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Essay on English College Writing
Parents and children are inevitably tied together at the beginning and end of life because there is no way to take care of either the young or the elderly without the other. As dependency lengthens at both ends of the life cycle, it becomes increasingly important for a society to be honest about the intergenerational facts of life. The facts are that the generations need each other and their primary nexus is within the family. Any policy that seeks to provide security in either childhood or old age has to deal with that reality.
The modern family contract with society that explicitly recognizes the contribution that parental investment makes to economic welfare in general and to old-age security in particular. The most straightforward way to recognize parental contributions would be to declare a parental dividend from children's earnings. Much of the bureaucratic mechanism needed to administer such a dividend is already in place. The payroll taxes that the Social Security Administration collects could be paid into a retirement fund for each worker's family, and the retirement fund could be administered in the way that IRAs and 401 (k) plans are administered now.
Younger generations undoubtedly would object that converting Social Security to a parental dividend would cause them to have to pay twice-once for their parents' retirement and again for their own. True. Working adults would have to repay a portion of the investment their parents made in them and create future assets for themselves by investing in their own children and/or by saving for their own pension funds. Requiring people to pay twice, however, would simply be a return to economic reality. Taking care of both the young and the elderly is what families have always had to do. It has been a seductive but misleading illusion to imagine that a social program..........
