Far from being a throwback to the 1950s, recognising marriage in the tax system is desirable because modern couples need the flexibility to divide their work and child-caring responsibilities as they believe best. Today, couples split work and child care in any ratio that works for them. It may be 50/50, or they may choose to reverse roles completely. Perhaps they planned for the man to be the main breadwinner during their child-raising years, but changing market conditions meant that the woman could earn more. Transferrable tax allowances allow couples to create their own unique work-life balance. Nick Clegg's caricature of the 1950s family was popular among radicals of the 1970s, but today his views are held only by conformist intellectuals who have yet to notice how the family has changed.

A tax system that acknowledges marriage is not providing a mere economic incentive, it is sending a moral signal that symbolises the vital part parents play in educating the young people who will protect liberal-democratic civilisation long into the future. That is why tax systems in many other countries recognise marriage. In France, for example, couples can divide their income between themselves and their children. An adult counts as one unit and children half so that a married couple with two children would be able to divide their income between three "units". Each "unit" has a personal tax-free allowance and so less tax is paid, leaving couples with enough money to juggle their time between child care and work as they wish.

We could go a step further and encourage cross-generational family solidarity by allowing income to be assigned to any relative living at the same address. A couple who took responsibility for looking after their elderly parents, for instance, could assign part of their income to them and pay less tax. Scrapping inheritance tax would further encourage mutual support across the generations. Families could build up assets – property, durable goods, shares, cash – with the intention of handing them on from generation to generation, thus rebuilding the extended family on a solid economic base.

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

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Robert Rector was just wrapping-up his speech to a room of 250 people. That's when about a dozen protestors, who stood with their backs to him, started shouting.

Rector is from the conservative-minded "Heritage Foundation." SRS invited him to speak about childhood poverty.

"The data shows very convincingly that the strongest factor producing long term poverty in the state of Kansas and every other state is the decline in marriage,” Rector said.

Rector wants the state to educate and encourage marriage. It would be an effort to stop single mom households.

“He has raised some good ideas. It's work, it's family structure. And it's not like we're endorsing that idea per see, it's about getting the discussion started to frame it,” SRS Secretary Rob Siedlecki said.

Siedlecki called for a break when the protestors wouldn't stop.

The protesters had papers like this one. It says in part, this was an "orchestrated attempt to promote {a} $6.6 million 'marriage initiative,' a Cinderella/fairy tale solution in the face of increasing poverty." On the back, you can see it's from Occupy Wichita. ...

Response from Joan Wagnon of the Kansas Democratic Party:

I just celebrated my 47th wedding anniversary. I’m the child of parents who were married for 37 years, and the only thing that broke up that union was the death of my father. I believe that children thrive in families with two married, fully participating and emotionally healthy parents. Such a family is able to withstand what life throws at it, from the trials of a bad economy to the frustrations of everyday living. But not everybody has that kind of marriage.

To argue – as the Brownback Administration appears to be doing – that marriage alone will end poverty is simplistic, at the very least, and potentially dangerous. I am particularly concerned that the governor opened his child poverty town hall meetings this week with a speaker who declared that encouraging marriage is the most effective tool policymakers can use to fight poverty.

Marriage can be wonderful, but it can also be horrific.

Before I ever thought about entering politics, I ran the YWCA in Topeka. A year after I started as executive director in 1977, I helped create the city’s Battered Women’s Task Force. I counseled hundreds of women who were facing domestic violence. I found them shelter and helped them put their lives back together.

Labels: domestic violence, government interest in marriage, Kansas, Marriage, poverty

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Former Georgia Chief Justice Leah Sears (on the short list for Obama appointments to the Supreme Court) and family relations scholar Professor William Doherty have teamed up to produce with what they call, without irony, a modest proposal to reduce “unnecessary divorce”: the Second Chances Act.

The Second Chances Act is a brilliant piece of work by two of the nation’s leading pro-marriage liberals. (Full disclosure: The authors kindly give me far more credit than I am due by including me in a list of people to be thanked for “contributions,” which in my case consisted of attending one meeting in which an early draft of the report and the legislation was presented.)

The Second Chances Act proposes new model legislation that includes a one-year waiting period for divorce, along with a requirement that parents of minor children considering divorce take a short online divorced parenting education course, which would include information on reconciliation. Spouses could trigger the one-year waiting period without actually filing for divorce by sending their mates a formal letter of notice. These requirements would be waived in cases of domestic violence.

Now, some might ask, “Unnecessary divorce? What’s that?”

The genesis of the Second Chances Act was Minnesota Judge Bruce Peterson’s observation that at least some of the people he was seeing in his court looked like they needed a “rest stop” on the “divorce superhighway.” “When Judge Peterson looked at his own court system, widely acknowledged as a progressive one,” Sears and Doherty write, “he saw attempts to meet nearly every need of divorcing couples—legal and financial assistance, protection orders, parenting education, and more—except for reconciliation.”

The assumption of the entire legal system is that by the time a person files for divorce, the marriage is already dead. Amazingly, no one really even asked how many people filing for divorce would be interested in reconciliation.

So Doherty teamed up with colleagues to do some groundbreaking and original research, testing that assumption.

What they found shocked the family law community: “New research shows that about 40 percent of U.S. couples already well into the divorce process say that one or both of them are interested in the possibility of reconciliation.” In about 10 percent of divorces, both the husband and the wife are interested in reconciliation (likely unbeknownst to either of them).

Labels: children, divorce, divorce reform, government interest in marriage, Marriage, marriage counseling, mental health, Second Chances Act

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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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The federal government this week announced a new round of funding -- nearly $120 million -- for programs across the country that promote marriage or fatherhood, an initiative that began under President Bush and has now been continued by President Obama.

The Administration for Children and Families, (ACF), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced Monday that it was awarding $119.4 million in grants to 120 organizations -- $59.9 million for 60 marriage programs and $59.3 million for 60 fatherhood programs.

Among the recipients are religious organizations, state departments of family services and nonprofit groups. The maximum grant was $2.5 million, which several organizations received, and the lowest was $338,000 for Youth and Family Services in El Reno,Okla. ...

The programs have garnered support on both ends of the political spectrum -- some conservatives support the marriage initiative while some liberals favor the fatherhood programs -- but critics are still skeptical about their effectiveness and question whether they're worth the cost.

"I think there are some things government does well. This is not one of them," said Shawn Fremstard, a senior research associate with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "The problem with both is they're very soft in terms of what they try to do. It's mostly subsidizing very general services that don't have much of a connection to the labor market."

Labels: children, Fathers, government interest in marriage, Marriage, marriage promotion, poverty

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Marriage, quite literally, is the lifeblood of the economy, according to a new report released Monday by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. The report, "The Sustainable Demographic Dividend," examined demographic data, such as census records and consumer expenditure surveys, and concluded that economic growth is dependent on healthy marriages.

The University of Virginia researchers found that when people get married and have children, seven sectors of the economy experience tenable growth. The specific sectors are: child care, life and personal insurance, household products and services, health care, food, home maintenance/home services, and pets and toys. By contrast, those industries suffer when marriage and fertility rates are low.

Since the recession hit, marriage and fertility rates have been waning. In 2009, the number of babies born in the U.S. dropped by 2.3 percent. Young Americans want to get married and have kids, says Brad Wilcox, lead researcher on the report, most just can't afford to do it given current unemployment, and underemployment, rates. ...

You seem to go back and forth in the report on the impact of women’s work outside the home on fertility; you suggest that it can both increase and decrease fertility. What’s your conclusion?

Historically, there was a very real tension between work and fertility for women. And that’s still the case; in most modern economies, women who do not work full-time in the labor force tend to have more kids. It’s also the case that the developed countries that have the highest fertility rates are ones where they give women more flexibility to combine work and family. I’m thinking here of places like Sweden. In the United States there aren’t a lot of public policies that help women to combine work and family but what’s exceptional about the U.S. economy is that it’s a lot more flexible when it comes to women moving into and moving out of the work force, as compared to many European countries where it’s hard both to move in and to move out of a job easily and quickly … For both of those different reasons, Sweden and the U.S. have comparatively high levels of fertility as compared to countries like Germany, Spain and Japan that haven’t had as strong a tradition of creating a flexible work-family culture for their women … The takeaway here is that from both the corporate end of things and the public policy end of things, we should pursue policies that allow families, including obviously women and especially mothers, to make the best choice for them and their family, and not to have a one-size-fits-all policy that would either favor stay-at-home parents on the one hand and households with both kinds of work on the other hand. ...

What can be done to encourage more stable marriages?

At the corporate level, companies do have a lot of power when it comes to shaping their internal culture; creating a culture that’s friendly to families, that makes it as easy as possible for people to work around their family schedules. Are they, for instance, offering their employees family plans that may be helpful to them as a couple and as a family, and make them better employees as well? They have even more influence when it comes to advertising. To go back to P&G again, it’s one of the biggest advertisers in the United States; are they thinking intentionally about how the message that’s embedded in their advertising does or does not encourage a family-friendly ethos?

On the public policy side of things, I would endorse things like efforts to increase the child tax credit, and keeping it fully refundable, which would put more money in the pockets of working-class and poor families. It would help to fill out, to some degree, the economic foundations of family life in many working-class and poor communities. But also it would be helpful to middle-class families. This idea of increasing the child tax credit from $1,000 to $5,000, and limiting that to kids who are in the household, would not be discriminatory but I think it would make family life more economical and it’s a concrete idea.

We could [also] do a lot better job in this country of improving our vocational educational system to bring it up to par with a country like Germany. That might seem kind of far afield, but the point is that I think one of the reasons we’re seeing marriages fail to form in the first place, and break down in the second place, is that many working-class and poor Americans don’t have the skills and training that they need to get a decent-paying job, and that has implications for their capacity to get and stay married.

Labels: cohabitation, corporate responsibility, culture, demographics, economics, education, government interest in marriage, Marriage, tax policy, W. Bradford Wilcox, work/family policy

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The mainstream media have labeled marriage the “hottest front in the culture war.” Much to the media’s surprise, several of the GOP candidates have already signed the National Organization of Marriage’s (NOM) Marriage Pledge. They were surprised by major candidates’ willingness to sign NOM’s pledge because this was supposed to be the year the social issues did not matter.

Presidential candidates for the 2012 election need to know that marriage is not only an essential issue in this race; it is a winning issue.

Elites have sounded the death knell on the marriage debate again and again, but popular support for traditional marriage refuses to die. Americans at the ballot box have repeatedly shocked elite opinion by demonstrating that even in deeply blue states a majority of Americans continues to oppose same-sex marriage. ...

Yet recent polling also reflects that Americans in the mushy middle are no longer hearing much about the opposition to same-sex marriage. Their willingness to express support for a traditional understanding of marriage is starting to shift, depending on how the question is posed to them and what other questions surround the polling question.

This shift means something: when the issue is framed as one of fairness or equality, Americans are now reluctant to disagree with gay marriage, but when it is framed as a moral or family issue, they continue to adhere strongly to traditional norms of marriage.

As Ken Blackwell recently put it, marriage is not a wedge issue but a bridge issue, creating strange bedfellow coalitions never before seen in American politics across lines of race, creed, and color. ...

So why is marriage, the one issue that the progressive left is energetically making too radioactive even to address, also the one issue that a candidate committed to American civilization cannot evade, avoid, or downplay?

The first reason is the nature of marriage itself.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, government interest in marriage, Maggie Gallagher, Marriage, religion

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At the same time as Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration announced it would return a $31.5 million federal grant that would help implement the new health care law, it was applying for a $6.6 million federal grant to promote marriage.

When Brownback announced last week that the state would reject the health care grant, he cited a concern that the federal government would not be able to meet its financial commitments. He also said states should be preparing for fewer federal dollars, not more.

But those concerns didn’t prevent the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services from seeking $2.2 million a year for three years to pay for counseling that encourages unwed parents to marry, The Kansas City Star reports. State officials said the effort would help reduce child poverty by encouraging stable families. ...

If the state receives the grant, the federal government would pay to send unwed parents to six counseling sessions offered by either secular or faith-based counseling services chosen by the state. The parents would volunteer for the program and could choose the kind of counseling service they wanted.

If the parents completed the program and marry, the federal grant would pay the $85.50 cost of their marriage license.

Labels: culture, government interest in marriage, Kansas, Marriage, marriage counseling, marriage promotion

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Now that government belt-tightening has become a national obsession, divorce-reform advocates are making the argument that they can be part of the solution.

Divorce is costly for everyone, they argue, and encouraging troubled couples to try to work things out could benefit the national bottom line.

The average split costs a couple $2,500. A new single-parent family with children can cost the government $20,000 to $30,000 a year. That’s $33 billion to $112 billion a year total in divorce-related social-service subsidies and lost revenue.

The country is “absolutely” ready for divorce reform, said Chris Gersten, founder and chairman of the nonpartisan Coalition for Divorce Reform. ...

Mr. Gersten’s coalition already has seen a victory: New Mexico state Sen. Mark Boitano introduced the Parental Divorce Reduction Act in this year’s session, and Mr. Gersten expects lawmakers in a dozen states to do so in 2012.

The act requires parents of minor children who are contemplating divorce to first attend six hours of “divorce-reduction” education. They would then enter an eight-month “reflection” period with access to marriage-strengthening materials and workshops. After that, they can go ahead with a divorce, “and we let the lawyers take over,” said Mr. Gersten, who added that couples in certain circumstances, such as domestic violence, would be exempted from the program.

Labels: Coalition for Divorce Reform, culture, divorce, divorce reform, government interest in marriage, Marriage, marriage counseling, no-fault divorce

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This policy brief reviews the deepening marginalization of marriage and the growing instability of family life among moderately-educated Americans: those who hold high school degrees but not four-year college degrees and who constitute 51 percent of the young adult population (aged twenty-five to thirty-four). Written jointly by two family scholars, one of them a conservative (W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project) and the other a liberal (Andrew J. Cherlin, professor at Johns Hopkins University), it is an attempt to find common ground in the often bitter and counterproductive debates about family policy. We come to this brief with somewhat different perspectives. Wilcox would emphasize the primacy of promoting and supporting marriage. Cherlin argued in a recent book, The Marriage-Go-Round, that stable care arrangements for children, whether achieved through marriage or not, are what matter most. But both of us agree that children are more likely to thrive when they reside in stable, two-parent homes. We also agree that in America today cohabitation is still largely a short-term arrangement, while marriage remains the setting in which adults seek to maintain long-term bonds. Thus, we conclude by offering six policy ideas, some economic, some cultural, and some legal, designed to strengthen marriage and family life among moderately-educated Americans. Finally, unless otherwise noted, the findings detailed in this policy brief come from a new report by Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America.

Labels: class, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, government interest in marriage, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, poverty

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...The linkages between family collapse and various forms of social failure were established decades ago. (A fine roundup of solid social science is The Case for Marriage, by Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher.) Reams of sophisticated research have documented what everyday experience confirms: that family fragmentation damages enormous numbers of boys and girls. Not all children in tough family situations do poorly, but more than enough do. "It is very hard," two sober scholars concluded in a 2010 Educational Testing Service report, "to imagine progress resuming in reducing the education attainment and achievement gap without turning these family trends around." The very idea, they said, of a "substitute for the institution [of marriage] for raising children is almost unthinkable."

Others have developed ways of measuring the most obvious economic and social effects of family fragmentation. Perhaps the most elementary is to calculate how much money government spends to keep single mothers and their children out of dire poverty. In 2008, Georgia College & State University economist Benjamin Scafidi calculated that family fragmentation cost U.S. taxpayers $112 billion annually. And Scafidi purposely left out some quite substantial costs....

Like a good academic, Scafidi felt compelled to be methodologically cautious; perhaps overly so. But the rest of us are free to observe that the actual cost is considerably above $112 billion a year.

A second way of estimating costs is to figure out how much lower the poverty level would be if out-of-wedlock birth rates and divorce rates were lower.

Labels: children, divorce, economics, government interest in marriage, out-of-wedlock births, poverty

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Utah taxpayers spend about $276 million on the effects of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth. But while there are effective tools to strengthen marriage and families, those who statistically need help most are the least likely to seek it out, experts say.

"Those who are younger, less educated and less religious feel that such education is not important. But they are more apt to divorce, as well," said Melanie Reese, coordinator for the Utah Healthy Marriage Initiative (www.strongermarriage.org), which is housed in the Utah Department of Workforce Services.

The cost of divorce and out-of-wedlock births to taxpayers nationally exceeds $112 billion a year, including the cost of federal, state and local government programs and forgone tax revenues, according to "The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing: First-ever Estimates for the Nation and All 50 States," a report by a coalition of organizations that includes the Institute for American Values, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, the Georgia Family Council and Families Northwest. ...

The link between marriage disintegration and the need for public assistance social programs is so strong, in fact, that Utah placed its marriage initiative within the department that administers the programs, Workforce Services. And the state offers tools to bolster marriage, from a Utah Marriage Handbook covering topics from sharing the expectations you have for your partner to creating a healthy stepfamily, to a relations/couple care course put together by Brigham Young University and offered online to state residents. That includes a premarital inventory. It's not a compatibility test, notes Liz Hale, clinical psychologist and chair of the Utah Commission on Marriage, but "it brings out how the other person thinks and offers an opportunity to have an important conversation."

Labels: children, culture, divorce, economics, government interest in marriage, Marriage, marriage counseling, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, Utah

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Maggie Gallagher is a veteran of the culture wars that have turned backers of marriage and family into frontline troops for Christian civilization.

In addition to writing such best-selling books as The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better-Off Financially, the scholar and syndicated columnist is chairman of the board of the National Organization for Marriage. She now also directs the Center for Research on Marriage, Religion and Public Policy, which opened in October at Ave Maria School of Law.

Gallagher spoke with Register correspondent Matthew Rarey. ...

Do any of these “interesting questions” pique your interest in particular?

One question I’m intensely interested in is why Mormon faith communities are so much more successful than other religious groups in terms of family. They have much higher rates of marriage, lower rates of abortion, divorce and unwed childbearing than, say, Catholics. We Catholics tend to go to orthodoxy for all the answers, but there’s something to be said for orthopraxy, too. How do we live the faith successfully and transmit a marriage culture to the next generation under modern conditions? What institutions and practices can parents, schools, neighborhoods, faith communities and professionals adopt that help make marriage not a theory but a lived reality?

The ancients cannot answer that for us. We have to figure it out ourselves. ...

CRM’s initial conference was entitled “Children, Kinship, Psychological Health, and Identity Formation: The Cases of Divorce and Donor Insemination.” Why this topic?

Both divorce and donor insemination affect children’s identities in ways that we have only begun to think about and explore. Divorce is not just a practical problem for children. It poses an existential or ontological problem: How do I trust the family when the family can fall apart? Without the family, what is my core identity?

Adult children conceived by donor insemination are beginning to point out similar existential issues on their origins. The parent they love deliberately deprived them of access to the other biological parent, the so-called sperm donor. For at least some — and it looks like many of these children — the biological relationship continues to matter, even though the actual family of the child pretends it does not.

They point to the reality that donor conception is used because biology does matter: Their mother wanted a child who was her natural child. But the child’s longing to be connected to his or her mother and father — the two people who made him or her — is treated as a non sequitur. It’s just not taken seriously.

We know biology isn’t everything. We know that adoption is good. But if biology isn’t everything, is it anything? Are parents just “caregivers” who’ve taken on a role? Or is there a relationship that is in some sense beyond choice — that is created by creation, as it were? These are big questions.

On the small side, I think the scholars present learned from each other some practical things, too.

Labels: Catholic Church, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, culture, donor conception, government interest in marriage, Maggie Gallagher, Marriage, religion

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If I were running for governor of Maryland, here's a speech I would give this weekend, injecting a fresh idea into the campaign:

"I will propose a new law to encourage cohabiting couples to marry. Most out-of-wedlock births are to couples who are committed enough to each other to live together. However, most cohabitations end within 18 months." ...

"If elected governor, I will make it my priority to reduce this wreckage. Here are some ideas:

"I will create a Maryland Marriage Commission. It will include key church and government officials, plus leaders in the marriage movement.

"I will require state welfare offices to provide information on the value of marriage in reducing poverty and increasing wealth, happiness and longer lives. (For example, married men live 10 years longer than single men, and women live four years longer.) Publicly funded birth control clinics will provide information on the benefits of marriage. Public schools can be encouraged make a case for not having children until marriage.

"I will reduce marriage penalties. Currently, if cohabiting couples marry, they lose welfare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, housing subsidies, etc. I propose to extend state benefits for a year if they marry and agree to take courses to improve their communication and conflict-resolution skills. That will encourage many to marry, which is what is best for them and their children. After that year, I will taper off subsidies by 25 percent per year. Since married men earn more than single men, most would not need subsidies long term."

Labels: cohabitation, divorce, government interest in marriage, Marriage, marriage penalty, marriage promotion, Maryland, out-of-wedlock births, poverty

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Marriage is one of the top five issues of the 2010 elections. It will remain a controlling factor in the American dilemma until some form of the “10 Marriage Policies to rebuild America” is enacted at federal and state levels.

Why? Marriage-absence is driving federal and state deficits. Health care coverage, personal bankruptcy, and home loan defaults are infrequent problems for married couples. Children raised in intact families are the last to get in trouble, flunk out of school, join a gang, have babies, become chronic substance abusers, commit crimes, or grow up to be criminals.

Social spending – with government rushing in hoping to mitigate problems arising from marriage-absence -- is by far the largest line and fastest-growing item in federal and state budgets. Social spending does not put out fires, nor does it save the starfish. It buys another round of marriage-absence and deficits. ...

Eight years ago, James Q. Wilson pointed out the nexus between marriage, freedom, and economic success: “the nation is becoming divided into two nations; not a nation of the rich and the poor, but a nation of the married and the unmarried bearing children. The effort of the United States to expand freedom and economic opportunity to everybody is now running up against this wall.” Eight years later, we collided with the wall and wonder where our freedoms, economy, and future went.

Labels: economics, government interest in marriage, Marriage, Missouri, out-of-wedlock births

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Ottawa author, psychologist and relationship researcher Dr. Sue Johnson is on a mission: She wants the federal government to help improve marriages.

Reports on the state of our unions are numerous.

A Canadian's risk of divorcing by her 30th anniversary now stands at 38 per cent, a drop since the 1990s, the Vanier Institute of the Family, which conducts research on the changing nature of the Canadian Family, reported last year. The average age at divorce in Canada is 44 for men and 41 for women. ...

Johnson, the head of the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute and a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Ottawa, argues that Canada needs a national institution to co-ordinate strategies to build strong marriages.

"There is little support for the most basic unit in society. We don't have an active government policy for an institution that thinks about how to strengthen marriages," she says. "I'm not sure we have to throw millions at it. But you need a national commitment and a central organization." ...

Clarence Lochhead, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, says Johnson's idea is interesting, but he hesitates to endorse it.

"It would be a good and healthy thing. But one would have to be careful about framing the need for such an agency and make sure that it's inclusive," he says.

The notion of family has proved be a fluid thing. Rather than "marriage," Lochhead prefers to use the term "relationship of care that involves commitment over time."

Even young people aspire to marriage and say they want to spend their lives with a single person, but that's not the reality for many Canadians, he says.

"We gave up on the idea of promoting a version of the ideal family, and concentrate on the lived reality."

Johnson says her idea is not about only heterosexual couples, or people in legal marriages, or even about keeping unhappy people together.

Labels: Canada, family structure, government interest in marriage, Marriage

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...So at the risk of awkwardness, we must talk about the facts of life. It is true that marriage is, in part, an emotional union, and it is also true that spouses often take care of each other and thereby reduce the caregiving burden on other people. But neither of these truths is the fundamental reason for marriage. The reason marriage exists is that the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children. If it did not produce children, neither society nor the government would have much reason, let alone a valid reason, to regulate people’s emotional unions. (The government does not regulate non-marital friendships, no matter how intense they are.) If mutual caregiving were the purpose of marriage, there would be no reason to exclude adult incestuous unions from marriage. What the institution and policy of marriage aims to regulate is sex, not love or commitment. These days, marriage regulates sex (to the extent it does regulate it) in a wholly non-coercive manner, sex outside of marriage no longer being a crime.

Marriage exists, in other words, to solve a problem that arises from sex between men and women but not from sex between partners of the same gender: what to do about its generativity. It has always been the union of a man and a woman (even in polygamous marriages in which a spouse has a marriage with each of two or more persons of the opposite sex) for the same reason that there are two sexes: It takes one of each type in our species to perform the act that produces children. That does not mean that marriage is worthwhile only insofar as it yields children. (The law has never taken that view.) But the institution is oriented toward child-rearing. (The law has taken exactly that view.) What a healthy marriage culture does is encourage adults to arrange their lives so that as many children as possible are raised and nurtured by their biological parents in a common household.

That is also what a sound law of marriage does. Although it is still a radical position without much purchase in public opinion, one increasingly hears the opinion that government should get out of the marriage business: Let individuals make whatever contracts they want, and receive the blessing of whatever church agrees to give it, but confine the government’s role to enforcing contracts. This policy is not so much unwise as it is impossible. The government cannot simply declare itself uninterested in the welfare of children. Nor can it leave it to prearranged contract to determine who will have responsibility for raising children. (It’s not as though people can be expected to work out potential custody arrangements every time they have sex; and any such contracts would look disturbingly like provisions for ownership of a commodity.)

When a marriage involving children breaks down, or a marriage culture weakens, government has to get more involved, not less. Courts may well end up deciding on which days of the month each parent will see a child. We have already gone some distance in separating marriage and state, in a sense: The law no longer ties rights and responsibilities over children to marriage, does little to support a marriage culture, and in some ways subsidizes non-marriage. In consequence government must involve itself more directly in caring for children than it did under the old marriage regime — with worse results.

Labels: culture, divorce, gay marriage, government interest in marriage, Marriage, sex

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...Robert Stein, a conservative economist who served as deputy assistant secretary for macroeconomic analysis in George W. Bush's administration, says the tax code is unfair to one particular group of Americans: parents.

He argues that parents invest thousands of dollars in raising members of society who eventually fund programs such as Social Security and Medicare, but retirees who chose not to raise children get the same old-age benefits as those who did. ...

Stein would replace this system with a $4,000-per-child tax credit. That parental tax credit would be funded in part through Stein's other big idea: Simplify the personal income tax to two brackets -- one that taxes 15 percent of income and the other 35 percent. He estimates that few people now in the 10 percent bracket would pay more if they move to 15 percent, because of the child exemption. ...

Much of the energy from conservatives went to promoting marriage as a cultural virtue. But Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, argues that it is important to highlight the economic benefits of marriage. ...

"We need to appreciate that marriage is more than an emotional connection between two people," Wilcox said. "There are kids; it's a kind of economic cooperation, a form of social insurance."

Wilcox says churches, the entertainment industry and other cultural institutions would have to embrace this view of marriage, not just the government. He proposes federal funding for public-service announcements and other social marketing to promote marriage, modeled on anti-smoking campaigns.

And to discourage divorce, he says, states should change marriage laws so spouses who are being divorced against their will and have not engaged in abuse or adultery would be given preferential treatment by family courts in determining alimony, child support and custody of children.

Labels: culture, demographics, divorce, divorce reform, government interest in marriage, Marriage, tax policy, W. Bradford Wilcox

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The press has rushed to report a minuscule drop in “teen births” based on data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). As usual, the mainstream media are focusing on a trivial, politically correct story while ignoring the real story buried in the data.

Here’s the real story: According to CDC, a record 40.6 percent of children born in 2008 were born outside marriage — a total of 1.72 million children. The overwhelming majority of the unwed mothers were young adults with low education levels, precisely the kind of individuals who have the greatest difficulty going it alone in our society.

Only about 7.5 percent of these out-of-wedlock births, 130,000, were to girls under 18. Of course, these births can be disastrous for the girls involved. But as a social problem, teen pregnancies and births are of quite limited importance. By contrast, 1.72 million out-of-wedlock births amount to an overwhelming catastrophe for taxpayers and society.

The steady growth of childbearing by single women and the general collapse of marriage, especially among the poor, lie at the heart of the mushrooming welfare state. This year, taxpayers will spend over $300 billion providing means-tested welfare aid to single parents. The average single mother receives nearly three dollars in government benefits for each dollar she pays in taxes. These subsidies are funded largely by the heavy taxes paid by higher-income married couples.

America is rapidly becoming a two-caste society, with marriage and education at the dividing line. Children born to married couples with a college education are mostly in the top half of the population; children born to single mothers with high-school degrees or less are mostly in the bottom half.

Labels: children, culture, government interest in marriage, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, teenage pregnancy

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Touching on a sensitive issue among conservatives nationwide, the Republican-controlled Oklahoma Legislature is embroiled in a dispute over whether lawmakers should remain focused on the state's budget problems and other fiscal priorities or delve into family issues, especially the state's chronically high divorce rate.

Republican members proposed three pieces of legislation imposing new regulations on marriage and divorce in Oklahoma. Two of the measures were defeated, but another — requiring counseling for those planning to wed, and therapy sessions for couples considering divorce — is awaiting action.

The issue has produced sharp clashes among conservative colleagues who normally find themselves in agreement. The debates have featured charges of hypocrisy and of betraying Republican principles against government intrusion into private lives. ...

The most recent federal health statistics in 2007 show the state has the third highest divorce rate in the nation, behind only Nevada and Arkansas. More than half of marriages in Oklahoma end in divorce. In 2007 there were 28,419 marriages and 18,851 divorces.

The divorce problem, which is attributed in part to poverty, teenage pregnancy and a tradition of marrying early, is particularly bedeviling because Oklahoma also has one of the highest rates of church attendance. Promoting family values is a staple of political campaigns at all levels. ...

A study released in 2008 by the Institute for American Values, a private, nonpartisan research group in New York City, estimated the taxpayer cost of divorce and unwed childbearing at $112 billion a year nationwide.

The Legislature debated a bill to require troubled couples to visit a therapist or a faith-based counselor before seeking to end their marriage and another to eliminate incompatibility as grounds for divorce if the couple has children or has been married 10 years or more. Neither were approved, but McCullough's measure to require pre-marriage and troubled-marriage counseling remains alive.

Labels: divorce, divorce reform, government interest in marriage, Marriage, marriage counseling, Oklahoma

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