Thanks
I agree that it takes a family, not a village. I always thought that was a stupid phrase...
Anyway...I was just mentioning that families DO pay a lot for health care, and that perhaps doing something on that front may also help.
I know that when I was working at the hospital, I was making ten dollars an hour, and I still couldn't afford the health care they offered. It was sixty dollars a paycheck, AND had a $350 deductible. I don't get $350 worth of sick...the only major thing I've had to do with hospitals in the past, say, ten years, was my pregnancy. I just don't often get sick. But what about my husband, or my daughter? If they got really sick and required even an emergency room visit, it'd probably take almost my whole check to pay it, because I can't afford insurance. That's ridiculous. I once had a migraine so bad that I had to leave work, and they made me go to the hospital. For them to take my temp and pulse, and give me one little pill, it cost me $267. That's ridiculous. So even if I'd HAD insurance, it wouldn't have paid for it, because there was a $350 deductible.
And then there's the marriage penalty, which makes absolutely NO sense to me.
http://www.concordcoalition.org/fede...gepenalty.html
I don't understand why a household in which two people must work to make ends meet is taxed at a higher rate than two single people living together who make the same amount as the married couple. The tax should be the same. The marriage penalty is actually a discouragement to getting hitched, especially if you want to have children. As we all know, kids aren't cheap. They talk about how they believe that having people be married would result in fewer public assistance cases; It seems to me, though, that if married couples got more of their money back, instead of having it taken by the government, that THAT would reduce the number of people who rely on such public assistance programs as WIC and LaChip.
Having people get married, or having them go to counseling in the hope that they stay married, isn't going to help them out of poverty if they're penalized monetarily by doing so. Lots of couples fight about money. The marrige penalty probably doesn't help that, and no amount of counseling will change the fact that the penalty exists.
I'm all for marriage...just ask my husband
. I was raised in a single family home myself. I met my father when I was around 21 or so, and to be honest, I'm glad I grew up without him. He was a major flake, and probably would have been a bad and/or disruptive influence on our family had he stayed. My mother raised me well, I think. It might have been nice to have had a father around, but since he wasn't, I can't miss something I never had, and no influence is better than a bad/disruptive one. Not to mention the fact that not all single parents were ALWAYS unmarried. Some may be divorced or widowed.
And I'm all for couples going to counseling, if necessary, to help them work out their problems. But a counselor can't help you work out your money problems, and going to a counselor won't make those problems disappear. I'm not saying that his idea is a bad one. I think that low-cost counseling is a damn good idea...I'm just pointing out that it's not quite the magic bullet I think he's hoping it will be. Poverty isn't necessarily caused by not being married, especially if being married actually takes MORE money out of your pocket.
Sidhe