Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
How social-welfare policy is affecting family formation
How social-welfare policy is affecting family formation
Apr 26, 2025 12:31 AM

In America, the most effective “anti-poverty program” is the institution of work (more specifically, ensuring people have a full-time job). The second most effective program for preventing people from being poor is the institution of marriage.

The poverty rate among married couples in America is around 6 percent, and among married couples who both have full-time jobs the poverty rate is practically zero (0.001 percent). In contrast, the poverty rate among single-dads/moms is much higher: 25 percent for single dads / 31 percent for single moms.

Unfortunately, government-based anti-poverty programs tend to conflict with or discourage the benefits of work and marriage. In his 1984 book Losing Ground, Charles Murray reported that the expansion of federal and state support for poor families during the 1960s-era War on Poverty ended up penalizing marriage. The reason is that government aid is often “means-tested” — recipients can only receive the aid if they do not possess the means to do without that help.

While this may seem like monsensical approach, it can have detrimental unintended consequences. For example, a single-mother may be receiving $15,000 in aid from the government and wish to marry a man who is earning $15,000. Before walking down the aisle, though, she learns that her potential husband’s e would put her over the means-tested threshold and she would lose all government aid. She would be better off, financially speaking, by merely “shacking up” with the man and not getting married at all. This is often known as a “marriage penalty,” where it makes more financial sense for a couple to cohabit rather than to marry. And it has been a public policy problem for almost fifty years. A new report by AEI and the Institute for Family Studies, however, shows that the unintended consequences are beginning to change in unexpected ways.

“In the 1960s and 1970s, social-welfare programs may have been most consequential for family formation among the poorest couples, largely because they were the ones most likely to participate in such programs,” notes the report. “Today, however, the design of social-welfare policy may have the most influence on couples in the lower middle class.”

The report’s analysis of American couples whose oldest child is two years or younger indicates that 82 percent of those in the second and third quintiles of family e ($24,000 to $79,000) face this kind of marriage penalty when es to Medicaid, cash welfare, or food stamps. By contrast, only 66 percent of their counterparts in the bottom quintile (less than $24,000) face such a penalty.

Additionally, they found that almost one-third of Americans aged 18 to 60 report that they personally know someone who has not married for fear of losing means-tested benefits. The report offers four strategies for addressing the marriage penalties embedded within social-welfare policies:

1– In determining eligibility for Medicaid and food stamps, increase the e threshold for married couples with children under five to twice what it is for a single parent with children under five. Such a move would ensure that couples just starting a family do not feel pressured to forgo marriage just to access medical care and food for their families. The cost of this policy change would be limited, since it would only affect families with young children.

2– Offer an annual, refundable tax credit to married couples with children under five that pensate them for any loss in means-tested benefits associated with marrying, up to $1000. This would send a clear signal that the government does not wish to devalue marriage and, for couples, it would help to offset any penalties associated with tying the knot.

3– Work with states to run local experiments designed to eliminate the marriage penalty associated with means-tested policies. States could receive waivers to test a range of strategies to eliminate penalties in munities, and municate to the public that the penalties are no longer in force there. Successful experiments could then be scaled up to the national level in future efforts to reform means-tested policies.

4– Encourage states and caseworkers working with e families to treat two-parent families in much the same way as they do single-parent families. For instance, states could ease the distinctive work requirements that many have in place for two-parent families receiving cash welfare. Reforms such as this one would put two-parent and single-parent families on a more equal footing when es to public assistance. More generally, policymakers and caseworkers should try to eliminate policies and practices that effectively discriminate in favor of single-parent families.

The effect of government aid programs is mixed — and costly. Since the beginning of the war on poverty until 2012, local, state, and federal spending on welfare programs has totaled 15,000,000,000,000. Currently, the United States spends nearly $1 trillion every year to fight poverty, an amount equal to $20,610 for every poor person in America, or $61,830 per poor family of three.

Despite their relative ineffectiveness in alleviating poverty, the programs aren’t going away anytime soon. Today, more than four in ten families in America receive some kind of means-tested government assistance, from Medicaid to food stamps. Instead plaining about social-welfare policy, though, Christians in America should be encouraging reforms that eliminate marriage penalties. In helping to alleviate poverty we need to make sure we aren’t unintentionally hurting the formation of American families.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved