For the next few decades, means-tested welfare programs such as food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, day care, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families penalized marriage. A mother generally received far more money from welfare if she was single rather than married. Once she took a husband, her benefits were instantly reduced by roughly 10 to 20 percent. As a Cato Institute study noted, welfare programs for the poor incentivize the very behaviors that are most likely to perpetuate poverty.[2] Another Cato report observes:
*Of course women do not get pregnant just to get welfare benefits.... But, by removing the economic consequences of out-of-wedlock birth, welfare has removed a major incentive to avoid such pregnancies. A teenager looking around at her friends and neighbors is liable to see several who have given birth out-of- wedlock. When she sees that they have suffered few visible consequences ... she is less inclined to modify her own behavior to prevent pregnancy.... Current welfare policies seem to be designed with an appalling lack of concern for their impact on out-of-wedlock births. Indeed, Medicaid programs in 11 states actually provide infertility treatments to single women on welfare.*
The marriage penalties that are embedded in welfare programs can be particularly severe if a woman on public assistance weds a man who is employed in a low-paying job. As a FamilyScholars.org report puts it: *When a couple's income nears the limits prescribed by Medicaid, a few extra dollars in income cause thousands of dollars in benefits to be lost. What all of this means is that the two most important routes out of poverty*marriage and work*are heavily taxed under the current U.S. system.*[3]
The aforementioned FamilyScholars.org report adds that *such a system encourages surreptitious cohabitation,* where *many low-income parents will cohabit without reporting it to the government so that their benefits won't be cut.* These couples *avoid marriage because marriage would result in a substantial loss of income for the family.*
A 2011 study conducted jointly by the Institute for American Values* Center for Marriage and Families and the University of Virginia's National Marriage Project suggests that *the rise of cohabiting households with children is the largest unrecognized threat to the quality and stability of children*s family lives.* The researchers conclude that cohabiting relationships are highly prone to instability, and that children in such homes are consequently less likely to thrive, more likely to be abused, and more prone to suffering *serious emotional problems.*
William Galston, President Bill Clinton's Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, estimated that the welfare system, with its economic disincentives to marriage, was responsible for at least 15% to 20% of the family disintegration in the United States. Libertarian scholar Charles Murray has placed the figure at somewhere around 50%. By Murray's reckoning, the growth and increased liberalization of the *welfare complex* have eroded the traditional ethos of working-class communities that once held people who worked at low-wage jobs, and men who married the mothers of their children, in much higher esteem than unwed parents who became wards of the state.
Originally Posted by cockerpunk
