Republicans are launching a major push to make marriage promotion a center piece of domestic policy.
Republicans have launched a major rhetorical push in the last few weeks to promote the idea that marriage promotion is a great way to address childhood poverty and income inequality. Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, recently said in a speech, “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.”
To some degree Rubio is right, marriage does reduce the poverty rate, but this is largely due to how the government calculates poverty, rather than the implied idea that getting married automatically makes you more responsible or something. As Slate’s Mathew Yglesias recently pointed out:
If you look up the Federal Poverty Guidelines you’ll see that the way it works is that one person is poor if he or she earns less than $11,490. But due to household economies of scale, the FPG says that for two people to be non-poor they need to make $15,510 not $22,980. Indeed, the poverty line for a family of three is only $19,530—less than double the poverty line for one. Basically poverty is $11,490 for the first person plus $4,020 for each additional person.
To be sure there very well may be concrete benefits to creating more two family households, but it’s just not clear how the federal government could go about doing it. Indeed the latest push to promote marriage as a tool of social policy seems long on rhetoric and short on specifics. For example, Rubio has purposed bigger earned income tax credits for low-income marriage couples financed by cuts to single workers. Fairness issues aside, this seems a pretty roundabout way of trying to get people to say “I do.” I’m not married, so this is a little outside of my wheelhouse, but I seriously doubt EITC rates factor into most folks’ decision to get hitched.
Maybe our country would be better if more couples got married, but it’s not clear what the federal government can do to remedy this problem. Indeed the standard conservative philosophical point, that government can’t automatically solve all our problems, is probably useful here.
Photo by J. Scott Applewhite/AP