disingenuous

"Disingenuous" is a magical word. It allows you to call someone a liar without crossing an invisible line of unacceptable behavior. 

There is "disingenuous" criticism of the infrastructure bill for including things that are not infrastructure. Infrastructure is not just roads and bridges. Water, internet, and electricity are all vital infrastructure. 

There is one area of the bill that is more radical/revolutionary/controversial and calling it infrastructure is .... a new definition of the term. That said, the bill is actually called, The American Jobs Bill, and whether caregiving is infrastructure or not, it is essential to making it possible for people to return to work. 

A good discussion requires someone with knowledge, wisdom, and sensitivity. I am not that someone. 

I can share a little about the subject though. This is a picture of my grandmother working in Minneapolis. Her husband died in WWII, leaving her a single mother. When she was a maid she had a position where it was easy to take care of her baby and work. Later she was able to work at Sears Roebuck because she could enter my mother into an elementary school. But then my mother turned six, and the school let my grandmother know that my mother could not stay there next year, they were already letting her stay one year longer than the rules. 

There was no other place my grandmother could place my mother and get to in time after work. She left Minneapolis and went home to Montana. In theory my mother could go to her grandmother's after school, but from the movie I made of my grandmother, it sounds like she just went home and hung out with her friends as an early and very young latchkey child. This allowed my grandmother to continue to use her brand new education and work in a job that allowed them to have their own house. 

When and where my mother lived as an adult, I don't believe they even had formal childcare facilities. She used informal daycare, women taking care of children in their home. Informal daycare is unregulated and uninspected and untaxed. This is how most young US children and infants are cared for now as there was not enough formal childcare available before the pandemic and what was available was completely unaffordable for most. 

If my mother were alive she might disagree, but I only remember two times when the informal care was a problem. The second of the times my poor mother had a lousy Monday morning and was running late and for the first time did not wait to see us enter the trailer before leaving for work. The babysitter wasn't there, she had gone on vacation with her family and apparently not told my mother. I was in elementary school, I was probably six, and made the decision that I should skip the bus to take care of my toddler sister. Imagine my mother at work getting a call from the school because her daughter didn't show up, calling the babysitter and not getting through because she wasn't home and cellphones weren't invented yet, and having to get permission from her boss, and it was not a good workplace, to leave work to find her children. My mother then missed several more unscheduled days finding another place for her children. 

(For my part, I remember wanting confirmation that I'd made the correct decision in skipping school to care for my sister and that it was good that I'd spent my lunch money buying her food. :-) It probably broke my mother's heart a little bit more that I was asking that.)

Parents need childcare or they can't work. There was a woman this pandemic who was put in jail because she needed to work, she didn't have childcare, and in desperation she left the children alone. She should never have been put in that no-win situation. Putting her in jail and the children in foster care is about the dumbest outcome possible.

Childcare typically falls on women. If we want women to return to work, we need to make sure there are childcare facilities. 

Heather Cox Richardson wrote:
"The American Rescue Plan increased the Child Tax Credit from $2000 to $3600 for children under age 6 and $3000 for other children under age 18, offering monthly payments immediately, in advance of the 2022 tax filing season. The measure also provided $15 billion in expanded childcare assistance, and it increased food benefits (SNAP) by 15%.
Experts estimated that the American Rescue Plan could cut child poverty in the U.S. by more than half.
The administration’s American Jobs Plan continues the focus on children and their mothers as it sets out to shore up the caregiving economy. The coronavirus pandemic hit women particularly hard as women, particularly women of color, left the workforce to care for children when childcare centers closed. Women have lost 5.4 million jobs, nearly a million more than men. The American Jobs Plan would invest $400 billion in the caregiving economy; $137 billion in schools, early learning centers, and community colleges; $111 billion in clean drinking water; and $621 billion in transportation."

Whether childcare counts as "human infrastructure" or not, it is absolutely essential if we want women to return to the workforce. Given how necessary two incomes are, if one parent can't work, the families will be poor but if there is only one parent......

Congratulations, we made it through the week. It was a rough week, with the trial of Derik Chauvin continuing, a Black man killed by a cop who confused her taser with her gun, and a Black child killed by a cop. We had more mass shootings. We had good news too, and of course I had two bits of personal good news, but it was a tough week and we made it. Because we're awesome.