The most important inequality in America is not the wealth gap or the wage gap. It may not be the racial opportunity gap. The marriage gap is wreaking havoc. And unfortunately, it's the gap that gets the least attention.
I am a libertarian. I don't care who or if you marry. However, I remember that there is a problem for a new report from the American Business Institute. Edited by Kevin Corinth and Scott Winship, “Land of Opportunity: Advancing the American Dream” covers a wide range of challenges facing the country today, from the cost of living and workforce development to education, crime and the erosion of community life.
The authors are not cultural warriors. They are empirical economists. But among its most important findings are those that address the collapse of the American family and what the government has done to accelerate it.
From economist Robert VerBruggen's chapter on the erosion of married parenthood, I learned that in the mid-20th century, only 1 in 20 children was born out of wedlock. Now it's 2 in 5. I also learned that the United States has the highest rate in the world of children living in single-parent households: 23% in the United States versus an international norm of 7%.
Based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, VerBruggen shows that 40% of millennials from intact two-parent families graduated from college and 77% achieved middle-class or higher incomes. Among those who did not grow up in intact families, only 17% graduated from college and only 57% achieved middle-class incomes. The latter are also approximately twice as likely to be incarcerated, even after controlling for other socioeconomic factors.
The damage doesn't end at the front door: Research using tax return data “suggests that neighborhoods with high rates of single parenthood cultivate lower social mobility, even among children who are not raised by single parents,” VerBruggen notes.
This is a pretty bipartisan idea at this point. in a 2013 review Of the relevant research, sociologist Sara McLanahan of Princeton University and her co-authors found that “studies using more rigorous designs continue to find negative effects of father absence on children's well-being.” Economist Melissa Kearney work shows that marriage protects against poverty among all races. In fact, married-parent households, regardless of race and education, experience significantly less poverty than single mothers.
This collapse of family stability is not occurring uniformly. Winship and Thomas O'Rourke found that while marital births fell by 29 points overall between 1970 and 2018, they fell 47 points for the bottom educational quintile and just 6 points for the top. Consistent with that divide, from the early 1960s to the late 2010s, marriage rates fell about 46 percentage points for the least educated young women compared to about 17 points for the most educated, leaving those least able to bear the costs of single parenthood the most likely to experience it.
Marriage is clearly a uniquely important institution for child rearing and income mobility. Still, I don't look favorably on the government's efforts to tip the balance toward marriage. I am also strongly opposed to the government putting its thumb on the scale against marriage.
Unfortunately, VerBruggen gathers evidence that shows that a lot of this kind of thing is happening. A couple with two children, with each parent earning $30,000, receives about $5,000 in earned income tax credit benefits if they remain single. They lose all those benefits if they get married. That's a marriage tax.
Thresholds for Medicaid, housing vouchers, and SNAP benefits are phased out in ways that punish couples who combine households and incomes. VerBruggen cites an estimate from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta showing that “7.5 percent more low-income women with children would marry by age 35 if they were not penalized for doing so.”
You cannot simultaneously believe that family structure does not matter and that the disadvantage of a single parent is a crisis. Or that children's outcomes are determined by economic conditions and that it is irrelevant whether two committed adults are involved or whether one parent is experiencing unstable relationships. Careful researchers, including those trying to debunk the marriage effect, keep finding it.
My conservative friends are focused on redesigning America's trillion-dollar safety net to reduce the marriage penalty. But the harder question (the one almost no one asks) is whether the existence of that safety net changes the calculus of marriage in a way that no redesign can completely fix. If the government reliably attempts to replace the economic role of the spouse, more people will rationally choose not to marry.
Recognizing this does not require abandoning people who really need it. Nor does it require excessively correcting and incentivizing women to live in abusive unions. However, it does require admitting that every dollar of well-intentioned assistance carries a behavioral price that we have largely refused to count.
Sometimes the most compassionate long-term response is to eliminate the marriage penalty in welfare programs. Sometimes it's having a smaller program or no program at all. We will never know until we ask the question honestly.
Rugy Veronica He is a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate.
