So you’re saying you want to pay women to stay home and raise kids?
How exactly does that work?
If a woman gets and stays married and to stay home and raise kids, she gets a social security benefit equal to 1/2 of her husband’s benefit for the rest of his life. After he croaks, she gets a survivor’s benefit equal to the husband’s benefit. She gets that even if she never worked for pay a day in her life.
We’re talking retirement age folks here, not paying salaries to 20yo housewives. SS is wage-graded, you’ve got a starting rate and it goes up from there. But working women (my generation) are more likely to have been paid less for their work and either quit the workforce or reduced work hours (or career) later in life during prime earning years to take care of disabled children, parents, parents’parents, which wimmen are expected to do. By doing so, they penalize themselves SS-base wise. If the base SS for a man who earned $10-$15/hr is $X, then the base for a woman working $7.75-$9.00/hr should also be $X. This is not to say that those earning $100K should only get $X. They get $Z = $X plus whatever upper bracket they’ve earned to the max. But let’s not give women a $600 SS check (half of which goes to medicare) and a man a $1200 SS check (a quarter of which goes to medicare) and think we’re being equitable.