LORAIN, Ohio — Marriage has lost its luster in Lorain, Ohio.

Sixty-three percent of all births to women under 30 in Lorain County occur outside marriage, according to Child Trends, a research center in Washington. That figure has risen by more than two-thirds over the past two decades, and now surpasses the national figure of 53 percent.

The change has transformed life in Lorain, a ragged industrial town on Lake Erie. Churches perform fewer weddings. Applications for marriage licenses are down by a third. Just a tenth of the students at the local community college are married, but its campus has a bustling day care center.

The New York Times interviewed several dozen people in Lorain about marriage here. What follows are their stories.

Young parents spoke of an economy that was fundamentally different from in their parents’ time, and that required more than a high school education for fathers to be stable breadwinners. They talked of how little they trusted each other to be reliable mates, and of how the government safety net encourages poor parents to stay single. ...

Many women described a lifestyle of dating in which relationships sometimes resulted in children, but less often in fathers deeply involved in their families. Judge David Basinski of Lorain County Domestic Relations Court, in Elyria, said he recently had a case in which a man who had nine children by six women owed $55,000 in back child support. Child support cases have become so common among unmarried parents that the court now gives seminars on parental responsibilities.

Labels: children, class, culture, economics, Fathers, incarceration, Marriage, marriage penalty, men, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, single parenting, welfare, women

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LORAIN, Ohio — It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education. ...

The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage.

Here in Lorain, a blue-collar town west of Cleveland where the decline of the married two-parent family has been especially steep, dozens of interviews with young parents suggest that both sides have a point.

Over the past generation, Lorain lost most of two steel mills, a shipyard and a Ford factory, diminishing the supply of jobs that let blue-collar workers raise middle-class families. More women went to work, making marriage less of a financial necessity for them. Living together became routine, and single motherhood lost the stigma that once sent couples rushing to the altar. Women here often describe marriage as a sign of having arrived rather than a way to get there.

Meanwhile, children happen. ...

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.

In Lorain as elsewhere, explanations for marital decline start with home economics: men are worth less than they used to be. Among men with some college but no degrees, earnings have fallen 8 percent in the past 30 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the earnings of their female counterparts have risen by 8 percent.

Labels: children, class, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, marriage penalty, men, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, race, unmarried parents, women

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BETSEY STEVENSON and Justin Wolfers are known for their work on the economics of coupledom. They avoid giving Dr. Phil-style advice, but they do follow a few basic principles:

DON’T MARRY Mr. Wolfers and Ms. Stevenson aren’t married. Why? Taxes, mostly. Ms. Stevenson says the tax code essentially creates “a subsidy for affluent husbands” by treating a working couple’s dual income just as it treats the same amount of income earned by a working married person whose spouse stays home. That makes working relatively expensive for women, particularly those with children. ...

HAVE CHILDREN Here, economics no longer applies. Children tend to upend the old formulas. Mr. Wolfers used to think that hobbies — he runs, for example — were economically expensive. After all, he could use the time he spends running to make more money. “But parenting throws that all out the window,” he said. Children require much, much time. If he lets his toddler take 10 minutes to do something he could do for her in 30 seconds, “that is a $30 interaction.” But, as a parent, he has learned new ways to value time — accounting for lessons in self-reliance, for example.

Labels: children, class, culture, economics, Marriage, marriage penalty, parenting, tax policy, unmarried parents

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House Republicans are launching a new attack on President Barack Obama's health care reform law today: It will drive you to divorce.

The health reform law could undermine marriage because once people tie the knot, they may no longer be eligible for tax incentives for insurance, a new report [pdf] from the GOP Oversight and Government Reform Committee says.

The law links the tax credit to household income. So two people whose combined income goes above a certain level will not be able to get a tax credit if they are married and file together. But if they get divorced or stay single they might, individually, be eligible for a premium credit. Giving people pause about marriage could be a big "unintended consequence" of the law, the report says.

The committee asked the Joint Committee on Taxation to crunch some marriage numbers. The JCT found that 2 million of the nearly 60 million married couples in the U.S. will end up qualifying for the tax credit.

Labels: marriage penalty, tax policy

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U.S. tax and property laws are so complex that unintended consequences are common. Here is one: Thanks to a 1996 federal law aimed at preserving traditional marriage, thousands of same-sex couples in California, Nevada, and Washington state could get big tax bonuses on their federal returns starting this year.

The bonuses are off-limits to heterosexual married couples—a sharp reminder of the "marriage penalty" that often dings two-earner couples.

What's going on? The affected same-sex couples are benefiting from unusual interactions between state and federal laws.

All three states recognize domestic partnerships and also have what is known as community-property law. Community property refers to a system of ownership in nine states that usually attributes income and property acquired during marriage equally to both partners, regardless of who earned it. (The nine states are Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin.)

The three states also now apply community-property laws to registered domestic partners. So the Internal Revenue Service—which must follow state property laws—has ruled that these couples should figure their total community income and split it down the middle, starting in 2010.

That is where the benefit comes in. Although domestic partners must divide their income equally, the federal Defense of Marriage Act prevents the IRS from treating these couples as married joint filers. So for 2010 and after, each partner will claim half the community income but still file as single or head of household.

The result, in many cases, is a federal tax savings because a couple will avoid the marriage penalty that often raises taxes for two-earner heterosexual married couples. ...

The law has changed many times since, and the current system contains both marriage penalties and bonuses. The bonuses often favor married couples with disparate earnings, because their combined income benefits from lower brackets.

Labels: domestic partnership, gay couples, Marriage, marriage penalty, tax policy

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Kansas Gov.-elect Sam Brownback promised to attack rules for welfare programs that he said discourage marriage as he announced two appointments Monday to social services jobs in his Cabinet. ...

Through SRS, the state provides financial support for poor families and benefits that help them with buying groceries. Eligibility for many SRS programs is tied to the federal poverty level, which rises as the number of people in a family increases.

That means it's possible that a single-parent family receiving such benefits could no longer qualify if the parent marries and the new spouse has a modest income, SRS spokesman Steve Mock said.

Brownback said he wants to see that changed.

"You hit a benefit clip or a marriage penalty in the welfare programs, presently, that for most people is devastating financially. I want to see us get rid of that," he said.

The governor-elect wasn't specific about which programs have rules that discourage marriage and couldn't quantify how many people are affected, though he said it's a significant problem.

Shannon Cotsoradis, president and chief executive officer of the advocacy group Kansas Action for Children, said she doubts any policymakers would want to block improved benefits for families. But she said she hasn't heard of the problem cited by Brownback.

Labels: cohabitation, economics, Kansas, Marriage, marriage penalty

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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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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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Senate Democrats' health care bill would create a new marriage penalty by imposing a tax on individuals who make $200,000 annually but hitting married couples making just $50,000 more. ...

Democrats said the bill will offer lower health care costs for small businesses and families, and said the new taxes are aimed at upper-income earners, so costs would not go up for the middle class. They said that makes good on President Obama's campaign pledge not to increase taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year, which explains the reason for the new marriage penalty.

"We wanted to make this provision consistent with the president's pledge not to increase taxes on singles making under $200,000 and married couples making under $250,000," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who wrote the Senate bill.

"Yes, this structure can create a 'marriage penalty' for some couples. It also creates a 'marriage bonus' for others," he said. "A married couple with one wage earner can earn up to $250,000 without facing this higher tax, whereas a single person in the same job with the same pay would be hit by it."

But a married couple in which each earner makes $150,000 would be hit with the tax, whereas an unmarried couple living together with the same incomes would not.

Labels: cohabitation, Marriage, marriage penalty, poverty, tax policy

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...There’s no question that the marriage penalty pains many dual-earner couples. Although Congress has taken steps to reduce it, many middle- and upper-income married couples still pay more than they would if each partner filed separately as a single person. For example, for a couple who each earn about $75,000 and take only a standard deduction, the marriage penalty is about $500, says Mark Steber, vice president of tax resources for Jackson Hewitt. The penalty goes up as incomes rise, to about $787 for a couple making $200,000, for example. The marriage penalty disappears for married couples filing jointly who make roughly equal incomes totaling $132,000 or less, Jackson Hewitt says.

But marriage also conveys many offsetting financial benefits that will endure long after April 15, Mr. Steber says.

Labels: marriage penalty, tax policy

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