moynihan tried to point out in 1965 that welfare laws requiring the absence of a father in the home for the mothers to receive welfare checks would be disastrous for the families. He was called a racist and everything else, but time has proven him more than right.
There is very little incentive for Jack to move back in with Jill. We could probably write a book about all the reasons a couples are encouraged to stay apart.
Political correctness destroys the dialog required for basic problem solving. These problems will go on forever because we cannot address the situation.
Incorrect usage, although a common mistake in term. - The person is eponymous, not the thing.
Sorry, couldn't resist a jab at those so called "professionals" who use words that they really don't understand.
And of course fathers are needed for a functional family but America hasn't been teaching that for the past untold years.
One day, socialist family-destroying poverty producing welfare laws will be universally viewed with the same contempt as Jim Crow laws, or slave laws of the antebellum period. What bothers me is wondering why people don't revolt against them now. If there was a whites only water fountain somewhere, or a bus that refused to let blacks ride in the front, there'd be confrontations everywhere. But laws passed by white liberals requiring dads to be out of the house, and not a peep. I don't understand that. You'd think that taking the white man's welfare money and living in squalor would be seen as selling out to the white man, yet getting an education and rising out of poverty is, as is maintaining an intact family. The dynamic is evil at work. And it will continue because it merely involves money. Where white water fountains required whites to beat up the black who whished to drink there (an ugly spectacle), there is much less visible disruption to simply cutting off the flow of checks should the man try to step up and do the right thing.
More government money won’t solve the “unwed father” problem. More government money is why the women wouldn’t marry in the first place.
Less welfare at all, or none for never married women, would be more fair. Either she marries a man (father of baby or not) and receives some subsidies or puts it up for adoption.
“Political correctness destroys the dialog required for basic problem solving. These problems will go on forever because we cannot address the situation.”
Well put.
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