Thursday, February 05, 2004

213 Can government help marriage?

There are three things that women can do to virtually wipe out future poverty in this country according to a member of the Clinton administration. William Galston put the matter simply in an article last January in the Wall Street Journal. To avoid poverty, do three things: finish high school, marry before having a child, and produce the child after you are 20 years old. Only 8% of people who do all three will be poor; of those who fail to do them, 79% will be poor.

Eliminating the marriage tax penalty sent the right message, but I’m not confident that the Federal government needs to be spending money to promote marriage, even though we know the simple fact of married parents promotes the health, welfare and education of children. It’s just that there is no proof that people aren’t getting married because of poor interpersonal skills, nor that $1.5 billion can undo the mess of the last 35 years. I'm envisioning our city's life long learning program requesting dollars from the government for gourmet classes and nature walks--all in the name of promoting healthy, stable marriages.

A brief prepared on the topic in support of the administration in 2002 cited current research that children need to live with their biological parents in low-conflict marriages, but concluded there was no proven approach for building strong marriages.

Robert Reich sounds a bit deluded when he says it’s being poor that’s keeping women from getting married (although not keeping them from having babies). Poor people got married and usually stayed married for all of our history as a country--and they do so in many other countries. Is it only in America that a poor woman thinks she’ll be less poor if she raises two or three children by herself? Besides, movie stars, athletes and other entertainers promote a no-marriage lifestyle, and they certainly aren’t poor.

Even so, some (whose jobs depend on continuously funneling money into social problems) are complaining President Bush’s marriage initiative money should be going to single parents. Others are saying, what about those married people who don’t want anymore children, when are you going to help them? I say if Uncle Sam didn’t have to be a step-father (welfare, food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid make him a better and more reliable provider than many men), the government would save billions and children would be better off.

Recent history points to the 1970s as aggravating the problem--around the time of the growth of the current women’s movement, but no one points fingers (except me). The rate of white women having children out of wedlock is now equal to that of black women in the 1960s when sociologists were blaming a tradition of weak black families on slavery.

It seems God had a plan for marriage, one man and one woman and one marriage, and all our tweaking and fiddling with it whether by feminists, social workers, scholars or the Federal government has not improved on it.

Update from Mitt Romney's article

In the February 5, 2003 Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney, Governor of Massachusetts has an editorial "Citizen's Guide to Protecting Marriage." Prefacing his list, which includes a warning not to let activist judges make laws, is this paragraph:
Marriage is a fundamental and universal social institution. It encompasses many obligations and benefits affecting husband and wife, father and mother, son and daughter. It is the foundation of harmonious family life. It is the basic building block of society: The development, productivity and happiness of new generations and bound inextricably to the family unit. As a result, marriage bears a real relation to the well-being, health and enduring strength of society."

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