Altared States: Bush tries to promote marriage through welfare reform

The experience of decades makes clear that welfare and non-marriage go together like a horse and carriage. Forty percent of children with single mothers are poor -- five times the rate of children with married parents -- so President Bush proposes that the federal government get into the business of promoting marriage in order to reduce welfare dependency. In the next round of reform, the president declares, "stable families should be the central goal of American welfare policy."

Predictably, the initiative has been condemned by the government- friendly Left: The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner has derided its goal as "shotgun welfare betrothals." Also not surprisingly, a recent Pew Research Center poll found that marriage-friendly conservatives object to government meddling in this private relationship: Almost 80 percent of Americans -- and 60 percent of "highly committed" white evangelicals -- object to the government's encouraging people to marry. This latest example of Bush's activist conservative agenda is meeting the same fate as its predecessor, the plan to increase the role of faith-based charities by federally funding their good works: Liberals are objecting to the goal, and conservatives have reservations about the means.

The 1996 welfare reform has shown remarkable success in putting welfare recipients to work: The rolls are down by over 50 percent, and three- quarters of single mothers are now employed. But there has been only modest success in achieving the reform law's other key goal: the reduction of out-of-wedlock births and the "formation and encouragement of two-parent families." Only a handful of states have heeded Washington's call to implement programs aimed at promoting marriage among the poor. West Virginia pays a $100 monthly bonus to married welfare families, while Michigan and Utah offer classes and videos on marriage and parenting skills. Oklahoma has the most ambitious program, involving churches, social-service agencies, and the business community in extolling the importance of marriage and the harmful effects of divorce. (It's too early to tell whether there has been any payoff from these state efforts.) The administration now proposes setting aside $300 million to induce other states to launch their own experiments to encourage "healthy, two-parent married families."

Conservatives -- and many liberals -- can at least agree on what the problem is: The evidence that children are far better off being raised by their married, biological parents is overwhelming. Studies consistently show that children living in broken or never-formed families are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems, fail in school, be physically abused, be involved in crime, and wind up on welfare as adults. Children have clearly suffered as a result of a federal welfare system that for decades subsidized single parents and penalized marriage. With subsidies inevitably increasing the behavior Washington was paying for, and modern cultural norms dictating that no stigma attach to illegitimacy and single motherhood, the number of out- of-wedlock births soared.

The media image notwithstanding, unmarried mothers are far more likely to be high-schoolers than Wall Street lawyers haunted by the ticking of their biological clocks. Although teen pregnancy and birth rates have declined over the past ten years, the U.S. still has the highest rates of teen pregnancy and birth in the fully industrialized world. Four out of ten all-American girls become pregnant at least once before they celebrate their 20th birthdays. About 80 percent of teen mothers are unmarried, and 75 percent are on welfare within five years.

Early, unmarried motherhood typically gives birth to poverty and welfare dependency. Half of all welfare recipients had their first baby as a teenager. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation logically concludes that the "collapse of marriage is the principal cause of child poverty." He estimates that federal and state spending in means- tested aid for single-parent families amounts to about $150 billion a year. Rector also recognizes the inherent anti-marriage bias in means- tested welfare programs that offer cash and services to low-income single mothers, and that reduce benefits upon marriage to a working husband.

Because he doesn't see Washington dismantling this means-tested welfare system anytime soon, Rector thinks it's about time the federal government spent a fraction of what it spends on single-parent families on an effort to reduce the number of such families. But here's where it gets complicated: How exactly does the government expect $300 million to counteract the anti-marriage effects of the $150 billion it spends on means-tested programs? No one knows. Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution, a veteran welfare analyst who is advising the administration on welfare reform, explains, "We know that marriage is important, but we don't know how to promote it, so we want to put money out and see what we learn."