Letters: Maxim Institute produce pompous column

A reader respinds to Maxim Institute columnist Kieran Madden.

I continue to become more disillusioned by the Maxim Institute, which I admired and supported some years back.

In your edition of July 31, a Maxim representative writes a quite pompous column, designed as much, it seems, to display his catalogue of polysyllabic words, especially the word "intergenerational", as to impart any useful opinion or information to readers. Take this extract:

" ... considering people's connectedness in intergenerational families helps contextualise over-simplified…arguments". Good grief! Is he up himself or not?

Besides, is there any such thing as a family which is not intergenerational ?

Anyway, this fellow writes a couple of things worth taking up.

On the one hand, he writes of the "need to rediscover families when it comes to policy-making", and, on the other hand, he also writes glowingly of a mother who told him so proudly that she and the father are "the only dual-income family in her community".

Surely he hasn't been so cloistered in his academia for so long that he doesn't understand that families with two or more incomes are a significant, perhaps the most significant, cause of unemployment amongst the rest of the community?

Remember when we had no such thing as unemployment — when the father was the family breadwinner, and the mother was the home-maker, forming the society for her husband and her children and herself to live securely in? Now we have both parents working, and a chaotic, dangerous society.

Perhaps the Maxim representative believes that two incomes are needed to provide for a family these days. Then, what's Maxim Institute doing about that ? It wasn't so a generation ago, before the rise of feminism.

One thing that Maxim Institute could do, as could anyone interested in returning our communities to secure environments where children are carefully cared for and neighbourhoods re-appear, is to tell our parliamentarians to radically alter the feminist tax schedule that has applied for so long now.

At the moment, a man trying to provide for his family on a salary/wage of $100,000 has to give $24,000 to the government. Two-income parents earning $50,000 each have to give the government a total of only $16,000.

Is that helping our mothers to stay at home and benefit our communities ?
Even when two-income parents earn $60,000 each, they pay $2000 less tax than the single-income earner of $100,000.

LEO LEITCH
Houhora