President Obama announced a number of expensive taxpayer-funded initiatives in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, but Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly charged that many critics are overlooking the worst one of all – a deliberate effort by the government to drive women out of the home by subsidizing child care instead of providing tax relief.
“President Obama is the one waging a real war on women,” said Schlafly.
The legendary conservative activist noted that while Obama presented a laundry list of new entitlements and “free” handouts from the government, much of his rhetoric was vague. However, Schlafly says Obama was very specific in presenting new programs that would encourage both parents to work rather than allowing a mother to stay at home with her children.
In his address, Obama proposed tripling the existing child care tax credit “up to $3,000 per child, per year.” He called the benefit that would help pay child-care costs a “must-have.”
The Obama administration also had announced on Jan. 18 that it would raise the capital gains tax and use the funds to provide a “$500 second-earner credit to help cover the additional costs faced by 24 million families where both spouses work.”
The result would be government subsidies that push both parents into the workforce.
However, as Schlafly observed, Obama already revealed his real agenda on Halloween 2014 when he said: “Sometimes, someone, usually mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result. And that’s not a choice we want Americans to make.”
Schlafly, whose recently published book “Who Killed the American Family?” came out just days before she turned 90, said, “Democrats say it’s all about ‘choice,’ but allowing a mother to stay home with her children is apparently a choice that the people who constantly preach about tolerance are not willing to tolerate.”
Many establishment media outlets are largely celebrating Obama’s greater emphasis on subsidizing child care. Jessica Grose at Slate wrote, “This is an extremely important rhetorical shift – the move from child care as a mushy, emotional, frivolous extra, to a serious imperative.”
Atlantic Media’s publication Quartz enthused that “Obama is right” and suggested that “the lack of affordable child care may be the real reason why the glass ceiling still exists.”
And Amanda Oglesby at the Asbury Park Press calls the initiative “fantastic news” but says, “$3,000 isn’t nearly enough.”
Obama defended his policies because, in his words, “In today’s economy … having both parents in the workforce is an economic necessity for many families.”
Yet even though the president framed the issue as a way to help working families, Schlafly believes Obama is pursuing a larger agenda.
“The president has been very clear about his goal to get all wives and mothers into the workforce,” she said. “The result is that families become dependent on child care, which is now subsidized by the government. More importantly, if both parents work, a larger amount of money is available for taxation and the government can bring in more revenue.”
The end result, she said, is that “families are less self-sufficient and the government is able to extend its financial base. What does Obama want in all this? He wants more money.”
According to Schlafly, these policies are not just immoral but short-sighted and financially costly.
For example, she said, the government “spends an outrageous amount of money in order to fix the ‘gap’ between high-achieving and low achieving students.”
“We were told for many years that the root of the problem was poverty,” she said. “But now we now that the best way to increase student performance is for students to live with both a mother and a father at home.”
Schlafly referred to a recent government-backed study led by scholars from Oxford and the University of London that “said that there was a ‘significant tendency’ for poorer behavior management among children from single-parent families and those brought up by unmarried mothers and fathers.”
The results of such policies are that governments and schools are increasingly taking on the traditional responsibilities of parents, even to the point of providing supper as well as lunch.
As Schlafly outlined in “Who Killed the American Family?” the collapse of the traditional nuclear family “has caused the dramatic rise in government spending.”
“The nuclear family doesn’t need government busybodies to tell them how to raise their children or spend their money, but when mothers have no husband or father of their children to provide for them, they turn to Big Brother Government.”
And most importantly, she maintains, “It was a killing, not an accident.”
Schlafly judges that Obama “likes the way things are going.” Therefore, the State of the Union was “no surprise.”
While Schlafly praised what she called the “very good” response of “fresh face” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, she does not see much hope that the “Boehner Congress” will muster much opposition on major issues.
More importantly, Schlafly believes that conservatives are missing the critical importance of Obama’s attempt to subsidize the destruction of stay-at-home mothers.
“No one seems to be talking about, even though this is driving so much of what is going on,” she said. “I hope more will.”
