What should the government and society do to encourage marriage?

Great Debates
1

This article argues that:[ol][li]Marriage is uniquely important to society. Self-indulgent lifestyle choices of adults are destructive to the lives of children, inflicting enormous social costs on our institutions. The greatest anti-poverty program ever devised is marriage.[]It is not the government’s role to encourage marriage. Marriage is a personal choice that’s none of the government’s business and, besides, government programs are doomed to fail.[]Encouraging marriage is the job of parents, community leaders, the middle class, religious figures, social and cultural icons, teachers and every adult who cares that children are being emotionally and intellectually damaged by self-absorbed adults who regard them as the unintended reminders of one-night stands.[/ol]Regarding point #1, ISTM that the arguments assume a cause-and-effect relationship between marriage and poverty. For all we know, the poverty and problems of so many children of unmarried parents may be caused by the mother’s young age, her lack of education, her poverty, etc. Maybe marriage would make a big difference to a poor, uneducated teen-age mother, but the article doesn’t prove it.[/li]
Regarding #2, the Bush administration is about to get a law passed allowing them to spend up to $300 million per year to promote marriage as an element of welfare reform. It will be interesting to see whether they have any impact.

Regarding #3, it’s worth debating what other social institutions should and shouldn’t do to promote marriage. It seems natural for charities to focus on unmarried mothers, because they’re the most in need. In a way, the more we help unmarried mothers, the more we encourage unmarried motherhood. OTOH, it seems wrong to turn our backs on needy unmarried mothers.

Another related point is the frequency of divorce. If marriage is vital to society, then is divorce would seem to be harmful to society? Should something be done to discourage divorce?

2

Allow lesbians and gays to marry.

Numbers would increase considerably:D

3

I agree that the government shouldn’t encourage marraige.

The government shouldn’t encourage single parents either.

The best way to do this would have the government get out of the welfare business and tax everyone at the same rate regardless of marital status.

A public awareness campaign about the problems of single parenthood wouldn’t hurt either.

4

I for one do not believe that it is the married or unmarried state that has an influence on kids and/or society.
The way kids are raised nowadays would have an awful lot more to do with it.
I don’t think being married (or not) is fundamentally going to change the way you raise a child. Cohabitating couples do just as well, or even better in some cases.
I do agree that we live in a “me” era, the era of the individual. Which is, i’m sure you’re aware, something the Western World promotes. A lot of Asian societies place the group, or family before the “self”.
So who’s to blame for our current social diseases? Everyone a bit, methinks.
Evreyone should try and live their life in harmony with their surroundings, be that fauna, flora, or homo sapiens.

Not everyone sees marriage as a lifetime commitment, in fact, most people don’t. people get married after a few months, a year or so, and then they’re surprised it doesn’t work out. But ah well, they dip into their purses or wallets, and buy their freedom back.

I think it would be criminal to prohibit divorce. I can assure you that a lot more domestic violence would be the result. Or nobody getting married anymore, at all.

People should learn how to live together, and come to think of it, prospective parents would do well to take parenting classes. After all, being a parent is something you learn, not something you are.

And studies in the UK have shown that teenage delinquents do better when their parents have gone to such lessons.
Give me a moment and I’ll see if I can find you a link.

So marriage: personally I’m indifferent, but I don’t think that married couples should be rewarded, over unmarried, cohabitating couples.

5

The author of the article is trapped in his own assumptions. The problem could just as easily be solved by encouraging, or even mandating, abortions for single mothers.

Sua

6

Debaser is on the right track here. With the gov’t in the welfare business, it then has to be in the “get people off welfare” business, which means social engineering like this. It’s the same as when the gov’t requires motorcycle riders to wear helmets because “we all have to pay for it” when they crash w/o one.

We’ll see conservatives supporting public money spent on promoting marriage, but decrying public money spent on promoting condom use in teens. And liberals will do the exact opposite. How about a happy medium and no public money spent on social engineering projects?

7

Naive fantasy. Any governmental intervention in society - inevitable as government - is ‘social engineering.’ No way around this insofar as government is and should be a partial expression of social mores. Unless you plan on abolishing human nature, learn to live with it.

8

I agree. In particular, transfer payment programs, such as Social Security or welfare, have important social engineering aspects, for better or for worse.

Even taxation has elements of social engineering. I would like to see the marriage penalty totally eliminated, not just reduced. I think marriage is good for society and it should not be discouraged by the government. One way to accomplish this would be to allow married couples to file separate returns as if they were single.

9

Of course it will never happen. That’s not the point. The point is you have a goal of the way you think things should be and then you work towards that goal. If you have no vision of the ideal situation, how do you make decisions other than just say, “well this is the way things are, we can’t change it”.

Even if we accept that idea that “government should be an expression of social mores”, it does not automatically follow that the government should actively discourage a type of perfectly legal behavior. Or try to minimize it’s involvement in the personal choices of the citizens.

10

Dec: But if we recoginze that taxation can have social engineering implications, we can try to minimize those aspects by making the tax as socially nuetral as humanly possible. Throwing up your hands and saying that all taxation is social engineering is an abdication of responsibility to ensure the government is a guardian of personal freedom, not an enforcer of a particular lifestyle.

11

I agree.

Getting back specifacally to marriage, when I was young the opportunity to file a joint return helped most married couples. The husband usually produced most of the income, but the joint return treated their income as if each had earned 50% of it. Even today, the joint return saves money for couples like this. However, because it’s mandatory, it hurts couples who earn roughly the same amount.

I don’t know whether it’s possible to design a system that would be marriage-neutral for all couples. I suppose we could just eliminate the joint return, but that would encourage couples to think of themselves as separate financial entities. The very existence or non-existence of the joint return is a kind of social engineering.

Also, some married couples might still be able to finagle the allocation of joint income, so as to reduce taxes.

12

From the article:

Bill OReilly made a good point using these basic figures the other day. (He was using national numbers, not Georgia, but the gist was the same.)

The reason that Blacks in particular make less money than whites and other groups is becaus of the extremely high rate of unwed pregnancies. If 64% of black births are out of wedlock, and only 22% of white births are, then there is no way that income parity will be reached since unwed mothers are likely to be poor.

However, if you look at married blacks vs married whites, then there is income equality. Whites make very slightly more, but it’s close. There isn’t the large income gap that you see when looking at the whole of the two groups.

This would explain why spending and spending on welfare, social programs, medicaid and backing it all up with affirmative action has not given blacks income equality. Maybe the same effort spent on getting blacks to marry before having children would raise them to the level of whites.

shrug I don’t trust the government to be able to get the trains to run on time, so I doubt that they would be successful at changing the culture of a huge group of American people. Like I said in my first post, the only thing I can think of that would even try is a public awareness campaign that points out the risk and ruin of unwed childbirths. However, since it would be seen as picking on unwed mothers, that will never happen.

*note: I am an athiest, so these really are my views for what is best. I am not a christian type who just is looking for ways to promote God’s idea of marriage.

13

why is there a need to be a financial and legal unit, anyway?

two people live together (same house), have a child together, and raise it together.

The taxation should be based individually, and value of the property where you live + amount of kids.
Marriage should not be a factor. Why treat some people as a financial unit, and others not?

14

Far more important than encouraging marriage IMO (and I’m the child of divorced parents) is encouraging **both **parents to take responsibility for their children, in all senses, including the financial sense of course.

There is no benefit in encouraging women to marry, or stay married to, the fathers of their children if they are useless sperm donors, and I don’t think the government should encourage them to do so, via tax policy or otherwise. The resources would be much better spent on a) better sex education; b) more available contraception for low-income people (women AND men; the men are half of this too, remember, even if their contraceptive options are much more limited; they have half the responsibility for making babies, although contraceptive research tends to ignore that aide of things. But that’s a topic better suited for the Pit.); c) teaching single parents, male and female, how to get the most bang for the child-rearing buck; d) child support enforcement for deadbeat parents; and e) job skills training for those single parents who need it in order to become more self-sufficient.

Women will get pregnant accidentally; it’s practically a fact of biology, unless you expect all unmarried people to be 100% abstinent, which ain’t gonna happen in the modern world. For that matter, it has happened since the dawn of time, and even if looser social restrictions on premarital sex are balanced by better contraception, it’s still going to happen.

My dad was a mediocre parent at best, so why force my mom to stay married to him and create the resultant level of psychological tension in the house, for the sake of creating artificial “stability”? That doesn’t help anyone. My sister and I were lucky in that a) Dad was responsible financially and never missed a child support check, and b) both our parents were functionally and educationally equipped to be economically self-sufficient (albeit at highly divergent levels), but lots of kids aren’t. I think the whole idea of encouraging incompatible people to get or stay married “for the sake of the children” through tax/social policy is bullshit.

Think about the kids; they’re the innocent ones in this whole mess. It seems counterproductive to penalize parents for making bad choices, when their habits, responsibility levels (or lack thereof), and personalities have already been formed. Do what it takes to have the kids end up on the best possible footing when they reach adulthood, but I would argue quite strongly that marriage isn’t a blanket solution.

15

People above have blamed the prevalence of single parents for poverty, but it’s equally the case that economic problems lead to separation and divorce (whether it is due to people being forced to work longer hours; greater stress and depression; changing circumstances causing strife; people having to leave home to find work; or other reasons). Ensuring economic stability would be one of the best ways of preserving marriage, but it seems the least likely to be tried.

16

I think the government, ideally anyway, should have a role in supporting and promoting social values and morals that are generally beneficial to society. However, that promotion should be very subtle. Think about the commercials urging kids to stay in school, say no to drugs, that sort of thing. Right now, there’s a convenience associated with getting married, as well as certain benefits. However, there’s also a financial penalty, in the form of higher taxation. I don’t think tax breaks for marriage are necessary, though there sure as hell shouldn’t be a tax penalty. Whether or not you agree the government should be encouraging marriage, I think we can all see that’s it’s asinine for the government to be discouraging it.

Oh, and elfje:

Cite?

True, but wouldn’t marriage help overcome the “me” thing, and counterweight it with a feeling of responsiblity towards family? It would seem that a formal declaration of the intent to spend the rest of your life with someone, in the form of marriage, would tend to strengthen one’s feeling of commitment towards one’s family.

Cite?

Cite? While it wasn’t criminal to get a divorce, it was certainly frowned upon a generation or two ago, to the extent that it may as well have been illegal. Divorce was something you just didn’t do. I seem to recall that people still got married. I don’t know about the proliferation of domestic violence, but unless you can prove otherwise, I have no reason to believe it was dramatically higher in the past, nor that this had anything to do with divorce.

Obviously, I disagree. Married couples are more likely to stick together during tough times, and if that couple has kids, staying together is extremely important. Even if the parents are unhappier by staying together, it’s generally better for the children if they do. And sorry, but once you have kids, your well-being takes a backseat to theirs (within reason, of course - nobody should have to stay in an abusive marriage, for example).

So yeah, I think the government should be encouraging marriage. As long as it’s not too overbearing in its methods, I think it can have a very positive effect overall.
Jeff

17

Having been married, had children and now divorced, and paying a hefty (but necessary in the big picture) CS, I can’t really say that marriage as it is currently conceived is necessarily the very best thing for adult men and women as individuals, but looking at the alternatives it is the very best thing for children and in the end that’s what really matters.

While there are some violent and abusive fathers whose wives and children would be better off without them, in the main the real issue is that Daddy deprived sons and daughters are (IMO) usually poorer both in terms of economic resources and social development than children from intact families or divorced families where the father has some substantive custody and is still a significant presence. Based on my observations of children in a wide variety of daddy and non-daddy households, children with daddies are generally (but not always) less fearful about the world, and more truly confident about themselves and their abilities to succeed in life, especially as they get older.

In this context let me be clear. I’m not talking about egotistical “self esteem”. Gang bangers from single female headed households often have that in abundance. I’m talking about a view of the world as place full of accessible opportunities if you will use self discipline and work hard towards a goal. It’s less a sense of ego esteem and more one of maturing confidence in your capabilities. Kids look at their dads (even mediocre ones) as providers and “can do” achievers and see and believe that these are accessible life models for themselves.

Even granted the reality that in modernity men and women do not necessarily need each other labor or resource wise to survive in a decent fashion as they did in the past, in the end keeping men in the nurturing and provider loop socially and economically is what marriage is all about as a desired social good, romantic notions surrounding modern marriage aside. The bottom line for a productive and successful society is that men must be kept yoked to the family plow to the extent possible with a variety of carrots and sticks if societies are to produce strong and capable citizens. Whether it’s the government, the church, his peer group or his personal desires to be bonded to his wife and children that mediate this commitment and connection, the bottom line is that it must be done or in the end society will suffer.

I vote yes to government sponsored pro-marriage activities.

18

Anecdotal, but FWIW my parents had joint custody. For several years after the divorce, my dad lived no more than half a mile away and we saw him at least once a week, plus every other weekend. I honestly don’t think he was a more participatory father when he was physically living under the same roof with us.

I agree that both parents should be important parts of kids’ lives, but that’s a very difficult thing to teach even on an individual basis, and even more difficult to encourage and/or or force via social policy.

19

The Marriage Penalty is a Myth. Furthermore it shortsightedly focuses on Income Tax and ignores the other tax benefits, i.e.

There are inequities, as the article notes, but the Marriage Penalty, for the most part, is a chimera.

20

oh and **Jeff, ** I strongly diagree with the idea that staying together for the kids is a) a good idea, or b) the polar opposite of divorcing out of selfishness. Provided both parents put the sme amount of work into childrearing after they split up as they did before, I think it’s far better for them to live separately if living together will create a ttense or emotionally violent environment for the kids. I’m damn glad my parents got divorced, and it has nothing to do with their respective parenting skills.