The Morning Call has a nice little article today about a particularly precious snowflake (h/t Fark):

Rebecca Maykish is 17 and dreads school so much that she stopped going regularly.

In fourth grade.

Those days off have come at a price to her school district and the Palmerton taxpayers who support it. Since 2004, the Palmerton Area School Board has authorized payments of more than $45,000 to help Rebecca make up for her missed school days. Rebecca’s mother, Barbara, has used the money for at-home tutoring and education software purchases. She has also spent it on modeling classes for Rebecca, subscriptions to teen magazines, and travel to New York and Toronto with a summer camp.

All of the expenses were approved by the district.

That’s right - for close to nine years, Mother-of-the-Year Barbara (hereby designated “MoY Babs” from here on out) decided that, when her daughter started freaking out about school after a couple of weeks, that it was definitely time to not only get her out of there, but start collecting tens of thousands of dollars in tax money under the auspices of some make-believe phobia.

It gets better, though.

When the final bills were tallied, the fund set up for Rebecca had reached $46,361. All the money paid to her came from district funds, said Steve Serfass, Palmerton Area School District solicitor.

Barbara Maykish spent $3,892 on at-home instruction, and hundreds more on educational software. She spent $2,100 for Rebecca to take classes at the Barbizon modeling academy, and nearly $6,000 to attend summer camp in Ferndale, N.Y., and go on field trips to Toronto and New York. The fund also covered $54 for subscriptions to Seventeen, Teen Vogue and Teen People magazines, according to documents provided by Maykish and the school district.

The documents show Barbara Maykish spent $222 to board her dogs while visiting Rebecca at a California boarding school in 2007; $2,329 for her and Rebecca to fly to the school and $500 for tuition and spending from March-May.

That’s right - a modeling academy, along with subscriptions to teen magazines.  Let’s take a look at America’s Next Top Model…

I’m thinking no.  Also, while we’re on the subject, what airline did they use to fly to this school?  Virgin Air Superfly Pimp Class or something?

The real crux of the problem, though, is right here…

At the beginning of most school years, Rebecca has tried to attend school but the longest she has made it was to Thanksgiving in fourth grade. She began this year as a junior at Palmerton High School but stopped going after the third week of September.

”It’s kind of humiliating to start out at the beginning of the year,” Rebecca said. ”People always say ‘Didn’t you used to go to this school? What happened?’ ”

Rebecca says she reads for pleasure, enjoying parodies such as ”Zen of the Zombie,” a mock self-improvement book. But her writing skills are weak and she can only do basic multiplication and division on downloaded worksheets. She estimates she spends three hours a day learning. Barbara Maykish has opted not to homeschool her, saying she worried that she would not be able to help Rebecca with her math and writing problems.

That’s right - the mother elected not to homeschool her because she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep up with the academic demands of a fourth grader.

Look, I understand phobias, at least to a point.  I have a mild phobia of spiders.  It used to be a lot worse, but, as I got older, I realized that I had a choice - I could either let my phobia of spiders turn me into a sniveling wimp whenever I saw one in a room, or I could get over it, channel that fear into pure, undying hatred, and crush the bastards.  In short, I realized that it didn’t matter whether I had a phobia or not - the spiders didn’t care.  They weren’t going to stop existing just because I had some hangups regarding them.  At some point, MoY Babs failed to teach her daughter this, letting her develop all kinds of wonderful separation anxieties (NOTE:  Why do I have the feeling she was one of those “mothers” that insisted on holding her daughter whenever she cried?) so that her daughter is essentially doomed to a life of useless ignorance.

Like mother, like daughter, I suppose.

Let it never be said that I’m not into a little theatrics and grandiosity here…

I’m right now engaged in some campaign work near Redding, CA, and by “campaign work”, I of course mean “doing tech support in some remote location in the middle of nowhere”. But, I am meeting with my future constituents, even if they don’t realize it yet.

One article I read before I left, via Instapundit as always, detailed the high costs of children - giving birth to them, raising them, sacrificing career options for them, etc. From the article:

Not long ago we worried about baby booms and overpopulation. Now some people are worrying about a “Global Baby Bust.” Writing in Foreign Affairs, Phillip Longman says it’s mostly because of economics:

He’s clearly right about the economics. Children used to provide cheap labor, and retirement security, all in one. Now they’re pretty much all cost and no return, from a financial perspective. That suggests that subsidies might solve the problem. Vladimir Putin thinks so, as he plans to offer generous parental benefits to encourage citizens to have more children, something that’s necessary as Russia’s population is in absolute decline. (Italy, which is also in demographic free-fall, is doing something similar).

At this point, it’s important to note that many would argue that some people think there are plenty of people already. I’m not one of those, in no small part because many of our social programs are built with the understanding that there will be substantially more young people to keep the programs alive than there will be old people to draw from them. When you have less than sustaining population growth, you have a big problem that can either be solved by:

1. Importing additional taxpayers (immigration).
2. Slashing programs.

I’d argue that #2 is a perfectly reasonable option and, to be honest, is something we should be doing anyways since such government benefits are effectively a Ponzi Scheme, albeit an incredibly poorly performing one. However, even with this being the case, millions of Americans have put substantial sums of money in programs like Medicare and Social Security with the promise that they’d get something in return, so simply eliminating those programs is not an option unless we’re ready and willing to hand their money back. Seeing as we’re facing high levels of debt, we’re unfortunately not in a position to pay anything back to the American people at the moment. So, we have to come up with a plan that allows those programs to stay in the black, such that we do not incur additional debt. That leaves:

1. Importing additional taxpayers (immigration).
2. Having more children.

As the article above pointed out, though, nobody wants #2 - it’s stressful, expensive, and there’s no practical reward (though there are substantial emotional rewards in the long run). The solutions offered by particularly affected countries involve a flat payment - have a kid and we’ll give you $1000, or something similar. The problem with flat payments is that those most financially capable of caring for multiple children will care the least about the money - $1000 doesn’t matter as much to someone making $100k/year as it does to someone making $20k/year. Consequently, instead of creating large numbers of new taxpayers, you instead increase the load on an already faltering social system.

I have a better idea.

I propose we institute a flat tax cut for each child (say, 5%), up to a certain number of children (say, 5 - I’m pulling numbers out of my hat here). This has the following benefits over the usual flat-fee system:

1. Those most capable of caring for children, financially-speaking, will have the most incentive to have more children.
2. By encouraging the rich to have larger families, it will distribute their wealth when they die to more people (the children and their children), which, in turn, will increase the spending of that wealth (more money spent on food, housing, and other essential items that can normally only be consumed so much by one person).
3. If the poor choose to have fewer children, they can concentrate their wealth in their smaller families and achieve greater social mobility, letting them some day be in a position to take advantage of these tax breaks. That’s right - increased class fluidity!

Now, I will point out that it’s not always about money - it’s also about time. Having children requires time - time to take them to soccer practice, time to take them to music lessons, time to manage the 15,000+ activities that every parent insists their child needs to participate in to get into that Ivy League school… heck, it takes time to take them to day care and retrieve them after work. Even if you trim away most of the fat, caring for kids is a time consuming endeavor.

Unfortunately, I do not have an answer to that problem. But, I think solving the money issue will help turn the tide a little. Then, Americans can decide for themselves how to deal with the time constraints of children.