A refundable Caregiver Tax Credit speaks to all who want to achieve a more human-centered society in the 21st Century: parents or other primary caregivers, underpaid caregiving professionals, adults who need care, women who do not receive comparable pay for comparable work, and all who are concerned about how we live as a people. It speaks to federal, state, and local governments through job creation and other multiplier effects that bring in revenue. It enhances civil society as it bridges the gap between work and family.
Caregiving is as essential to human life as land, water or air. It is as important as paying jobs at McDonalds, Ebay or Boeing. Without caregivers, no one would be alive today. No one. Caring work within families is an essential component of economic, social, and political well-being. It is largely unacknowledged, and as work, usually unpaid. Yet, from the moment caregivers "leave home" for the marketplace, the former nurturing work is extracted from the nation's economic resources by way of daycare centers, fast food, nursing homes, etc.
Families of blood or choice are the building blocks of community. Optimal nurturing tends to occur within families and ideally produces happy, healthy, active, engaged children (society's "replacement parts") and preserves the dignity of adults in need of ongoing care. People who choose to give care full or part-time, need the means to survive. Caregivers need productive choice to decide rationally, when or whether to enter or leave market (paying) jobs e.g. whether to give care directly or purchase "mother" substitutes.
The home caregiver option means less or no paid work. Either way families pay. Society can ill afford to ignore their need for recompense. The right to make caregiving decisions in the best interests of the family ought to extend to rich and poor alike.
The nation gets ahead every time a caregiver stays put even for just one day. Estimates of U.S. savings resulting from home caregiving to frail elderly parents or disabled or dying family members were pegged at $257,000,000,000 in 2002. If caregiving were not done within families of blood or choice, the cost to society of substitute care would be immense. A fully refundable Caregiver Credit would set us on a political trajectory toward "just distribution" and be cost effective.
Advantages of The Caregiver Credit
- It is 'mommy neutral,' applying equally to at-home and employed mothers and other caregivers.
- Caregivers tending to the needs of older adults are a large and growing part of the population that will increase as baby boomers' aging parents become needy, followed in mere decades by their own aging concerns. This group has and will continue to have substantial political clout.
- If the Caregiver Credit were offered at a reasonable level, the potential for community-based reforms to the service delivery system for families with children and adults in need would expand exponentially.
- Its range of appeal is inter-generational, gender and sexual preference neutral, class, ethnicity, ability, and race balanced, and multi-partisan.
- Caregiver Tax Credits can be implemented at federal, state, and/or local levels, commensurate with varying fiscal needs and levels of consensus.
The New Economy has profound implications less job security, more time between paying jobs, more hours of formal education, more involvement in politics, more financial investment skills, more expertise in health insurance coverage and administration. Some argue, implausibly, there should also be more time for child rearing. Even functioning at superhuman capacity, the day remains 24 hours. Faster-smarter-better works to produce things, but it still takes 18 or so years to raise kids successfully. We all come into the world in need of care and we all leave the same way. Robots may soon be able to sweep our floors, but when will they be able to teach our kids ethics or comfort the dying? Get involved, now. Sign our email list or visit www.caregivercredit.org.
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