I certainly share Burkett's outrage and sense of injustice at the coddling of 'breeders' in corporate America. When a company provides benefits that can only be used by people with children, the rest of us basically subsidize those benefits. When parents are allowed, even encouraged, to leave work early to watch their kids' soccer games, without any expectation that the work hours will be made up some other time, the rest of us are penalized by having to take up the slack. When weekend or overnight support activities are delegated to the childless becaue parents have to spend time with the kids, the childless are basically working on behalf of the parents and not on their own behalf.
Of course, the real crux of the problem is that workers in America are expected to work longer and longer hours for the same pay. We are expected to be tethered to pagers, cell phones, and mobile computers 24 x 7 at the same pay we would have received for a normal work week just a few years ago. That is the problem that needs to be solved. Framing this issue as childless v. breeders simply divides an already splintered work force. And, of course, that was the intention of the book. The appearance of Ann Coulter on the back cover praising this book to the skies was my first clue.
I agree with Burkett that federal subsidies to well-off parents is wrong. There is no reason that a childless person making, say, $30,000 should pay taxes to subsidize a parent making 6 figures. But, again, the real issue is the general erosion of the progressive tax system that worked so well for us in the fifties and sixties. The issue is not the specific ways and justifications for this subsidy of the wealthy by the poor, but the very existence of such subsidies. We need to return, as we barely started to do during the Clinton administration, to a system of taxation in which those who have benefitted most from our society should pay a correspondingly greater share of tax.
In all, Burkett's book manages to point out obvious flaws in the disparate treatment of parents and the childless by corporate America and by federal tax and subsidy policy. But by focusing narrowly on that issue she succeeds only in contributing to the larger problem of the right-wing federal money grab in which working Americans subsidize the very wealthy and thereby increase the already appalling wealth-gap.
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