Karen Kornbluh, principal author of the 2008 Democratic Party platform and a work-family economics expert, spoke today at the New America Foundation in Washington about how to make sure our response to the economic crisis is responsive to working families -- particularly single mothers and their children. A third of all American children today are raised by a single parent and 60 percent of all children in poverty are being raised by a single mother.
Kornbluh's main point was that any "New New Deal" must address a central problem with our existing New Deal social programs: They are biased toward dual parent, single-earner families with children. Under our current system, a stay-at-home wife and mother who never worked a day in her life will get a larger share of Social Security than a working single mom. And as Kornbluh smartly put it, Social Security benefits "the Cleavers more than Roseanne and Dan." In other words, even among married couples, our system rewards single-earner marriages more than dual-earner ones, which are by far more common.
--Dana Goldstein
