Every once in a while, I browse the home pages of some of the crazier State Reps from Wisconsin. Glenn Grothman has to be one of the most worrisome, given his shocking intolerance and bigotry, but of greatest concern to me is his willingness to openly broadcast his nonsensical and baseless claims. This is a man who very clearly believes that the world works according to his prejudices.
As evidence, take his most recent diatribe posted on his legislative website. Entitled "How The United States and The State of Wisconsin Are Working to Encourage Single Motherhood and Discouraging Children in 2-Parent Families," the title alone should immediately strike any sane person as paranoid and delusional. In it, his premise is that the "Left and the social welfare establishment want children born out of wedlock because they are far more likely to be dependent on the government." He supports this argument by claiming that single mothers are much better off financially staying single, due to programs like low-income housing assistance, food stamps, and day care, than they are married. He concludes that the rise in single motherhood has therefore been driven by all the great financial benefits single, low-income mothers receive, rather than a complex interaction of changing society, evolving cultural norms, earlier sexual activity among teens who use birth control sporadically, systemic discrimination, and other factors that I personally find too complex to boil down here. But Grothman apparently thinks that because social programs are available to the poor, liberals therefore want people to be poor and use them. So we made the problem. Get it?
Grothman goes on to patently lie about Wisconsin benefits for lower income parents as his means of backing up his claim. For example, he states that a single "mother is eligible for child care valued at $9,200 per year" assuming "one of the two children is in school and does not need daycare." But, Grothman claims vindictively "If she is married to the father, she loses this benefit."
Not quite. The Wisconsin Child Care Subsidies program is designed for "all low-income working families ...with gross income at or below %185 of poverty." The parent or parents must be working, looking for work or in training, or in school. The subsidy is prorated based on total income. Contrary to Grothman's implication that the single mom is receiving $9,200 cash, she never sees any money from the program. In fact, whatever subsidy is paid directly to her child care provider enables her to try to support herself, just as families use it to support themselves.
Grothman similarly berates the single mom for her Earned Income Credit, her food stamps, and her BadgerCare medical assistance insurance. However, he does not seem to realize the irony in the fact that he is complaining about all the "benefits" of this hypothetical single mother, who in his example is earning $15,000 a year. Yes, Grothman begrudges that single mother of two children who makes a whopping $15,000 yearly.
Grothman has solutions, of course. He claims that he has received complaints about the "superior apartments" that rent subsidized families live in, and the illegal inclusion of boyfriends at the home. Grothman proposes restricting "the square footage to 50% of the average square footage for a rental unit in the area," apparently because being poor means you should be crammed like sardines into an apartment. He advocates drug testing for recipients of any type of Wisconsin aid. He also proposes restricting child care subsidies to no more than 40 hours per week, apparently thinking that the poor have access to Star Trek type transporters which make travel time from day care to job and back again a matter of mere seconds, and not a hour or so as happens in the real world.
Perhaps the most frightening part of Grothman's diatribe is its total disconnect from reality. Families headed by single mothers are much more likely to live in poverty than those headed by two parents. The unemployment rates for single women are substantially higher than those of married men or married women. Currently, about 72% of all poor families with children in Wisconsin are headed by single mothers. Apparently, it has never occurred to Glenn Grothman that people do not enjoy living in poverty. It is not a desired state. Children do not like going hungry some days. Women are not choosing to live in poverty as single parents. They are doing so because they have no alternative.
It is a shame that Democrats failed to gather enough signatures to initiate a recall of Rep. Grothman. Perhaps, however, West Bend deserves him. It was, after all, their school board that just denied a Gay-Straight Alliance student group sponsorship as a school club in the high schools, paving the way for lawsuits regarding discrimination as well as fully public homophobia and bigotry. It isn't difficult to see how Grothman was elected in a place like that.