....sort of. It's cheaper to maintain two households and remain unmarried largely because of the way that government interacts with our poor. You lose more from getting married than you stand to gain in benefits.
I ran some of the numbers a while back, and they are quite interesting. Here is the marriage penalty for a low-income couple from just three programs:
As you can see, the penalty from just those alone for the average single-parent household income of about $24K is a little over $5,500; or, a cost of about 22.9% of their income.
Meanwhile, children of the single parent households that we help create with these twisted incentives are more likely to drop out of school, get married out of wedlock, abuse drugs, be incarcerated, and subsequently find
themselves in poverty in a twisted cycle.
And that's not the only way that we help to trap people in poverty. The idiotic way in which we often structure our welfare state leaves our poor vulnerable to running up against welfare cliffs, where an increase in income causes a loss of a
greater amount of benefits, with the result of a lowering of their standard of living.
The poor are thus presented by our government with a series of incentives to
avoid getting married and to
avoid increasing their productivity and income. We punish them if they attempt to improve their position, and then wonder why they do not.
Not married =/= single parent household, nowerdays many people live together without getting married, also these problems exist since these people are ALREADY poor and jobless and on welfare.
:shrug: perhaps, but given the prevalence of birth control, incidence of unanticipated / economically destructive pregnancy should be decreasing, not increasing.
Well, the OP gave you some stats. Here's a handy chart:
I agree, and I think education is the key here, also the fact that marriage is out of favor doesn't mean you have a loss of a family, its just without the formality of state endorced marriage.
Also I think even though the nuclear family is declining (which I don't doubt, I just think its not ass dramatic as some people claim, since many couples live together without marriage), I would argue that economic problems are a major cause of that.
Indeed it does demonstrate such a thing. The two-parent family is a more economically efficient unit due to shared costs (housing, utilities, food, etc), specialization of labor, the ability to generate two incomes, and increased economic stability inuring it to economic shock.
That isn't causation, also you have to explain why a poor father should stay (purely economically, of coarse morally he should absolutely stay), however the family unit brakes down after economic problems, not prior, infact the #1 cause of divorce is economic problems.
:shrug: perhaps. "needs" is a rather subjective argument (for survival? to rise above the poverty threshold? to advance to the middle class?) 2-income families do not necessarily mean a less effective family unit (economically). The issue that I have most often run into is that the mother does not make enough to fully pay for the additional costs incurred (child care, extra gas, professional clothing, etc), and often couples do not sit down and do the math to realize that. But that is strictly anecdotal.
It absolutely DOES mean a less effective family unit socially, and from a family standpoint, having a parent at home to take care of the children is VERY important to make sure the children do well in school, stay out of trouble, get a good amount of love and so on. Also this trend started since wages started to stagnate in the 70s and actually drop.
Yeah? There is greater wealth inequality in the US than, say, in Pakistan. Which do you think has more "social problems"? Tribal genocide has a tendency to happen in poor countries, not wealthy ones. Methinks that your group decided what they wanted the result to be and defined "social problems" in order to get it.
Pakistan is in the middle of a war, and has many many other problems .... Thats an extremely unfair comparison, its like comparing the Netherlands to Iraq.
Precisely. Conservatives are more likely to care for the poor because that is what they are taught in Church. For me personally, that's part of the puzzle. The other part is that when we talk about single-parents, we are largely talking about my family. With the exception of myself and my brother, every child in my generation in my family was raised by a single parent. My wife was raised by a low income single mother. Her sister is now a low income single mother. This is a problem that threatens our society and hits fairly close to home.
I would also argue that conservatives tend to have more money, thus more ability to give to charities. I would say, if you want to fix families, STEP ONE, is to give economic opportunities that can make families economically secure and thus be able to focus on the more fundemental issues of family, and then other issues perhaps, like those of social morals and so on.
I am religious and christianity teaches empathy, not disdain and blame.
Well that is a rather entertaining case of begging the question. How are the social democracies working out, anywho? Poor folks in Argentina and Mexico are living it up, while poor folks in America are living hand-to-mouth in dirty shacks?
Pretty damn good, Mexico isn't a social democracy, Argentina has a somewhat social democratic government and is improving significantly, while the US is not (well it is slightly, but I would'nt give it that much), in europe the countries with strong social democracies that didn't deregulate, liberalize and financialize are doing well.
:-D actually those rules come from the Left-Leaning Brookings Institute:
Work and Marriage: The Way to End Poverty and Welfare
...Advocates for the poor have too long argued that welfare was the solution to poverty. Yet most evidence points in a different direction. The reform of welfare in 1996 has had far more positive effects on employment, earnings, and poverty rates than almost anyone anticipated. The data summarized in this brief suggest this is because work is a powerful antidote to poverty and that, in its absence, no politically feasible amount of welfare can fill the gap as effectively.
The short-term implication of this finding is that fiscally strapped states need help if they are to continue to fund programs that move welfare recipients into the work force and keep them there in a softer economy. The longer-term implication is that steps should be taken to move the entire system of benefits targeted to lower-income Americans more toward encouraging work and marriage and less toward providing unconditional assistance to those who do not work and who bear children outside of marriage. Because work-related benefits are more politically popular than those not tied to work, the system would not only be more effective per dollar spent, but it might well enjoy the political support that would make it more generous than the one it replaced...
I don't think welfare is a solution to poverty, socialists have NEVER argued that, socialists have argued that the institutions need to change, that the poor should have a say in the economic affairs.
That being said, evidence also points the otherway, some of the countrie with the STRONGEST middle class are those with the best saftey nets, teh Scandanavian countries for examples have an extremely strong middle class and here you don't need to work to have a comfortable life.
In the 90s employment went up because of giant economic growth, not welfare cuts.
Cutting welfare isn't gonna magically make people start working, there are 5 job seakers for every job opening, thats a fact, the solution is to make economic solutions, not make people more desperate than they already are, that welfare reform in 1996 is still in effect, the reason we have poverty isn't welfare, its economic crisis. Family problems arn't the reason there is poverty, its a result of poverty.
I personally would reform welfare however, but it would'nt be cutting it, it would be government funded (through grants), cooperative buisinesses or sole propriatorships, that can fill a market need or a social need, thus giving people an actualy way to earn money, have a say over their enviroment, make an income, and spend it in their communities giving incentives for investment.
Socialist parties have already proposed this, and in some parts of Italy you alreayd have that (for example in the wealthy north italy, where some areas have mostly cooprative buisinesses).
But to do that you'd have to go against banks, who want people to borrow from them and not the state, and giant corporations that want to exploit poor people for labor and make sure poor people rely on them and not themselves.
No, corporatism launched us into crisis and then kept us there. Long term poverty is overwhelmingly the result of personal, not institutional decisions.
Corporatism IS capitalism, its ALWAYS been that way, Corporatism is the natural outcome of Capitalism, just like totalitarianism is the natural outcome of Leninism.
