Tag: war on poverty

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Updating the War on Poverty

Fifty years ago President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America” and promised that “we shall not rest until that war is won.”  The news recently has been full of assessments evaluating the war on poverty’s success and asking to what extent we have achieved victory.  Most of these assessments conclude that, though the war on poverty has had some specific and limited successes–especially in decreasing poverty among the elderly–on the whole it has fallen well short of the lofty ambitions that inspired it and the goals it set for itself.

Courtesy of http://media.npr.org/
Courtesy of http://media.npr.org

What might an updated war on poverty look like in the 21st century?  In recent decades we have learned quite a bit about the factors that lead to and keep people in poverty.  In particular, it has become abundantly clear that stable marriages and families are among the best predictors for avoiding poverty.  Nick Schulz, in a useful little volume entitled Home Economics: The Consequences of Changing Family Structure, summarizes much of the evidence linking poverty to changes in family structure such as increases in divorce, single-parent households, and children born out of wedlock.  Just a few of the findings that he reports:

  • Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, after reviewing Census Bureau data, found that “if young people finish high school, get a job, and get married before they have children, they have about a 2 percent chance of falling into poverty and nearly a 75 percent chance of joining the middle class by earning $50,000 or more per year.”

  • Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, in their book Growing Up with a Single Parent, report that “adolescents who have lived apart from one of their parents during some period of childhood are twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to have a child before age twenty, and one and a half times as likely to be ‘idle’–out of school and out of work–in their late teens and early twenties.”

  • A group of researchers from the Pew Research Center “compared the median household incomes of married adults with unmarried adults in 1960 and again in 2008.  Half a century ago, the gap in household incomes was 12 percent.  In 2008, the gap had grown to over 40 percent.”

This is just a small sampling from a large body of research confirming what is by now an indisputable fact: if you want to reduce poverty, you should want as many children as possible to grow up in stable families with their own two married parents.

This evidence could provide the fulcrum for a bipartisan coalition devoted to strengthening marriage and the family.  Liberals, committed to the poorest and most vulnerable members of society and concerned with income inequality, should make common cause with conservatives, who emphasize the traditional family unit as a building-block of society.  A coalition of this sort, seeking a common, pro-family reform agenda, could make new headway in the fight against poverty.

Although family issues are often politically divisive, some reform proposals could reach across the partisan divide.  A waiting period between the filing of divorce papers and the actual finalization of a divorce, during which couples could be offered access to marriage counseling, might reduce the rate of divorce.  Other reforms, such as increasing the child tax credit, might ease financial strains on families.  More creatively, we might make the credit available only to married couples, or introduce an additional tax credit targeted specifically at married couples that choose to forego a second income so that one parent can stay at home full-time with their children.

Strengthening marriage and the family is a daunting task.  Family decline has been a product of complex cultural factors, and public policy is a blunt instrument for effecting large cultural change.  Fifty years ago, however, Lyndon Johnson told Americans, “Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom.  The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.”  If we today remain committed to giving our fellow citizens “a fair chance to develop their own capacities,” we will require creative ideas about revitalizing the American family.

A longer version of this column will appear as an essay in the Lent issue of The Cresset (http://thecresset.org).

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Opinions Two Views

Is Marriage the Greatest Tool for Lifting Families out of Poverty?

Would marriage help solve America’s poverty problems? Senator Marco Rubio seems to think so. Since the War on Poverty was declared 50 years ago there have been many theories and ideas about how to solve the problem of poverty. But Senator Marco Rubio has introduced a new theory. In a recent speech that addressed wealth inequality, Senator Rubio asserted that the “greatest tool to lift children and families out of poverty” is “marriage.” Senator Rubio keenly pointed out that marriage has become more and more unpopular over the past 50 years, but he believes that it is the greatest solution to the poverty problems that young people face.

So is marriage the ultimate tool that will fix America’s poverty problems?

jedNow before we begin to critique Senator Rubio’s bold statement, it is important to point out that in the Senator’s speech he cites some interesting data concerning the links between marriage and a college education. Indeed, the Senator showed that 64% of adults who have a college degree are married in contrast to only 47% of adults who only have a high school diploma.

Rubio’s theory goes like this: an individual’s economic future is dependent not only upon having money and a good income but is also heavily dependent upon social capital. Marriage and a strong family structure create an environment that manifests social capital. When an individual is raised in a family that invests in him/her socially then the person will be better equipped to handle the challenges in the future. Increases in marriage will cause increases in social capital, which will then increase an individual’s opportunities for economic success.

No one could refute the merits of this argument. But how does this help the millions of children and adults who were not raised in a home with married parents?

Getting married would not make an unemployed person become employed. Getting married would not miraculously increase a person’s low wages. Marriage would certainly have an impact on wealth inequality for future generations but it would not solve the poverty problem for people right now.

Another approach must be taken for those that are already entrapped by their poverty.

Right now, over 47 million Americans do not have health insurance, almost 50 million Americans are receiving food stamps and over 5 million Americans are currently receiving unemployment benefits. To make matters worse, it is estimated that over 15 percent of Americans are either unemployed, underemployed, or have completely given up on finding a job and have stopped looking for employment.

Lifting America out poverty will depend on whether lawmakers can find a way to increase employment, wealth, and wages. President Obama addressed this in his State of the Union speech. Ideas like raising the minimum wage to $10.10, extending unemployment benefits for an additional 14 weeks, and lowering fees and costs for businesses that hire minority workers would have an immediate impact on the lives of poor people right now.

There are key factors that will contribute to solving these problems that have nothing to do with being married. Having a job, having a job that is full time, having a job that pays a sustainable wage, and having a substantial income that provides for a person’s needs are all positive growth factors that contribute to a person’s ability to provide for himself. The common link between all of those factors is income. Having the ability to purchase, having the ability to make your own destiny, and having money at your disposal are all keys to freeing a person from the prison of poverty.

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Opinions Two Views

Is Marriage the Greatest Tool for Lifting Families out of Poverty?

“Marriage” is a hard topic to broach in public debate, particularly in the context of economics. Many women, like myself, view it with a certain amount of trepidation when the subject comes up; the floodgates seem to be open to derogatory comments about “welfare queens” and single-motherhood, with poor women bearing the brunt of poorly-disguised scorn and highly insensitive gaffes. The conversation and ensuing media rigamorale can be so off-putting.

sarahHowever, it’s not a conversation that we should tune out. Some have suggested that the collapse of the married, two-parent family – the result of decades of rising divorce rates, out-of-wedlock births, and rising numbers of couples who do not marry – has resulted in much of the poverty we see today.

Indeed, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) recently made bold a speech on the fifty year anniversary of the War on Poverty in which he said “The truth is, the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by 82%. But it isn’t a government spending program. It’s called marriage.”

I would agree with Rubio, though with a few objections. To begin with, I don’t think marriage is a panacea to the current economic climate. (Granted, it’s not clear that in context of his speech that Rubio was assuming that it was.) I’m not even sure that it’s “the greatest” tool to combat poverty, either. That lends itself too much to a messianic definition of marriage, which I don’t think is appropriate. (It also seems to cheapen other equally important strategies to combat poverty.)

However, whether we like it or not, marriage and other social relationships do affect us and how rich and how poor we are. As Nick Schultz of the American Enterprise Institute points out in “Home Economics: the Consequences of a Changing Family Structure,” economics is not solely a study of numbers and monetary transactions. The most important economic questions of our time – rising income inequality, depressed wages, and slow economic growth – cannot be answered without touching upon our social institutions. If this is the case, marriage must be addressed.

Marriage delivers on a number of good things that can help relieve poverty. For one, it seems to  promote economic  mobilization. Our modern version of marriage has all the promise to provide a stable home for children, helping them succeed later in life. Though they acknowledge that the effects of marriage are not the only factor, a new Brookings Institution study makes the claim that “children born into continuously married family  [sic] have much better economic mobility than those in single parent families.” So, marriage seems to be good for the kids.

It’s also good for the adults. In the absence of marriage, single parents, particularly single moms, have to struggle working one or more job, along with the regular housework and childrearing.  According to a study undertaken by the Atlantic, poor women and single moms are more likely to have higher levels of anxiety, to live with regret, to stress about their kids, and rely on their family and friends for money. Marriage can relieve some of the pressure by turning one income into two.

Altogether, marriage creates a miniature economy that has the potential to benefit all parties and, in the best marriages, this is fueled by a love and warmth that cannot be reproduced elsewhere.

That being said, the solution to poverty in the United States can’t just be “get married,” nor should we expect that to be the solution for every individual. However, marriage is nonetheless an important aspect to resolving poverty and one of our greatest tools. Given its benefits, why don’t we encourage it enough? Let’s stop tuning out the conversation based on political rhetoric and start looking at marriage as the great thing that it is.