Marketplace January 21, 2004
One of the President's new initiatives, announced last night in his State of the Union Address, is to spend over a billion dollars to promote marriage, especially among the poor. The money would be used, among other things, to provide counseling for couples in how to form stronger and more lasting relationships.
I'm all in favor of marriage. Been married over thirty years to the same wonderful woman. And if the President wants to promote marriage, that's fine by me. After all, it's an election year a time to celebrate motherhood and apple pie ... and marriage.
But if anyone in this administration seriously believes that promoting marriage is going to reduce the scourge of single-parent poverty in America, they're dead wrong.
It's true that most impoverished kids have unmarried mothers. Yet the White House has cause and effect backwards. It's not being single that causes mothers to be poor. It's being poor that makes it less likely they'll marry. You see, poor women generally don't have a bumper crop of marriage-worthy men to choose from. Most of the men available to them are either unemployed or employed part-time. And even when they've got a job these men typically earn very little. So it's completely rational for a poor woman to hedge her bets. A man is welcome to stay with her only so long as he pulls in enough money and treats her well.
In fact, poor unmarried mothers typically have men living with them. In nearly half of all out-of-wedlock births, the man who lives-in is the biological father. But the woman has no reason to marry him unless he's a good breadwinner. Studies show that mothers are far more likely to marry the fathers of their children when the father is employed.
Look, there's no doubt that single-parent poverty is a big problem. But lack of marriage isn't the main culprit. It's the lousy jobs many poorly-educated women and men have to settle for. Jobs at the bottom of the economic ladder don't pay enough to support a working woman and her children. They don't pay enough to support a working man and his family, either. So even if the mother is sharing expenses with a working man who's also at the bottom of the income ladder, the family is still going to be poor.
Government campaigns to promote marriage aren't the answer. The best way to improve the odds that children won't be impoverished is to help women and men get better-paying jobs. This means, at the least, access to good schools and job training. Yet school budgets all over America are being slashed, funds for job training are being cut, and community colleges are turning away more and more poor people who can't afford the tuition.
Election-year grandstanding about marriage is no substitute for doing what this nation must do to prepare all our people for work that pays enough to keep families out of poverty.
