Over the past couple of years, Republicans have felt increasing pressure to put forth free market proposals to combat poverty. Accordingly, many, like Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, have begun proposing solutions — a reassuring trend for an issue too often ignored by politicians. Some salient ideas have come out of this push, such as Ryan’s plan to expand the earned income tax credit to childless adults. However, many of these anti-poverty proposals unfortunately miss their mark.
Notably, Republicans have raised the idea of marriage promotion as an anti-poverty solution. In 2014, Florida Senator and current presidential hopeful Marco Rubio called marriage “the greatest tool to lift people, to lift children and families, from poverty,” noting how it “decreases the probability of child poverty by 82 percent.” While mulling a third run for president in early 2015, Mitt Romney proposed incentivizing marriage as a means to reduce poverty. And former Florida Governor and current presidential candidate Jeb Bush said in May that more “traditional marriage” is needed to fight child poverty.
Given Marco Rubio’s statistic, the rationale behind encouraging marriage may seem straightforward. According to UNICEF, the United States has the second-highest child poverty rates in the developed world. And this poverty falls disproportionately hard on children living with only one parent; 45 percent of children living with just their mother and 21 percent of children living with just their father live in poverty, in contrast with the national child poverty statistic of 13 percent. The rationale follows that the best economic situation for a child is a two-parent household. This makes sense: How can we expect single parents to provide for their children economically while also performing all their necessary parenting functions? Problems associated with single parenthood — especially single motherhood — have been widely talked about ever since the Moynihan Report of 1965, where Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor in the Kennedy Administration, blamed the economic and social problems of African-American communities on the high frequency of single motherhood. Therefore, advocates say that we should use government policy to convince parents, who might otherwise raise children on their own, to get hitched.
But the more prominent approach that has been proposed would be to reduce marriage penalties in the welfare system. Currently, when two welfare recipients tie the knot, the benefits the couple receives after marriage are less than those they would have received collectively had they stayed apart. This system presumes that couples will share resources once married, reducing the need for more assistance. Many conservatives have called for an end to the welfare marriage penalty, arguing that it creates a harmful disincentive to marry, among other problems. But the dispute over marriage penalties is besides the point; just the idea of marriage promotion should not be seen as a serious, effective solution to America’s child poverty problem.
First and foremost, it’s been tried before, to little avail. In 2001, President George W. Bush rolled out the Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI), a marriage promotion project that has since cost taxpayers $800 million. The program employed a combination of counseling, advertising, and educational programs to try to encourage couples to marry and reduce the child poverty rate. Over a decade later, studies assessing the program have deemed it largely ineffective at affecting marriage rates at all. America’s marriage rate continued to decline, and its divorce rate did not change much. When researchers at the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University wrote a paper assessing the program, they compared states that spent significant funds on the program to states that did not. The report found that “state-level spending on HMIs did not have a significant association with state marriage rates.”
It is hard to determine just how effective ending or reducing welfare marriage penalties would be in increasing marriage rates. But the very idea of this rests on the assumption that increasing marriage rates would reduce child poverty — an assumption that seems unlikely. Supporters of marriage promotion programs think that by reducing the number of single-parent households, they will decrease poverty — or, in other words, that children are in poverty due to a lack of marriage. In reality, the picture is much more complex. In many ways, poverty itself is what causes couples to stay separate rather than marry. Economist Nancy Folbre and historian Stephanie Coontz explain that low-income and uneducated women are not seen as very “marriageable” and have a difficult time finding spouses, pointing out that women from low-income areas can be five to seven times more likely to become unwed mothers than other girls. In addition, research has shown that the stresses of poverty themselves lead to a higher likelihood of divorce. Another reason that low-income women don’t marry is to avoid the risk of having to care for a spouse who could potentially become unemployed and make their economic situation worse off, not better. Knowing this makes it much harder to assume that increasing marriage rates will have a direct effect on poverty.
Furthermore, when sociologists have compared the United States to countries in other parts of the world with lower child poverty rates, they have continually found that the number of households headed by single-parent families makes for extremely little of this difference. Rather, larger social safety nets account for much of these gaps in child poverty rates between countries. Matt Bruenig of Demos demonstrated this concept by showing the United States in comparison to three countries with much smaller child poverty rates and similar percentages of children living with single parents. When he factored out taxes and transfers, the child poverty gap between the United States and these three countries mostly went away, showing that welfare programs made the real difference. Rigorous analysis from the Population Association of America has confirmed this idea.
And when Mathematica, a policy research organization, conducted a study of marriage promotion programs sponsored by the HMI in eight cities, the results did not come out favorably for proponents of marriage promotion. The authors wrote that the program studied “had no effect on the family stability or economic well-being of children.”
Moreover, this Republican push for marriage promotion disregards non-heterosexual marriages. This is because of the right’s consistent push against gay marriage over the past few years. If marriage is really the ideal situation to raise a child in, what is the problem with expanding the institution in a way that is actually effective? Thus, Republican support of marriage promotion is especially problematic.
And better solutions do exist. A more effective solution to poverty reduction that considers family structure might be expanded contraception and family planning services, which low-income women are less likely to be able to use. By allowing women to better choose the amount of children right for them, considering their economic situations, contraception can help fight child poverty. And it’s important not to forget strengthening safety net programs, which, as previously mentioned, are the biggest explanation for our poverty gap compared to other developed countries. Thus, especially when other policy options are considered, marriage promotion cannot be seen as an effective solution to America’s child poverty issue.
