MARRIAGE DOES NOT PREVENT POVERTY
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
What is the federal government coming to? While the Bush Administration
is, on one hand, cutting job training programs even though unemployment rates
are up, they are hoping to spend as much as $100 million a year to “promote
marriage”. Wade F. Horn, Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and
Human Services says that programs urging poor couples to marry will “promote
the well-being of children.”
Horn is right when he notes that, “On average, kids who grow up in stable,
healthy, married two-parent households do better than kids who grow up in
some other kind of arrangement.” But even a bad statistician will tell you
“correlation is not causation”. In other words, the fact that children in
married households “on average” do better than those who are not in married
households does not mean you can sprinkle magic dust on unmarried parents,
hook them up and expect poverty to magically disappear. If unmarried parents
lack jobs, marriage won’t improve their children’s economic status.
Government helps poor kids when it develops programs to help get their
parents paid. Programs to promote or provide education, training, child
care, and health services are likely to do more for poor children than
programs to promote marriage. An unemployed man and an unemployed woman
can’t feed their children with their marriage license.
More than half of all marriages currently end in divorce. Will government
promote remarriage when first marriages end? Will we push parents to marry
even if they are unsuited to each other, or if abuse is a component of the
relationship?
The purpose of public assistance should not be to promote marriage.
Public assistance programs were developed to reduce poverty! It is a
contradiction that a fiscally conservative government should fritter a
hundred million dollars away on marriage counseling, especially when there is
so much more that could be done with the money. Says Leslie Wolfe, President
of the Center for Women Policy Studies, “This initiative has nothing to do
with logic or ending poverty, but with promoting a right-wing, patriarchal
social engineering policy.” She’s right – the federal push to promote
marriage is less about economic status than it is about moral synergy. Right
wing conservatives say they want to spend their money replicating their own
lives, no matter how fractured they are. They want people to be married,
whatever the dire consequences of ill-fated couplings.
There is a perspective from which the $100 million slated to promote marriage
is seen as a drop in the budget bucket. After all, when federal spending
exceeds a trillion dollars a year, a mere hundred million can be considered
chump change. AT the same time, the chump that could have been changed is
the unemployed worker who missed out on job training because some folks find
those programs – but not marriage promotion programs – a waste. From where I
sit, I’d rather spend money on teaching people how to work than teaching them
how to live. Work lessons might stick; life lessons might fail.
Issues of marriage and work might not be so important except that welfare
reform legislation, passed in 1996, must be reauthorized this year. Wade
Horn hopes to fund the marriage promotion program by transferring it from a
program that provides incentives to states that lower their rate of unwed
pregnancy. As the discussion continues, there are likely to be other
proposed changes in the structure of welfare legislation. Here’s a thought –
we ought to relax some of the work requirements for women who are enrolled in
school so that they can earn degrees and leave poverty permanently. Such a
change is likely to have a greater impact on the economic status of children
than a marriage-promotion program. Welfare reform, as we know it clips the
wings of low-income women who have college aspirations instead of empowering
them to leave public assistance.
There are lots of ways to provide economic empowerment to poor children and
their custodial parents. Government can provide training, childcare, and
other support. We can make sure that women who want to leave poverty have
college options and other chances to transform their lives. We can provide
essential supports; lift poor women up when we need to. And when poor women
can’t make their lives work, government policies can embrace their children.
Here’s the bottom line – more than 7 million poor women earn the minimum
wage that we haven’t raised since 1996. Half of these women raise children.
Providing these women with a living wage doesn’t bust the nation’s budget,
but tax cuts to the wealthy might. The bottom line is that there are some
fools who want to make marriage an issue. I care less about parents’ marital
status than about their pay. Raising the minimum wage does more for working
people than pushing marriage licenses does. Further, we’ll pay less when we
pay people than when we take the weight for poor social policy choices.