| First off, I want to once again lodge my protest about life's beginning at conception. This just isn't true. Life began a very long time ago, and continues on through each successive generation of living thing. The life arc of an individual organism might begin at conception, but the idea that life begins at that moment offends the very notion of life. Okay, less tangent and more direct point. Tim Skubick writes about the "Take a fetus to work day" bill being discussed right now, even as we speak, in the Legislature. Where in the heck do they come up with this stuff? The insatiable appetite of Michigan Right to Life appears in need of being fed as the state seeks to become the first in the nation to offer a tax credit for a twelve-week old fetus. You read that right…a fetus.
You know, we've cracked on Skubick our fair share here over the years, but when he sets aside the horse race stuff and writes about issues, he usually does pretty okay at it. It's not necessarily that he's a closet liberal or anything. It's that he's been around so long that it appears that he can channel a sensibleness from an age that died when term limits became the law of the land. I'll once again point out that while it's not a bad thing to extend tax breaks to pregnant women, because there are expenses associated that can't be explained through traditional tax breaks, but the road there are through targeted tax breaks aimed at helping people with health problems that carry ancillary costs beyond just traditional medical bills. If they really wanted to help pregnant women and young families, they could go that route without the culture war crap. Instead, we've gotten culture war crap. There's this, and the "don't let the gays adopt" bill. As for something that would really help people control medical costs, they've alread opted out of creating a Michigan-based health care exchange. By the way, the headline. This is the same Republican Party that want at the same time to extend personhood to fetuses while from some corners wanting to repeal child labor laws. Those would be your, "The United States was great until the federal government started protecting its citizens from the depredations of the wealthy and put it on track to become a Socialist hellhole back in 1896" crowd. If kids work cheap, imagine how much cheaper it would be overall to farm out work to fetuses. |
