Go to Work, Ladies! Your Kids Will Be Grateful
So what if you can’t have it all? Maybe your daughter can.
A new working paper by the Harvard Business School finds that daughters of working mothers are likely to be more successful in the workplace than their peers. Analyzing data on 50,000 people in 24 countries, researchers found these women are more likely to be employed, hold supervisory positions and earn more money than women who grew up with stay-at-home mothers.
A working mother was defined as being employed before their child turned 14 years old.
Daughters of employed moms are 4.5 percent more likely than daughters of stay-at-home moms have jobs, the study found -- small but statistically significant difference, the authors say, meaning it’s not just a coincidence. Daughters of working mothers also earn 23 percent more than daughters of women did not work outside the home.
Related: 10 Best States for Working Mothers
In addition, 33 percent of daughters of employed women hold supervisory roles, compared to 25 percent of daughters of stay-at-home mothers. And the daughters of working moms do fewer hours of housework each week, the study finds.
Sons of working mothers were found to spend 7.5 more hours on childcare per week and a longer amount of time on household chores. They spend more time caring for family members than sons of stay-at-home mothers.
The study hints at the neglected importance of gender attitudes that are shaped and refined within homes and in families, since policymakers usually focus on gender differences on the political and corporate levels. Parents who embody non-traditional gender roles are serving as role models and a resource for their children who might one day enact non-traditional gender roles in their own lives.
Working mothers are demonstrating to their children that traditional gender roles are not the only opportunities for their sons or daughters. Even though many mothers worry that by working they’re neglecting their child, they could actually be helping them in the long-run by showing them they’re world might not be as limited as tradition suggests.
The study comes in the wake of a slight reversal in the decades-long trend of women joining the ranks of the employed. From 1999 to 2012, the number of mothers who were unemployed in the U.S. rose from 23 percent to 29 percent, a Pew study found. Causes of the rise are debatable, but a growing number of women cite their inability to find a job, largely as the result of the recession.
With the job market recovering, the new study’s message is clear: Lean in, women!
Trump: Repeal the Obamacare Mandate to Cut the Top Tax Rate
President Trump repeated his call Monday to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate as part of the tax bill. In a tweet — geotagged from Pennsylvania, not the Philippines , where Trump currently is — Trump added that the billions in savings from ending the mandate should be used to cut the top marginal rate to 35 percent and the rest on cuts for the middle class.
The Congressional Budget Office said last week that eliminating the mandate would save $338 billion over the next decade.
The current version of the House tax bill keeps the top individual income tax rate at 39.6 percent, while the Senate bill lowers it to 38.5 percent. However, mandate repeal is not currently part of either tax bill, and, as The New York Times notes, “repeal of the individual mandate was not on the list of 355 amendments that the [Senate Finance Committee] released on Sunday night.”
Tax Reform Is Hard, but the GOP Could Have Made This Easier
The Tax Policy Center’s William G. Gale writes that the GOP’s approach to the tax bill combines a $5.8 trillion tax cut with a $4.3 trillion tax increase to offset the costs. There may have been an easier way. “What if the House GOP simply tried to cut business and individual taxes by $1.5 trillion. No offsets needed. They could have distributed small tax cuts to middle-income individuals by, say, modestly expanding the earned income tax credit and raising the standard deduction. And they could have trimmed the top corporate tax rate by a few percentage points. It would not have been base-broadening tax reform, but neither is the current bill. ... Tax reform is never easy, but crafting the bill this way has vastly increased the challenge of passing it.”
Alan Greenspan: Deal with the National Debt Before Cutting Taxes
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is warning that sharply cutting taxes right now would be an economic “mistake.”
In an interview with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business Network Thursday, the 91-year-old Greenspan said it’s more important for President Trump and Congress to put the nation on a sustainable fiscal path by addressing rising entitlement spending driven by the aging of the U.S. population.
“Frankly, I think what we ought to be concerned about is the fact the federal debt is rising at a very rapid pace, and there’s nothing in this bill that will essentially stop that from happening," Greenspan said. "So my view is that we’re premature on fiscal stimulus, whether it’s tax cuts or expenditure increases. We’ve got to get the debt stabilized before we can even think in those terms.”
GOP’s Estate-Tax Repeal Details Would Save Super-Rich Tens of Billions Extra
It’s no surprise that the House Republicans’ tax bill includes the eventual repeal of the estate tax, a long-held GOP goal. But The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler highlights an unexpectedly generous aspect of the current bill: It “allows the beneficiaries of estates to not pay capital gains taxes on the increase in value of assets held by the estates. That has not been a feature of most previous estate-tax bills.”
Currently, estates face a federal tax if they’re valued at more than $5.49 million for individuals or almost $11 million for couples. But, for tax purposes, the value of assets passed on to heirs gets “stepped-up” or reset to their value at the time of death. Kessler’s example: “Imagine a home that had been purchased for $250,000 but was now worth $1 million. The ‘stepped-up basis’ would be $1 million. If the heirs sold the house for $1.1 million, they would only owe capital-gains tax on the $100,000 difference, not the $850,000 difference from the original purchase price.”
The GOP bill repeals the estate tax, but also keeps the stepped-up basis — a seemingly small detail that creates a huge tax shelter. It means that heirs of large estates would save tens of billions of dollars a year when they sell assets that have appreciated in value over time — or, as Kessler puts it, that the bill will allow “tens of billions of untapped capital gains to remain beyond the reach of the U.S. government.”
Republicans Are Still Coming After Obamacare’s Individual Mandate
Speaker Paul Ryan said Sunday that House Republicans are still considering a repeal of the Obamacare individual mandate as part of their tax bill. "We have an active conversation with our members and a whole host of ideas on things to add to this bill. And that’s one of the things that’s being discussed," Ryan said on Fox News. President Trump touted the idea in a tweet last week, and Sens. Tom Cotton and Rand Paul have recently spoken in favor of using the tax bill to eliminate the mandate. The move would save the government $416 billion over 10 years as roughly 15 million people go without insurance due to lower spending on subsidies and health care services, according to the CBO. Those savings could be appealing as Republicans look for revenues in their revised tax bill. But if the controversial repeal of the mandate isn’t included in the tax bill, the White House is reportedly ready to roll out an executive order weakening the requirement that taxpayers provide proof of insurance to avoid paying a penalty.