Rick Santorum describes himself as universally pro-life. That includes his tax plan, which policy analysts contend gives couples economic incentives to get married and have larger families.

Santorum’s tax proposals would triple the personal deduction for each child and “eliminate marriage tax penalties throughout the federal tax code.” He would retain deductions for charitable giving, home mortgage interest, health care, and retirement - all undertakings that support faith and family formation.

Significantly, he would eliminate all corporate taxes on U.S. manufacturers, from its present 35 percent to zero. The candidate’s native Pennsylvania has lost 127,000 manufacturing jobs 2005-10, and median income has fallen faster than the national average. High-wage manufacturing jobs made it possible to support a family without a college degree. A 2003 study funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation found higher education and the desire for more economic security delayed the age of marriage and family formation later than ever. ...

The marriage penalty embedded in the tax code may discourage marriage by taxing married couples at higher rates than single people. Santorum’s plan would equalize the tax burden by doubling the size of tax brackets for married families and eliminating other penalties for those who tie the knot.

But Santorum’s policies have deepened a longstanding rift between conflicting visions of conservatism.

Labels: conservatism, family policy, family size, Marriage, tax policy

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AT Christmastime, we like to tell stories about resilient families. The Cratchits of “A Christmas Carol,” for instance, who subsist on love, hope and 15 shillings a week. The Baileys of Bedford Falls, who survive wars, bank runs and bankruptcies because they have friends, one another, and a guardian angel watching out for them. The first couple of the New Testament, who manage to cope with a supernatural pregnancy, a murderous king and the necessity of delivering a child in the bleak midwinter, half-out-of-doors and far from home.

These stories resonate in part because of how easily they could turn out differently. Not every Tiny Tim has Bob Cratchit as his father and a reformed Scrooge as his benefactor. Not every George Bailey realizes that he shouldn’t jump off the bridge when things look bleakest. And not every unexpectedly expectant mother has a St. Joseph standing by her.

Millions of Americans know this all too well, because the darker possibilities the Christmas stories hint at — divorce, abandonment, childhood suffering — are realities they have to live with every day. But that unhappy knowledge isn’t evenly distributed. In 21st-century America, the well-off and well-educated have the best odds of enjoying the domestic stability that the Yuletide stories celebrate, while the very people who most need resilient families — the Cratchits and Baileys, the working poor and the hard-pressed middle class — are less and less likely to have them. ...

To some extent, the nervous politicians are right. There is no government program that can guarantee a happy childhood or a devoted spouse. (If you replaced Clarence from “It’s a Wonderful Life” or the Angel Gabriel of the Gospels with a Health and Human Services bureaucrat, those stories would probably have a much grimmer ending.)

But public policy can still make a difference in the way we organize our private lives, and public institutions should be designed with existing patterns of social life in mind. Where mating and marrying are concerned, both our policies and our institutions are increasingly out of date: they’re built for a world in which two-parent, single-breadwinner families were a near-universal norm, and they don’t take enough account of the mass entrance of women into the work force, or the mounting economic pressures on the American family.

Labels: children, economics, family policy, parental leave, parenting, poverty, Ross Douthat, tax policy, work/family policy

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Last week, when reviewing some of the family talk on the campaign trail, I mentioned a new study co-authored by Brad Wilcox called The Sustainable Demographic Dividend. As many National Review Online readers know, W. Bradford Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He is also the president of Demographic Intelligence, the premier provider of U.S. fertility forecasts and fertility analytics for companies in the financial-services, food, household-products, insurance, juvenile-products, medical, and retail sectors. He talks to National Review Online about what exactly fertility and marriage have to do with the economy. –KJL

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What is a demographic dividend? Why is it important to the economy?

W. BRADFORD WILCOX: Traditionally, a “demographic dividend” has been defined as the economic advantage that countries transitioning from a high-fertility regime to a low-fertility regime gain when the children that were born during the high-fertility years have entered their prime working years (15–64) but are not having many kids of their own. This allows countries to focus their human and financial capital on education and the market economy, rather than raising children, and — assuming policy conditions are right — enjoy a spurt of economic growth.

Economist David Bloom argues that more than 25 percent of the per capita GDP growth associated with the East Asian economic miracle of the late 20th century can be laid at the feet of the dramatic demographic changes that swept over East Asia in the last half century, when the total fertility rate fell from about six children per woman in 1950 to well below two today in most East Asian countries. These demographic changes freed up time, energy, attention, and capital on the part of men and, especially, women that could be focused on the economy.

In the short term, this demographic dividend can work out brilliantly, as the East Asian miracle attests. But in the long term, this dividend can turn into a demographic liability as birth rates fall well below replacement and a society ceases to produce enough people to work in the economy and pay for the welfare state. This is what is now happening in Japan, and a similar fate may befall other leading economies in the region — from Taiwan to South Korea.

In fact, just last month, a leading South Korean think tank predicted that the South Korean economy could face a major downturn within the next decade, because the country’s workforce is now poised to shrink as a consequence of long-term low fertility in the country. The bottom line: In the short term, low fertility can bring increased economic productivity and growth, but in the long term, low fertility may undercut growth if population trends prove unsustainable to the economy and the welfare state.

Labels: Asia, children, culture, demographics, economics, family policy, Marriage, men, parenting, W. Bradford Wilcox, work/family policy

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What then are the appropriate policy responses to the unsustainable state of family life in many advanced societies? Here are ten proposals that might be helpful:

1. PROMOTE FAMILY ENTERPRISE.
The last generation has seen a rapid increase in corporate consolidation. Whereas rigorous enforcement of antitrust and other policies preserved an important role for small-scale family farms and businesses until the 1980s, today there is almost no check on the growth of giant retailers, agribusinesses, and industrial concerns. As British social theorist Philip Blond has written, “Our fishmongers, butchers, and bakers are driven out—converting a whole class of owner occupiers into low wage earners, employed by supermarkets.” Though it is not possible, or even desirable, to entirely reverse these trends toward monopolization, it is possible to moderate them and thereby carve out more space for family enterprise and entrepreneurship, which will in turn help to rebuild the economic foundation of the family. A good start would be to offer payroll tax breaks to small businesses and to more rigorously enforce existing antitrust laws.

2. INCREASE INCOME SECURITY FOR YOUNG COUPLES.
Young couples contemplating starting a family now face far greater risk than their parents typically did that they will face repeated spells of un- and underemployment. As political scientist Jacob Hacker has demonstrated, even before the Great Recession of 2008, the size of swings in pretax family income from year to year had doubled in the United States since the early 1970s. In Europe, many young adults typically find themselves maneuvering from contract to contract, rather than being able to settle into a secure career that will support a family. In the developing world, young adults often find themselves trying to get ahead amid the swirl of hypercompetitive megacities that seem to have literally no room for children.

There is no single policy lever to pull that will put the family back into a healthy and sustainable balance with global market forces. We must grapple with issues like foreign trade, offshore employment, and downsizing. Yet it is essential that measures of efficiency not be so narrowly defined that they discount the vital role that secure, functioning families play in sustaining economic progress. To soften the blows young adults face from income and employment instability associated with globalization, countries should ensure access to affordable health care and lifetime learning to keep job skills from becoming obsolete. ...

8. ADJUST THE FINANCING OF THE WELFARE STATE TO MEET THE NEEDS OF AN AGING SOCIETY.
All pension and health-care benefits, including those conveyed through the private sector, are ultimately financed by babies and those who raise and educate them. Yet in modern societies, the “nurturing sector” of the economy is starved for resources. Parents in particular rarely receive any material compensation for the sacrifices they make on behalf of their children.

Here is a suggestive policy idea for allowing the nurturing sector to keep a greater share of the value it creates for society: Say to the next generation of young adults, have one child, and your payroll taxes, which support the elderly, will drop by one-third. A second child would be worth a two-thirds reduction in payroll taxes. Have three or more children, and pay no payroll taxes until your youngest child turns 18. When it comes time to retire, your benefits (and your spouse’s) will be calculated just as if you had both been contributing the maximum tax during the period in which you were raising children, provided that all your children have graduated from high school.

Labels: children, culture, demographics, economics, family policy, government interest in marriage, Marriage, parenting, poverty, religion, tax policy, universities, work/family policy

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Statistics Canada will no longer collect and crunch numbers on the country’s annual marriage and divorce rates, a sign both of cost cuts at the agency and the changing nature of relationships, as definitions get fuzzier and harder to track.

The national statistical agency published its last national figures on marriage and divorce rates last week. It has been collecting divorce data since 1972 and marriage data since 1921. It pegs the cost of reinstating the collection at $250,000. ...

It will also be trickier to assess what is going well. This week, Ontario said it would require every couple in the province hoping to split to attend an information session on alternatives to going to court before getting a divorce. Evaluating whether measures like that work, five years later, has become much more difficult, Mr. Benmor said.

Statscan says it will still examine trends in family composition through its census, conducted every five years, and general social surveys. But annual data on marriage and divorce rates won’t be replaced.

Labels: Canada, committed relationships, common-law, divorce, divorce reform, economics, family policy, family structure, Marriage

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A Forward article published last week raises the question of the constitutionality of New York's Domestic Relations Law, Sec. 17, which makes it a misdemeanor for any clergy member to "solemnize or presume to solemnize any marriage between any parties without a license being presented ... or with knowledge that either party is legally incompetent to contract matrimony." The article reports on the case of Yehuda Semel, who obtained a Jewish religious divorce from his wife. However their civil divorce proceedings are still pending in the courts. Nevertheless, Semel has married another woman in a religious ceremony without obtaining a civil marriage license. Most rabbis oppose performing a religious marriage ceremony where there has not been a civil divorce. Commentators argue, however, that it is a violation of the 1st Amendment for the state to make it illegal for a rabbi to perform a purely religious ceremony. It was not unusual before a 1983 change in the Social Security Law that preserved benefits for widows who remarry, for rabbis to perform a religious ceremony for a couple otherwise eligible to marry but who did not obtain a civil marriage license to avoid the woman's loss of her Social Security benefits. There was a Yiddish phrase for that type of marriage-- stile chupa (a "quiet marriage").

Labels: family policy, Judaism, law, Marriage, religion, religious liberty

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Questions about “abortion and the law” are usually seen as matters of constitutional law. Constitutional law, however, seems ill-suited. This is not only because the U.S. Supreme Court discovered a “constitutional right” for something that had been banned by most states for most of the nation’s history. It is also because the “privacy” right encompassing abortion frames the issue as a struggle between the state and the woman over her right to define her life, her future, or even her “concept …of the universe,” in the famous words of the Casey Court. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that abortion is about family relationships, not simply a contest between the state and a woman who happens to be pregnant. Scientific discoveries about human development and the testimonies of women who have had or have considered an abortion suggest that it is family law rather than constitutional law that provides the best means of understanding the issue of abortion. ...

Abortion is a family issue in other ways as well, as explained in the affidavits of 180 women filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in the second partial-birth abortion case, Gonzales v. Carhart. They described how abortion affected their mothering, how siblings of aborted children experienced repercussions of the abortion, and how they became pregnant again quickly after the abortion in order to have a “replacement baby.”

Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart indicated that the Court itself was beginning to understand abortion in a family context. The opinion states outright that a bond exists between a woman and her biological offspring and that the severance of this bond via abortion might cause significant suffering for the woman. The majority wrote that “Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child.” The Court’s use of language like “mother” and “child” also indicates a family law context. So does the majority’s choice of labels for the unborn including “a living organism while within the womb,” “unborn child,” “infant life,” and “child assuming the human form.” The Court continued: “some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.”

There are quite a few signs, then, that the time is ripe for exploring abortion from within a family law context. Indeed, there is some evidence that family law is experiencing second thoughts about “what was lost” during the period when lawmakers fell into a pattern of prioritizing adults’ interests over children’s. This is a fair characterization of family law’s failures over the past 30-40 years: the failure to place meaningful limits on the use of ARTs in order to defer to adults’ wishes and to the flourishing of the fertility industry; the adoption of no-fault divorce laws which turned a blind eye to the wellbeing of minor children within a marriage. This “adults’-eye-view” (really a blindness) has permeated recent judicial decisions creating a right to same-sex marriage on the grounds that legal marriage is unrelated to any state interest in procreation and child-rearing. ...

Where might it begin? Both scientific research and policies of the kind driving other “children’s interests” movements in family law are in order. First and foremost, there should be a reexamination of all laws and policies disadvantaging pregnancy and motherhood, whether these touch upon employment, education, Social Security benefits, tax policies, or other areas. There should be a truly empirical—not ideological—look at whether state-sponsored programs about sex or marriage tend to separate marriage and procreation. After all, over 80% of all abortions are sought by single women.

Labels: abortion, family policy, motherhood, tax policy

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A war over the family divided liberals and conservatives in the last several decades. Now is the time to end that war and come together for a nationally urgent and common cause. With 40 percent of children born to unwed mothers today, and a growing marriage gap between wealthy and poor, we can’t afford to go on pretending that strengthening marriage is a conservative or liberal cause. ...

Research shows that there is a growing class-based marriage gap: College-educated persons are getting married at a greater rate — and enjoying longer-lasting marriages — than noncollege-educated persons. As University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox reported in a recent essay for National Affairs, since 1980 the divorce rate for college-educated persons actually dropped by 30 percent, while rising 6 percent among the noncollege-educated. Further, as a 2007 Child Trends study reported, only 7 percent of mothers with a college degree have had a child outside marriage, compared to more than 50 percent of mothers who had not gone to college.

Consequently, as Wilcox notes, “children on the lower end of the economic spectrum [are] doubly disadvantaged by the material and marital circumstances of their parents.” And as family scholar Paul Amato and economist Rebecca Maynard point out, many scholars now believe that “a major cause of the rise in child poverty in the United States during the second half of the 20th century is the decline in married-couple households.”

Thus, one of the most important actions we can take to ensure greater equality of opportunity is to strengthen marriage. While it’s a tall order, we can do it. If marriage stabilized among one segment of the population — the college-educated — it can happen in other segments as well.

Any turnaround, however, will require a national, bipartisan movement built around the principles of cultural competence — mobilizing together as a nation to reverse the decline of an institution so central to our welfare. What might that movement look like?

Labels: culture, economics, family policy, Marriage, marriage penalty, out-of-wedlock births, tax policy

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As a long-time champion of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, it pains me to have to criticize that organization, as well as the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, for its just-unveiled Rock for Equality action. The premise of the action is simple -- and misguided: that same-sex couples, who, even if they marry, cannot have their marriages recognized under federal law, are discriminated against in social security benefits. ...

This is a hard issue to understand and to explain. I'm going to try. One type of married couple gets this kind of windfall under Social Security -- it's the type of family that Congress had in mind in 1939, when it created the system and only 15% of married women earned their own income. When one spouse has earned all or the vast majority of the couple's income, the non-earner or low-earner spouse gets a retirement benefit equal to half her spouse's, even if she never paid into Social Security; and if her spouse dies first, she will then receive the amount of money he was receiving. Example: If his lifetime earnings entitle him to $1,800/month in benefits, she will receive $900 while he is alive and $1,800 once he dies. (So the household has $2,700/mo. while he is alive and $1,800 when he dies).

When a same-sex couple resembles this couple's earning pattern, that couple is, indeed, disadvantaged by being considered unmarried, when the couple is actually married in a state that allows it.

But same-sex couples with two earners, whose lifetime earnings are pretty close to each other(I'm pretty sure my friend and her partner fall into this category), will gain nothing by being considered married. Instead, they will find themselves, like equal-earning heterosexual couples (including most African-American married couples), paying more into the system and getting less out. Let's say each partner is entitled to $1,350/mo. based on her own earnings. Sure, if they are married, each can qualify for a spousal benefit. But that benefit is instead of, not on top of, what each qualifies for on her own. So the spousal benefit is only $675/mo. instead of $1,350, which, of course, no one would choose. So that household also gets $2,700/mo. while both are alive. But when the first spouse dies, the survivor simply keeps her own benefit -- $1,350. The surviving spouse sees a 50% cut in benefits to the household, compared to the 33% cut experienced by the surviving stay-at-home spouse whose deceased spouse earned all the family's income. ...

Scholars and advocates unconnected to the gay rights movement have been pointing out for years how unfair this system is...to equal earning married couples and to single parents, whose lifetime earnings suffer because of their childcare responsibilities and who have no income-earning spouse confering a spousal benefit. Research by the Institute for Women's Policy Research [pdf] and law professor Dorothy Brown [pdf] demonstrates that black couples are disadvantaged by the current Social Security system.

Labels: economics, family policy, gay couples, Marriage, Nancy Polikoff, race

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Since the launch of Webcameron, when David Cameron allowed a “homemade” video of himself to be broadcast online, the Conservative leader has made it clear that the Tories are the party for families, and that they back marriage. In a speech in March at the Welsh Conservative Conference, he affirmed this, saying: “We want to see a more responsible society, where people behave in a decent and civilised way, where they understand their obligations to others, to their neighbours, to their country. And above all, to their family. Families are the most important institution in our society. We have to do everything in our power to strengthen them.”

Now Labour, recognising the success of this idea, are to publish a green paper in January supporting wedlock and conceding that children fare better when parents stay together. “In the past I think our family policy was all about children. I think our family policy now is actually about the strength of the adult relationships and that is important for the progress of the children,” Ed Balls told the Sunday Times.

Labels: family policy, government interest in marriage, Marriage, United Kingdom

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A recent profile in the New York Times of the marriage between President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle had a great deal to say about how the Obamas have balanced their desire for public influence and personal privacy. The article had nothing to say about one of the most simple and remarkable facts about the first family: for the first time in recent memory, the family in the White House is not a nuclear family.

The White House has played host to its share of unusual marriages, but the Obamas have broken new ground by bringing in Michelle’s mother, Marilyn Robinson, to help care for their children. The Obamas’ stated reason for inviting Robinson to live in the White House was so that she could assist in the care of Sasha and Malia, the Obamas daughters. As baby boomers age and America becomes what the President’s Council on Bioethics called the “mass geriatric society,” more and more elderly Americans may begin to live with their adult children. As with the Obamas, the desire for improved care-giving will be the main motivation. But in this case, the elders, not the children, will be the ones receiving the care.

Our society has not always been very clear about what obligations grown children have toward their aging parents. But in the case of the Boomers, the question becomes exceedingly complex. Taking advantage of the rise of no-fault divorce laws, they sought flexibility and happiness through more negotiable romantic and sexual attachments. They had fewer children than their parents’ generation, but those they did have were buffeted by the chaos of divorce, remarriage, custody battles, and multiple Christmases.

Now, the balance of dependence is tipping. As boomers enter their second childhood, we may witness the historical irony of aged parents experiencing some of the chaos and uncertainty felt by their children. What responsibilities of care does one have toward a stepfather? Toward a parent with more than one set of children? It’s no longer a question of who gets to keep the kids but rather of who gets stuck with the grandparents.

In such an environment it is easy to see why the public provision of medicine and end-of-life care is becoming especially important. Complicated family arrangements matter less when the main caregiver for the elderly is the government. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that only 12% of parents age 65 and older report depending more on their children than their children do on them.

Labels: culture, divorce, extended family, family policy

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The Tories are to go ahead with their plans to recognise marriage in the tax system, the shadow minister for families said today.

Maria Miller said the Conservative party "unashamedly supports families and unashamedly supports marriage", rallying around the tax pledge, a policy that has come in for criticism from liberal members of the Tory party and opposition parties but remains one of David Cameron's highest profile promises.

The Conservative leader is known to regard the policy highly but senior Tories and pressure groups are uncertain that the best way of supporting families is necessarily through recognising marriage because unmarried couples would also receive the tax break under Conservative proposals.

Speaking at the Tory conference in Manchester, Miller indicated no weakening of resolve. This afternoon she said: "It is not because we want to go back to any 1950s ideals of family life. It's because it's empirically proven that marriage provides a stable framework for our lives. With the evidence right in front of us, it's madness not to support marriage. That's why we're committed to introducing the recognition of marriage in the tax and benefit system.

"In turbulent times, it's our family who we turn to. The family, not the state, is our best support system."

Labels: cohabitation, family policy, government interest in marriage, Marriage, tax policy, United Kingdom

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44. The notion of rights and duties in development must also take account of the problems associated with population growth. This is a very important aspect of authentic development, since it concerns the inalienable values of life and the family. To consider population increase as the primary cause of underdevelopment is mistaken, even from an economic point of view. Suffice it to consider, on the one hand, the significant reduction in infant mortality and the rise in average life expectancy found in economically developed countries, and on the other hand, the signs of crisis observable in societies that are registering an alarming decline in their birth rate. Due attention must obviously be given to responsible procreation, which among other things has a positive contribution to make to integral human development. The Church, in her concern for man's authentic development, urges him to have full respect for human values in the exercise of his sexuality. It cannot be reduced merely to pleasure or entertainment, nor can sex education be reduced to technical instruction aimed solely at protecting the interested parties from possible
disease or the “risk” of procreation. This would be to impoverish and disregard the deeper meaning of sexuality, a meaning which needs to be acknowledged and responsibly appropriated not only by individuals but also by the community. It is irresponsible to view sexuality merely as a source of pleasure, and likewise to regulate it through strategies of mandatory birth control. In either case materialistic ideas and policies are at work, and individuals are ultimately subjected to various forms of violence. Against such policies, there is a need to defend the primary competence of the family in the area of sexuality,111 as opposed to the State and its restrictive policies, and to ensure that parents are suitably prepared to undertake their responsibilities.

Morally responsible openness to life represents a rich social and economic resource. Populous nations have been able to emerge from poverty thanks not least to the size of their population and the talents of their people. On the other hand, formerly prosperous nations are presently passing through a phase of uncertainty and in some cases decline, precisely because of their falling birth rates; this has become a crucial problem for highly affluent societies. The decline in births, falling at times beneath the so-called “replacement level”, also puts a strain on social welfare systems, increases their cost, eats into savings and hence the financial resources needed for investment, reduces the availability of qualified labourers, and narrows the “brain pool” upon which nations can draw for their needs. Furthermore, smaller and at times miniscule families run the risk of impoverishing social relations, and failing to ensure effective forms of solidarity. These situations are symptomatic of scant
confidence in the future and moral weariness. It is thus becoming a social and even economic necessity once more to hold up to future generations the beauty of marriage and the family, and the fact that these institutions correspond to the deepest needs and dignity of the person. In view of this, States are called to enact policies promoting the centrality and the integrity of the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman, the primary vital cell of society, and to assume responsibility for its economic and fiscal needs, while respecting its essentially relational character.

Labels: Catholic Church, demographics, family policy, Marriage, religion, sex

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Single mothers moving out of public assistance, and low-income families searching for affordable child care, will applaud the $4 billion increase in stimulus funds for programs like Head Start, Early Head Start, and Child Care Development Block Grants, which support state programs for subsidized care. But it's far from certain whether the children who actually receive these services will be better off, and that's Penelope Leach's particular concern.

This British child development expert, the best-selling author of Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five, has earned an international reputation for helping readers consider their offspring's point of view on matters like infant sleep disturbances and potty training. This new volume also offers a child-centered perspective, but Leach has moved out of the nursery and stands ready to make her mark on an entrenched ideological debate that asks whether nonmaternal child care helps or harms young children.

Actually, she thinks that's the wrong question to initiate a discussion on a contentious subject. Readers must first consider, she says, "what kind of care, where, by whom, for which children, from what age, for what hours, paid for by whom, and with what results?" ...

Still, she wants readers to come to grips with an unpleasant truth: Much of American day care is just plain "bad." Given the available options, infants in particular are better off at home with their mother, a family member, or a nanny. Working mothers of very young children express greater satisfaction with in-home care, in part because caregiver/infant ratios remain too high in most affordable group programs. That problem can delay the developmental milestones of underprivileged children already at risk because of family instability.

This is especially relevant for American families. About 12 percent of three-month-olds here are placed in day care, and another 24 percent are in family day care, where small groups of children are cared for in private homes. Though British child care practices track most closely with our own, fewer than one percent of three-month-olds attend day care in Great Britain, and just one percent are brought to family day care. Comparisons between American and other Western European practices are even more striking.

Labels: day care, family policy, motherhood, parenting, poverty

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...Costs, particularly relating to child-raising, are killing the urban middle class. Urban residents generally pay higher taxes and more for utilities, insurance, trash, and sewer than those living elsewhere. Manhattan is by far the most expensive urban area in the United States, with an average of cost of living that is more than twice as much as the national average; San Francisco, another city that has seen large-scale middle-class flight ranks second. The Washington, D.C. area, Los Angeles, and Boston also suffer extremely high living costs.

These costs are most onerous on the middle class, particularly those with children. This can be seen in the rapidly declining numbers of students in most urban school districts, including such hyped success stories as Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Washington, and San Francisco. Over the past seven years, for example, Chicago’s school system, which was run by new Education Secretary Arne Duncan, has declined by 41,000 students.

America’s core cities—including the borough of Manhattan in New York—boast among the lowest percentage of children under 17 in the nation. Although Manhattan had a much discussed “baby boomlet” (the borough’s number of toddlers under the age of 4 grew 26 percent between 2000 and 2004), once children over 5 are taken into account, Manhattan’s under-age population is well under the national average. This indicates there may be a process of exhaustion—both mental and financial—as the costs of raising children drain family resources. ...

Ultimately, in good times or bad, cities have to want a middle class to have one. And politicians, if asked, will genuflect to the idea of maintaining a middle class, yet their actions—on taxes, regulations, schools, development—suggest otherwise.

Indeed, in reality most urban areas have focused on creating what New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg famously dubbed the “luxury city.” To pay for often inflated public employee costs, the luxury city can only survive off the wealthy and on other groups—empty nesters, singles and students—who demand relatively little in the way of basic services like schools and public health facilities.

Labels: culture, family policy

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...The role reversal caused by men's job losses is one byproduct of the economic downturn that has many news outlets, if not outright cheering, at least tentatively applauding. In her online column for Forbes, Elisabeth Eaves likened stay-at-home mothers re-entering the workforce to more-permanent Rosie the Riveters, commenting, "thanks to the recession, we may be at just such another socio-sexual inflection point." New York Times contributor Lisa Belkin wondered if women might finally become the majority of American workers, suggesting that such a development would be a "silver lining" in these dark times. One Salon writer celebrated the possibility that the "long-awaited redistribution of domestic labor might prove crucial in finally evening the professional playing field," while another wondered whether the financial crisis could turn out to be "accidentally feminist."

It isn't just the media promoting the idea that increasing numbers of mothers putting in more hours in paid work represents progress for women. Left-leaning think tanks, as well as the Obama administration, are also undertaking efforts to further the trend the recession began. In mid-April, the Center for American Progress announced that it is teaming with the University of Southern California and Time Magazine to explore the impact the recession has had on women. While acknowledging that being the family breadwinner may be a burden to some mothers, Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the center and project co-editor, said that it can also be "an opportunity." On April 22 she informed Congress that the rising unemployment of men has provided many working moms much-needed domestic help.

That may seem a rather callous perspective to out-of-work men, but Ms. Boushey's take is perfectly appropriate to "A Woman's Nation," a venture that John Podesta, the CEO of the Center for American Progress, promises will consider "the central question of the role government, business, and faith organizations, as well as individual women and men should play in supporting women's role now in the workforce…. " Given how many of the center's former employees work for the Obama administration, it's little surprise how closely the project dovetails with a March 11 executive order forming a White House Council on Women and Girls that aims to increase women's employment in various male-dominated industries.

There's only one problem with all these efforts to support mom in her new financial-provider role, and Ms. Hemmert presents a stark picture of it. However empowered the media, the think tanks and the White House tell her she should be, she is profoundly unhappy to have changed places with her spouse. "I don't like coming home and seeing him in my apron," Ms. Hemmert says while watching her husband make dinner. She reacts with outright revulsion to the phrase "Mr. Mom," and her mouth hardens into a thin line when her husband explains that it isn't necessarily a man's job to earn a living for his family, that a man can also be "the person who handles children and sets up play dates."

Ms. Hemmert admits that she sees her own parental job as something separate and different from her husband's, and she not only resents him for usurping her role but has lost some respect for him. "I'm a woman, and I want to be a mother first," she states simply.

To be fair, many women who found themselves in Ms. Hemmert's position wouldn't experience the same level of displeasure and disappointment in their husbands that she expresses. But research indicates that most do share her desire to be a mother first and an earner second. And they, too, prefer a husband who's more interested in bringing home the bacon than in cooking it.

Labels: economics, family policy, gender differences, motherhood

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