Dialogues

What “I Do” Can Do

Dear Mickey and Jonah:

Like many others, both of you want government to provide more benefits to working, low-income parents. Yesterday I ran through the list of programs that provide tens of billions of dollars in benefits to these families in order to clarify what I would describe as the generous system of benefits we already have. Jonah calls this nothing more than a “good start.” OK. That’s why we have politics. I’m glad there are people like Jonah fighting in Washington and in state capitals around the country for more benefits for working families. But given the budget and political realities in Washington and in most states, I doubt that Jonah and his fellow advocates are going to rack up any major successes in the near future.

So, I agree that Angie and Jewell deserve help from government. But if they already receive (or are eligible for) around $4,000 through the Earned Income Tax Credit, $1,000 or more from food stamps, Medicaid coverage worth $1,000 or more for the children, plus child care and other benefits, it is clear that the current system provides what most Americans would think is quite a bit—especially from the perspective of married couples who both work and earn around $35,000 or more and receive few if any government benefits. Jonah wants to pay for additional benefits by repealing the Bush tax cuts. The top fifth of families (those earning around $65,000 per year or more) already pay over 80 percent of federal income taxes. Jonah and Mickey want them to pay more. Again, that’s why we have politics. The recent election implies quite strongly that not only will the tax cuts not be repealed, in all likelihood they will be made permanent. While Jonah and others are waiting for a change in their political fortunes, Angie and Jewell would be well advised not to count on additional government benefits.

As Mickey and I seem to agree, the most immediate help would come from marriage. A recent study at Brookings by my colleagues Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas showed that if the marriage rate today were the same as it was in 1970, the poverty rate would be nearly 30 percent lower. Thus, if you pick unmarried males and females at random from the population and match them on age, race, and education, and assume that they are married, the poverty rate would plummet without any government involvement. It is not ordained by nature that a third of American children and nearly 70 percent of black children be born outside of marriage, that marriage rates (which began to decline precipitously around the 1960s) for black Americans remain under 40 percent, or that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. One consequence of these huge problems with the nation’s families is stubbornly high poverty rates. But the toll in human waste goes far beyond mere poverty rates. As shown unequivocally by volumes of research studies, the earnings, wealth, health, and happiness of the adults, and the school performance, chances of teen pregnancy, arrest rates, mental health problems, and even suicide rates of the children are higher because of the dismal status of the American family.

Years ago a famous report on education said that if a foreign enemy had perpetrated our public schools on the nation, we would declare war. Our public schools are still bad, but the threat to the health and well-being of the nation’s children posed by the public schools is much less than the actual devastation now being caused by so many of our children growing up in single-parent families. To a substantial degree—brave and tough and uncomplaining though they might be—Angie and Jewell brought their problems on themselves by trying to support their families outside marriage. Even if Jonah and Mickey were co-emperors and could bestow another $4,000 or $5,000 a year on them, they, their children, and their communities would still be much less than they could be if they and their neighbors lived in married-couple families.

One of the major purposes of welfare reform was to encourage—and when necessary, force—adults to live in accord with the fundamental American value that adults should support themselves and their children. In this respect, welfare reform has been a huge success. In statistics that DeParle did not adequately review in his book, low-income mothers heading families increased their earnings (and their payments from the Earned Income Tax Credit) every year between 1993 and 2000. At the same time, their income from welfare declined. Combined, their lower income from welfare and their higher earnings left them around 20 percent better off in 2000 than in 1995. Thus, they made their money the old-fashioned way—they earned it. In the process, many of these single mothers—including Angie and Jewell—removed themselves and their children from poverty. Although the recession has reduced the percentage of these single mothers who have jobs, even after the third consecutive year of increasing poverty rates, the poverty rate is still more than 22 percent lower than it was in 1995 when mothers started leaving welfare and moving en masse into the workforce. If marriage rates increase in the future like work rates have already increased, research shows that a host of the nation’s social problems would decline, perhaps dramatically. More government benefits might make Angie and Jewell better-off financially, but government benefits would not confer the broad range of economic and social benefits that increased marriage would cause in their children and their communities.

Mickey is hopeful that increased work by welfare mothers will lead to increased marriage. I hope he’s right. But just as research contributed to the development of programs that dramatically decreased welfare dependency through increased work, research could lead to programs that hold real promise for increasing marriage rates. It’s certainly worth a try. And that’s exactly what the Bush administration is proposing.

Mickey points out that DeParle was “cold-eyed and unsparing” in his portrayal of the greatly diminished role of men in the lives of Angie and Jewell and their children. I wish those on the political left would be equally cold-eyed and unsparing in their assessment of the true prospects for solving the nation’s social problems and promoting the full development of our children through increased government benefits rather than through a resurgence in married-couple families.

Ron