Double-standards in the workplace...

undrentide said:

Personally I don't think this system encourages wives to stay dependant, though. At least if this system is abolished, it will cause severe financial damages to many households while it would not give more opportunities for women to work more or work at all.

Click to expand...

Obeika said:

Problem is that "working-mothers" earn much less than their male counter-parts so in factoring in the costs of child care and other expenses in the long run it is actually cheaper for one of the parents to stay home and look after the children than go through the hassles of finding a job, finding quality child care, going through the motions of getting up everyday making breakfast getting the "spouse", in most cases the husband, off to work, then getting the child either ready for school or child care and then going to work themselves.

Click to expand...

Well you both are right. Abolishing the system will increase the costs of living for these people. So in that sense it might be socially responsible for having such a system. However, being a liberal (in the European sense, not the left-wing American definition), I am weary of the side-effects of such policies; having such income brackets will perpetuate the status quo and not contribute to any change to the employability of women.

A similar example are the unemployment hand-outs. Many people in Europe suffer from the unemployment trap; because the benefits of being unemployed and being dependent upon the government are higher than the costs of searching and eventually finding a job, people stay unemployed for a long period of time. These unemployment hand-outs were of course created to offer the people who were really unable to find a job (because of low labor demand) a decent standard of living.

[Fifteen minutes later...]

Hm. I wanted to show some empirical evidence to support my case, so I gathered some data about unemployment rates and the maximum length of unemployment benefits of 18 countries and ran a statistical analysis, but I couldn't find any siginificant correlation to support "the unemployment trap".. Damn. Actually, Holland with a very generous hand-out that can last a lifetime has the lowest unemployment rate.

So maybe all these benefits are not bad after all.. I need to do some re-thinking on this. Thank you Obeika and Unredtide for forcing me to think critically!!

undrentide said:

Of course I don't mean 100%, and I was talking about only husband side, of course the wives' wage is taxed. Sorry I did not bother to look up proper wordings in English for ﾂ控ﾂ焦 and not to go into details either.

Click to expand...

I can not claim my children on my taxes as they are claimed already by my wife, I end up paying quite a bit in taxes off the top but the refund pays my health insurance, so I cant complain too much.

Even with our combined incomes we also get the "jido-teate" which is 20,000 every three months, it used to be 40,000 but my daughter is now 20 so she is no longer considered a dependant for the purposes of the allowance.