Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) on Wednesday night used one of Vice President Joe Biden’s decades-old op-eds against him, reading aloud Biden’s lamentation that expanded tax credits for child care would subsidize “the deterioration of the family.”
I’m really not sure what point she thought she was making. That he was fighting for child care for families that couldn’t afford it, but wanted to make sure the money was not spent on those who could afford it? Yeah, sounds horrible. Good grief.
This was a cheap shot by Gillibrand
Biden’s record on women is solid.
He was right to retort
“Only thing different is you are running for President!”
As a woman I have no issue with Biden. In terms of families.
He is a traditional male BUT he allows all women, even his spouses to DO HER!
I like that. I can see being traditional as his spouse & catering while at same time having MY individuality to pursue MY goals.
That is the mark of a SECURE man,
I repeat, cheapshot.
Made Gillebrand look petty in my book.
I don’t hold this one against Joe. Times change. Situations change. The op-ed is nearly 40 years old.
Who the hell cares? She is not going to get the nomination. She is just digging crap up from decades ago and hoping it will hurt Biden even if it does not help her.
Yep!
She made no points.
In fact, blew back in her face.
Go sit down & stfu Gillebrand.
Joe has consistently been an advocate for ALL women choose to do.
In or outside the home.
I applauded when he said “both my wives worked”
Yesss!
Biden won that exchange.
The headline is much worse without the accompanying Op-Ed.
It’s still problematic though. His argument seems to be that couples that really love their children ought to stick to one income and raise the child in the home. Well, except the poors, of course. They on the other hand should get their lazy butts off welfare and go clean some toilets.
This does not sound as an objection to spending money on families who can afford childcare. This sounds as an objection to women working when work is not a financial necessity.
P.S. Times change, people change – if he changed that is OK with me.
That’s been a pretty common attitude for a long time. To be cynical about it - if cooking,cleaning, dressmaking and childcare are women’s work that emasculates men and ladies should cultivate genteel hobbies and not strain their delicate constitutions then who does the cooking, cleaning, dressmaking and childcare in wealthy households? Poor women. Black women. Immigrants. The very fact that they work outside the home for pay mean that they are not “ladies”
This is utterly stupid. Children need time with a parent, lots of it. Childcare is not a substitution for that. Poorer families may need two incomes but richer families can sacrifice the time of a parent to provide more attention to the child. This is not rocket science. It’s not even outdated. Societal notions and some practical realities of 40 years ago did mean that the additional time with the children was generally filled by the mother. This is not Biden’s fault. The idea that modern women can just “lean in” and do it all is snake oil. In 40 years we have learned there is need to time off from careers to raise children. We have also learned that men can do an adequate job at this as well. A child with very limited access to a parent is not a good thing. More children in childcare is not a good thing. Help with childcare is a good thing for those who can least afford it and most require it. Gillibrand is simply desperate and comes across as such. Biden was trying to find a compassionate position that was also fiscally responsible. The time to debate it was 40 years ago. He has an excellent track record with women’s rights and it’s time for Gillibrand to bring the debate to this century.
There is a difference between saying that tax dollars shouldn’t subsidize wealthy families, and saying such subsidies are “subsidizing the deterioration of the American family”
Its pretty clear that he was saying “women should stay home and take care of the kids.” Just because he frames it as “rich women should stay home”, its no less misogynist.
The fact that he had to be dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledge it was wrong, rather than admitting it straight off, strongly suggests he doesn’t really have a problem with the “a woman’s place is in the home” idea. (Unless, of course, is HIS wife would who have told Biden to get stuffed if he tried to keep her from working).
Biden’s record on women is solid if you choose to ignore and erase from your memory his absolute hanging out to dry of Anita Hill during his chairing of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. And all the wing tip shoes still lodged in his posterior from the right feet of Orrin Hatch, John Danforth, and Arlen Spector.
Op Ed writers often don’t have control over the headline used for their articles.
That said, the idea that day care centers represent an abdication of family responsibility if a family is making $88,000 per year (the today’s dollars figure given by the TPM article) means that he is suggesting someone, presumably the mother, should be staying home and not pursuing a career. That is NOT a friendly attitude towards women and it it wasn’t in 1981 either. It implies that women in middle class families should stay home and forgo careers if they have children or, if they want careers, they shouldn’t have children. It’s the “you can’t have it all” argument that was popular back then and it is as much bullshit then as it is now.
He had the opportunity to say his ideas on this have changed and he didn’t.
So, yes, he may in a general sense be very supportive of women but he is of a generation that still harbors traditional views of women’s roles and his own positions in the past were not really progressive and perhaps really haven’t changed that much. I don’t feel inclined to take that chance.
I don’t know how else to interpret this.
And, by the way, saying that he voted for the Iraq war because he was lied to by Bush and Cheney (and that they were only doing this to provide pressure to allow inspectors back in) is a pretty flimsy defense. It was f***ing obvious to anyone paying attention that they were lying in the run-up to the war. The reason Saddam Hussein ejected the inspectors to begin with was the increasingly bellicose rhetoric from the Bush administration. *Bush and Cheney et al wanted a war and concocted a transparently false rationale and took other steps to make sure it happened. There was no mistaking this - if he really believed their bullshit then he was really a “Pollyanna”.
And this is another place that Trump could hit him. Trump claims (without any evidence) that he opposed the war (but the only evidence of this comes well after the invasion) - but he has said it enough that a lot of people will believe him. He can claim that Biden was wrong on invading Iraq. - just as he did with Hillary Clinton (I believe he did).
I will support him if he becomes the candidate but I cannot support him as a primary candidate.
*Paul Wolfowitz famously let slip that the only reason they seized on the WMD rationale was that it was the only thing they all agreed on as a reason for war.
It’s a complicated subject and it involves class distinctions as well as gender distinctions.
And remember that Biden was a single parent, too, after his wife died.
What he could have pointed out last night: When he wrote that article back in 1981, men were less willing and much less able to take time to care for their children. If they are more willing and more able today, that is a good thing; and more progress is needed.
Yes.
If Wiki is correct - US Reps made $60,662 in 1981 which is $178,000 now per the BLS CPI inflation calculator (https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=40000&year1=198101&year2=201906); the midpoint of the range in the op-ed is $40,000 which is $117,000 now. Those limits are high and it is perfectly reasonable to argue against them. If Gillibrand thinks this is a clever gotcha shot at Biden, either she, or her staff, are dim. She should follow Swalwell’s example and cut her losses before she hurts her reputation further and before anyone asks her why she risked tanking the economy when she was one of 63 Dems who voted with 108 Republicans against the bailout bill in 2008.
That vote may have been popular in her reddish purple CD and I suspect she had a pass from Pelosi, but it demonstrates the opposite of good judgement and courage.
To be fair - the range translates into $88,000 to $147,000. The most recent (2018) median income in the US for a family of 4 is $60,336. So the range is 145% to 243% of median income. In my business of affordable housing, federal government subsidies are limited to 80% of median income and even then there is not enough to help everyone who qualifies.
That is an expensive entitlement no matter how you cut it. Not sure if Gillibrand or her staff are innumerate or if they were counting on the public and punditry to be innumerate but this is pretty basic math.
Every time I see and especially hear Gillibrand, my loathing of her grows…
If we review people we’ve encountered in our lives, first hand, I think we can all find someone who has asked the government (state, local or federal) to fund something that they could perfectly well afford. Frequently that someone has even bragged about it. Trump has done this, not that he should be an example. What Biden was saying back then was that it’s wrong to encourage such behavior and I agree with him. His article wasn’t about keeping women out of the workplace at all, and it does not speak well of Gillibrand to imply that it does.
Gillibrand already has a lot to explain in her own life. 'Can’t wait until her Al Franken take down comes back to bite her in the butt. But that may also be why she is so far under water in nomination process.