Obamacare Might Free Women to Work Less and Stay Home With Their Families. Oh, the Horror!

More soccer dads, please.

Caught this story at TPM. It seems a noted feminist writer posted at the TPM Cafe her assessment of the CBO report that workers would opt to work less if they were freed to make such a decision because Obamacare offered them an avenue to health insurance and they don't have to remain wedded to a job they hate or don't need.

It doesn't take much imagination to realize that in America the person in a family that is most likely to make the decision to stay home would be Mom.

But the author, Leslie Bennetts, says there's a cost:

Studies consistently show that many women, if given the choice, will choose to work fewer hours in order to devote more time to their families. At the time, this often seems like a sensible response to the competing needs of jobs and children, particularly when exacerbated by the pressures of inadequate wages, expensive child care and inflexible workplace demands. If you ask women in the middle of their lives how the decision to sacrifice work for family has turned out, many will insist it was a good choice for them and their children.

But if you ask them again two or three or four decades later, they often give a radically different answer — one that is frequently accompanied by searing regret and a liberal helping of terror. It may take decades for the cost of giving up paid work to become fully apparent, but once it does, the picture can be bleak indeed.

Hey, Dad, that's more like it.

That really resonates with me. Beyond the individual choice that a woman faces, America as a country faces it, too. If we choose to carry on our traditions that place women below men in the workplace, we extend a key inequality out into the future. That's not good for our country, in my view, and it's not good for our families. As a dad who loved parenting, I'd say more Dad with the kids and a little less Mom would be good for families -- and pretty good for Mom, I'll wager.

To irritate conservatives on this question, let me repost a link from an earlier post of mine about parental equality in Sweden, something I witnessed personally last fall. Let the conservative heads begin to explode!

Here, though, is where conservative disingenuousness becomes exposed. They've cranked up the GOP Big Lie Machine to crush the Dems in the 2014 races and gleefully lie through their teeth about the CBO reports revealing that Obamacare is a job killer, killer I tell you!. It's not, and they know it.

The real hypocrisy is that if the report implies that more moms would quit the workforce to stay home with the kids, then isn't that the essence of conservative "family" values?

No, we don't need to talk about that. Who cares if a side benefit of Obamacare is that families are better served from a conservative point of view. It's much, much better to pound the lie! Obamacare is a job killer!

So, Moms, tell Dad to stay home for his share of the duties. It'll be good for you and good for the kids. Conservatives, we're on to you, so knock it off (which you won't).

Who cares if it's good for families. Obamacare is evil!