Like hope, I have two daughters

Like hope, I have two daughters. And while they are not named Anger and Courage, they are both beautiful.

This year one’s a junior and one’s a sophomore in high school. If they continue on their current schedule, that means they will graduate from college* in 2017 and 2018.

So I pay attention to things like this post from Ezra Klein: “If we add 200,000 jobs a month, will recovery take 7 years or 12 years?” He writes:

On Friday, we got the December jobs number: +200,000. That’s good, but not good enough. I posted a graph from the Hamilton Project showing that, at that rate, the labor market wouldn’t recover till 2024.

But perhaps that’s too pessimistic. The Economic Policy Institute took a look at the same numbers and concluded that a growth rate of 200,000 jobs per month would lead to a full recovery in seven years or so. That’s nothing to celebrate, but it’s better than the Hamilton Project’s estimate of 12 years. It’s also a bit odd: Isn’t this a simple matter of taking job losses and dividing by monthly job gains? Well, no. The date of our eventual recovery depends on some crucial unknowables about the future of the American labor force.

He goes on to discuss those variables, which are interesting, but not my point here. My point here is that my daughters are still in high school. For them, college is still a ways off and graduating from college to enter the working world still seems unimaginably distant.

But the way things stand, at the current pace of our economy, they won’t see a decent job market until after graduate school.

No one — no one in government, no one in the electorate, no one on Wall Street — should be satisfied with this state of affairs. And certainly no parent can be.

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This is unrelated to the jobs crisis my kids will be inheriting, but Charles Kuffner linked to Karen Mangiacotti’s story of how she became “The Penis Mom.” It’s a funny story filled with hope, courage and immensely appropriate anger:

Asking exclusively for dads to help is offensive on so many levels to me. I am freakishly strong and could mount a trébuchet with the best of them [Editor’s note: Um, honey, you don’t actually mount a trébuchet]. As someone who was a single mom for a good long time, I take issue with the assumption that every home has a dad to contribute. But most of all, I resent the message we are giving to our daughters that because of their gender, they are unwelcome to participate in physical tasks — that they are not strong enough and that only a man qualifies. I resent the message to all our children that we judge the value of contribution based on sex and not competence.

The reference there to a trébuchet, if you’re wondering, is due to a school project involving punkin chunkin — a delightful activity in which women and men have long participated, competing as equals.

(The Huffington Post, incorrectly, renders that “pumpkin chunkin” rather than the proper punkin chunkin. For those unacquainted with the Delaware tradition, just remember that “punkin” rhymes with “drunken,” which is also a reminder as to how the tradition began.)

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One more piece of news for the parents of daughters and/or the children of mothers: Keely Monroe reports on how the Affordable Care Act is “Expanding Access to Cervical Health Care.”

Preventive care services, like cervical cancer screenings, are critical to women because they allow us to monitor our health and catch illnesses before becoming catastrophic. Regrettably, women are less likely than men to access these services due to cost. Even small co-pays can dramatically reduce a woman’s ability to obtain preventive care.

… Two important provisions of the ACA have the potential to decrease these alarming rates of cervical cancer by eliminating the burden of cost-sharing for preventive health screenings for women. The first has already taken effect, and women are already benefiting from it! Starting on January 1, 2011, the ACA required Medicare to provide cervical cancer screenings without cost-sharing to the 22 million women who get health care through the Medicare program. The second will extend similar protections – and more — to women with private health insurance. The ACA requires private insurers to cover preventive care services specific to women, including cervical cancer screenings, without any extra charges or co-pays starting as soon as August 2012. This part of the law will help more women access not only cervical cancer screenings, but a full complement of the preventive health services women need to stay healthy.

Good. That’s a big step forward for life and liberty.

Although, of course, those words — life and liberty — have both been appropriated by political partisans opposed to the good news above. The “pro-life” and “pro-liberty” partisans all want to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

May I suggest that every candidate who advocates repealing ACA be asked — and forced to answer — the question: “Why do you want to reinstate co-pays that discourage cancer screening for women?”

If they don’t give a straight answer, then start loading punkins into the trébuchet. …

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* Women’s rugby coaches from colleges that offer scholarships really ought to be scouting the best girls’ rugby team in Pennsylvania. Just saying.