at the Huffington Post:
Stephanie slips the brown paper sleeve off a Starbucks drink and starts tearing it artfully. A small hut emerges. “My vacation home,” she says wistfully. Stephanie could use a vacation. Her last one was a weekend trip with her ex-boyfriend to the caves in Ohio’s Hocking Hills — which consisted of fighting in a tiny cabin and ended in their break-up. At age nineteen, Stephanie gave birth to her son and for years raised him alone. When he was four, she met and got pregnant with her current boyfriend, with whom she has a toddler. She and her boyfriend live together in a public housing duplex in small town, southwestern Ohio. Between the two of them, they have worked in just about every restaurant in town.
When asked what she thinks about marriage, Stephanie, whose own parents divorced several times, has a lot to say: “I believe you only get married once. So if I get married, I don’t want to be divorced.” Now that she and her boyfriend feel like family, she thinks it would be good to get married.
She says that marriage is more “binding” and “final,” and better for children. But for Stephanie, marriage poses a terrible choice: “If we got married,” she frowns, “what’s going to happen with my food stamps? How am I going to take care of my kids if those get taken from me?”
Stephanie is right to be worried. Experts estimate that, for most couples receiving public assistance, getting married will reduce their benefits by 10 percent to 20 percent of their total income. For people already living at the margins and often mired in debt (Stephanie herself has no college degree, but does owe $10,000 in school loans), that possibility is enough to make them think twice about marriage. And yet, Stephanie is also right that marriage on average is far more stable for children than just living together. By age 12, children born to cohabiting couples are 170 percent more likely to see their parents split up, compared to children born to married couples.
February 27th, 2013 | 11:02 pm
Well…if I recall several sources of problems and rhe solutions offered for similar matters, particularly on these pages, this couple’s biggest problem is their dependence on welfare, and that is causing them to be poor, or so the story is told by conservatives.
Their loss of welfare should be accompanied by subsequent begging at local churches, because this will be a more efficient delivery of charity, and would respect the right of Christians to provide charity, since the provision of various welfare supports robs the well-to-do Christian of an opportunity to give care to this couple, creating some invincible barrier for charity to penetrate. This is the suggested “subsidiarity” reflexive response promoted by Acton-ites.
I have paid attention to the conservative narrative on such matters. While there are attempts to steer the movement from such crazy talk by Douthat and somewhat by Reno, their failure to outrightly denounce such anti-Gospel non-sense will emasculate the change of tone and heart these writers seek. Sorry, this my depiction above is a typical narrative, and requires a denunciation as powerful as the bishops anti-HHS mandate attempts.
February 28th, 2013 | 1:21 am
What is anti-gospel about wanting to replace the welfare state with private charity. I don’t think it could ever work, but certainly not anti-gospel. Indeed, it strikes me that the Dan C.’s of the world are really the anti-gospelites because their attitude is evocative precisely of the attitude of Doestoevksy’s Inquisitor. Namely, they both invert Christ’s message about not being able to live by bread alone. For the Grand Inquisitor one only has the right to preach the word once one has filled man’s bellies. For the Inquistor’s Christ refusal to heed Satan’s temptation to feed the whole world was a travesty. Never forget that the anti-Christ will be the great provider of material goods so one hopes Paul Ryan doesn’t oppose him lest Dan C. finds him not Christian enough.
February 28th, 2013 | 1:58 am
Dan, I think your comment is a simplification of a complicated issue. Reading through the entire article, you might find reasoned suggestions for how and why the government should make up the difference between a non-married person’s benefits and a married couples (lower) benefits. No one is advocating to take these benefits away, just pointing out that the current system of incentives leads couples away from marriage in the short run, which has far-reaching long-term effects. It’s all about changing laws to promote institutions that work, such as marriage–while also not denying anyone their current level of support.
February 28th, 2013 | 6:55 am
There’s nothing anti-Gospel about recommending that we back away from the excesses of welfare-statism that we’ve fallen into, in favor of not stealing from future generations to enable immoral or irresponsible behavior in the present one.
There’s nothing pro-Gospel about faux charity–forcibly extracting property from the unwilling, siphoning off much of it for the corrupt (gov’t workers), and throwing the remains at the ungrateful. No one is saved in the process.
Having said that, I could go along with the proposal in the article. There should not be a marriage “penalty” from the government at any level of society. I’d probably favor a different way of removing this penalty, such as diminishing the incentives to form dysfunctional family units in the first place.
But the other may be the best idea for now. For to remove incentives to broken-family parenting, we need to work harder to change people’s hearts. We in the Church need to do more to discourage unchastity–we have, in many cases, just given up that battle–and promote the common-sense Catholic principle of Responsible Parenthood.
February 28th, 2013 | 8:46 am
A few weeks ago I attended a discussion on marriage that was led by Sherif Gergis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George. The focus was on the same-sex “marriage” debate but the sorry state of marriage among young heterosexuals was touched on. I wondered if the state still had an interest in supporting heterosexual marriage and if so, what it was doing to encourage it. Evidently, it could help poorer parents by allowing them to at least keep their welfare payments. Some people claim that no-fault divorce laws should be amended, because they seem particularly to discourage men from marrying.
I don’t see any good coming from the high rates of single parenthood. It’s a bubble that will burst calamitously. I don’t think that enough of our citizens agree with this, though, and I can’t see President Obama lecturing us on the value of heterosexual marriage (his “only Nixon could go to China” moment?).
so I do not expect any pro-marriage action from the State to help the likes of Stephanie, her boyfriends or their children.
February 28th, 2013 | 10:20 am
I can’t see President Obama lecturing us on the value of heterosexual marriage (his “only Nixon could go to China” moment?).
peg,
He already did it.
February 28th, 2013 | 10:47 am
The great state of Texas does have a pro-active program in favor of marriage (real marriage.)
Called Twogether in Texas, the program waives the state marriage license fee ($60 currently) for couples with a certificate that they have participated in a qualified program of pre-marriage preparation.
Such a program is justified by research showing greater incidence of marital success with focused preparation of this type, and the societal costs, including fiscal costs, of matrimonial breakup.
It’s not nearly enough, of course, but it’s at least a start.
February 28th, 2013 | 12:06 pm
Let’s knock off the nonsense here. The average SNAP benefit is $133 per month (http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/18SNAPavg$PP.htm) and it applies to married couples as well as single.
Stephanie in the above example wouldn’t be inhibited from marrying her BF if he wasn’t working or had very low income. Likewise if he was working and had a good income marrying him could lower their tax bills by allowing him to deduct her and her children as dependents. While you may be able to churn spreadsheets for hours and come out with some cases where she gets a marginal financial benefit from remaining unmarried, you can’t really depict the welfare system as the cause of her being single.
Clearly she has given more thought to another reason to avoid marriage
“I believe you only get married once. So if I get married, I don’t want to be divorced.”
What has made marriage less appealing is its lifelong nature. No doubt Michael PS will soon confirm this by noting France’s rise of ‘PACS’ which are a type of ‘marriage-lite’.
February 28th, 2013 | 4:00 pm
Two kids by two boyfriends, neither of which Stephanie married. Is it uncharitable and anti-Christian to mention that? Or are we automatically supposed to segue into the gushy mode as soon as we hear of Stephanie’s plight?
February 28th, 2013 | 5:15 pm
I think it’s fair and logical to ask how it is that our social safety net actually has a deleterious effect on the stability of society, and penalizing marriage is one way that it does. As a clergy person, I’ve seen multiple examples of this. Certainly I could say “these folks should’ve made better decisions,” but that doesn’t change the fact that they are trying to live life with the burdens of the bad decisions they have already made, as are we all. The goal of social welfare ought to be helping people to become self-sufficient as soon as possible. Instead, in multiple ways, our system penalizes actions that would actually lead to self-sufficency given a little time. So, in order to avoid helping a married couple for 6 months or a year, we end up bank-rolling a mother and children who may or may not be cohabitating with the father or boy friend for several years at least. It makes no sense.
I can provide a personal story that is illustrative. I know a young man who worked in retail in his late teens, met an older woman in her twenties and ended up getting her pregnant. The baby was born. Mom has medical issues and can’t work regularly. Dad gets a job with the state on a road crew, they move in together, but have a series of financial and health related difficulties. They want to get married, but discover if they do that their son will no longer be eligible for medicaid, and they cannot afford to pay for health insurance. Fast forward 5 years, dad has been promoted, his job now has family insurance coverage, and they can finally get married. In the interim, their family life has been more unstable than I believe it would’ve been had they been able to marry earlier, and it is the son who will bear the fruit of that instability, if any.
Now, this is not to say that private non-profits can never address these issues. While in seminary we visited the…
February 28th, 2013 | 7:44 pm
They want to get married, but discover if they do that their son will no longer be eligible for medicaid, and they cannot afford to pay for health insurance. Fast forward 5 years, dad has been promoted, his job now has family insurance coverage, and they can finally get married.
The CHIP program offers(ed) insurance up to 200% of the poverty level, custom designed for families with kids who whose incomes were enough to be above Medicaid but not enough to easily buy insurance on their own.
Obamacare establishes ‘community rating’ which basically means pre-existing conditions no longer mean a child with health problems will be priced out of insurance markets.
But I’m not going to hold my breath for anyone here to note how this lowers financial barriers to marriage. Yet a big deal can be made of a program that waives a $60 license fee for getting married.
February 28th, 2013 | 7:49 pm
I read an article recently about a situation in South Korea where many elderly people are not being taken care of by their children, due to the breakdown of traditional Confucianism. The author implied that the state should step in by saying something along the lines of “the government only does x” where x was some small thing. Like, they have to have a tiny one-room apartment.
Now of course this is heartbreaking, and were it within my power I would like to see every elderly person well taken care of. Yet if the state picks up the slack here, isn’t it simply rewarding bad behavior by the children? Shouldn’t the children be forced to support their parents, rather than relieving them of this responsibility, and indeed encouraging others to do likewise?
As with this choice between marriage and government benefits — the parents have a responsibility to care for their children. The fathers in this situation should be made to pay sufficiently to support their offspring, and if they can’t, only then should the government do it for them, and then they should be jailed.
March 1st, 2013 | 6:37 am
What has happened is that marriage used to fill lots of needs. For women in some times and places it was one of the few places of actual safety. As the materialistic benefits of marriage become easier to fulfill outside of marriage, the rate of marriage will have to suffer. Ironically, the quality of marriages will go up.
Be clear, marriage is less necessary for material needs. A single woman is perfectly capable of raising children alone compared to her counterpart from centuries ago. So the only plus left to marriage is the idea of a lifelong commitment. A plus to those who really want it, a minus to those who don’t. This also explains why those who have been denied that opportunity (gays) want into marriage while heterosexuals are leaving it aside.
Inequality also explains why it less popular among the poor. As you go up the income scale needs grow faster than money. To a lower income person it’s perfectly acceptable to have a baby if you can live with your mom, have enough to feed it and maybe have a semi-decent car for appointments and later school. If you’re in Michelle Obama’s class, you have to provide your kids with their own house, their own bedrooms, full health coverage, college funds etc. A challenge even at six figures, easier if you’re united in marriage to someone like you. One would expect to see marriage get less real at the very top of the income scale. Which is what we see. When you’re in the zone where money ceases to ever really be able to matter to your lifestyle (think Donald Trump, stars with wealth in 8 or 9 figures), divorces increase.
March 1st, 2013 | 8:20 am
Boonton,
I believe you are correct. My family has looked into government medical and has used food stamps. States vary, but I believe these discussions are generally carried on by folks who have no real understanding of the way social service programs actually work. They have massive issues, but they usually aren’t the ones criticized in articles like the above, where we are just expected to accept the premise that the subject of the story would receive fewer benefits (and no increase in benefits) from the state after marriage.
In my state, for example, if I am married to my husband my family can receive food stamps even if I’m staying home with the kids. This means the subject could move to being a stay at home mom, stop paying day care (assuming dad is not watching the kids in shifts) and give her toddler the benefit of a parent at home. This may not be her choice, but it’s one the state would financially support if she chose it. What the state does not support is a family with an income high enough to pay for food (and in many states the bar for food stamps is pretty high, relatively) getting state subsidies.
The problem the story protests could easily be solved in the reverse manner — state enforcement of child support by fathers, so that moms like the subject get their food money from the fathers of their children instead of the state. Instead, he gets to make what money he wants and keep it, and do so without seeing his child hungry because the state gives the ‘single” mom food stamps. This is the corruption and distortion the story should address.
I have to wonder, too, at the intro to the story. We had our indulgences, but the time we spent on food stamps we were not drinking Starbucks coffee and vacationing in country cabins. I find the story and its premise questionable in its plausibility.
March 1st, 2013 | 8:23 am
Sorry, pgk, missed your last paragraph, didn’t mean to repeat your point, let me instead just agree with it.
March 1st, 2013 | 9:40 am
Just one more note, though, Booton, on the Obamacare and kids with pre-existing — they can no longer legally deny coverage, but they can charge more for it — our insurance company told us our 6 year old could be charge at up to 500% the cost of a regular premium.
March 1st, 2013 | 12:23 pm
The father of the father of Stephanie child (the structure of this sentence is clumsy because we are not given Stephanie’s child’s father’s name. Which is itself telling.) should take his son (the father of Stephanie’s child) grab him tightly by the ear and say, “Why did you have sex with someone you did not marry?! Why are you not taking care of your child?! Why don’t you work at Wal-Mart at night and McDonald’s in the day (Like I did!) to do whatever is necessary to take care of your family!? Repent son!”
March 1st, 2013 | 4:33 pm
Marie,
Fair point about pre-existing conditions. From a quick reading it seems the law prohibts insurance from denying kids because of a pre-existing condition AND prohibits them covering everything except the condition (“preexisting exclusion”). Until 2014 there’s a temp program for adults with conditions to help them buy insurance. At that point insurance purchased thru the exchanges has to both cover conditions and can’t hike charges for them. So you’re right a lower income family with a child who has some type of condition who isn’t getting coverage from work or the gov’t is still in a tough boat, but hopefully one that’s getting better.
This doesn’t account for marriage rates. Most people with children do not have sick ones and if that’s the case coverage is not very expensive. Or if you have low income, no assets and can disregard your credit you can always tap the ER and not pay the bill. Needless to say the decline in marriage rates seems to impact other developed countries who have variations on universal coverage.
March 1st, 2013 | 5:03 pm
Pastor
The father of the father of Stephanie child (the structure of this sentence is clumsy because we are not given Stephanie’s child’s father’s name. Which is itself telling.) should take his son (the father of Stephanie’s child) grab him tightly by the ear and say,..
That’s all well and good but it ignores Carig’s very valid point, she choose to have two children by two different bf’s married to neither of them in an era where both birth control and abortion is reasonably available and affordable. Why? The answer is pretty clear, she and many people like her rationally calculated that being married to the father of her child would not materially impact her or the child’s well being.
I notice a lot of people here are focused on the care of a child or toddler. But a baby is only little for a few years. In less than 20 the raising of a child is done. For a 20-something person to buy into marriage, they are buying into a an arrangement that could be expected to last half a century. You need something more to argue for that than a few years of help changing diapers.
March 1st, 2013 | 11:01 pm
Boonton, I don’t think it is all that easy for a single mother to raise a child. There’s a tremendous amount of subsidy when they do, whether donated (single mothers living with their parents, or their parents watching the children,) paid for (day care, nannies, domestic staff,) or from government.
I think there’s way too much “everyone lives in NYC and is a rich white-collar knowledge worker” when discussing this. For many women, single parenthood is neverending stress, worry, and poverty, even when working and subsidized by others. This is just for the mother; for a child, no amount of subsidy replaces not knowing a father. While children may overcome the lack, it is a dear lack, and should not be encouraged.
March 2nd, 2013 | 2:19 pm
It’s not much subsidy. It’s how much a person thinks they need to raise a kid.
Ask yourself this, how many people you know who insist that they *must*, absolutely *must* have a minivan or like vehicle if they have kids? There’s even a breed that insist on this when they only have a single child! Notice how that ‘requirement’ for children didn’t seem to exist 40 years ago…even though many families were bigger.
Now consider that I know a lower income family with 3 kids whose main car is a little 2-door civic like thing. And finally consider a boss I had once who brought himself a Lexus. His thinking? In 8 or so years his son would be driving and that would probably be the car he would drive. Since ‘everyone wrecks their first car’, he should probably get the most top of the line car possible in terms of safety now.
What I see here is one set of people who are willing to do with less and another set that can’t imagine doing so with less. If you think you must have a new Lexus today to have a kid, it will be easier to do that if you’re in a stable marriage. If you think that all you need is a car with 4 wheels that runs 90% of the time, you can pull off single parenthood. In other words, materialism is helping save marriage for the middle and upper middle class. But the lower and extreme upper class have in their own way transcended materialism and as a result marriage suffers.
March 4th, 2013 | 9:07 am
Boonton,
The program for adult subsidies actually just closed to new enrollment — ran out of money.
Many states, like ours, currently have programs where you can buy insurance from a private company through the state if you have a pre-existing. Our program is great. It will cease to exist in 2014. We are a low income family with a child with pre-existing, we feel our situation will radically worsen in a year.
This definitely is not a real factor in marriage rates, as few folks statistically fit into this category. However, it does go to the point that government policy socially engineers in ways hostile to traditional thinking on responsibility. I note the rate up because the policy on health care is being sold as a great increase in choice for folks with pre-existing conditions, when in reality it is removing choices we have now. It’s bait and switch. Many “single” moms do also run into this kind of fast change operation, where they are sold on a program that doesn’t deliver in quite the way they were led to believe it would.
Funny with your examples, we moved to a van from a car on child three because kids now have to be in car seats and boosters until 8 or 9 years old, so squeezing three kids below that age into a back car seat becomes impossible. The weirdness this leads to is that to have three kids you don’t have to have a husband, but you do have to have a van.
Your POV about cost benefit analyses is really interesting, and I suspect explains much of the trending. If you remove traditional and religious motivations to marry, the only ones left are those of financial and lifestyle self-interest. Men and women can acquire those benefits more cheaply elsewhere. Stacy in this case is actually wise not to marry — marrying might relieve some of the financial and time burden now when she has young children, but those burdens can…
March 4th, 2013 | 1:24 pm
Marie
Our program is great. It will cease to exist in 2014.
As pointed out, the reason it is probably scheduled to cease is because in 2014 you would be buying insurance from the health exchanges where the private companies that sell there cannot charge extra for pre-existing conditions.
I note the rate up because the policy on health care is being sold as a great increase in choice for folks with pre-existing conditions, when in reality it is removing choices we have now
Sadly insurance is not about choices but about off loading costs onto others. I think the analogy of a bunch of coworkers going out to lunch and splitting the check evenly is apt. Those who eat more than average are reaping a benefit from those who eat less. If you can strategically plan your lunch buddies to be light salad eaters you can feast every day on the cheap. Of course it’s not funny when we’re talking about a child with serious medical problems. You are being priced out of the insurance markets to make life slightly easier for the thousands of parents whose kids are totally healthy. IMO it’s just to turn that on its head.
Your POV about cost benefit analyses is really interesting, and I suspect explains much of the trending. If you remove traditional and religious motivations to marry, the only ones left are those of financial and lifestyle self-interest.
Before downing materialism too much, keep in mind it’s not just about ‘fun stuff’. Over the weekend that mom I know with a tiny civic had her ball joint break in the middle of the street. If they were zipping at 70 mph it could have been a fatal accident. The boss who insisted on a new Lexus isn’t just about luxury, but also safety for his child.
Most of the arguments for marriage have been materialistic in nature. If you hear about children of marriages having better school outcomes,…
March 5th, 2013 | 9:23 am
As for materialism, most human motivation is a mixed bag. Valuing created goods properly is a virtue. All expensive purchases are not a vice. All cheap purchases are not frugality. But the dad who buys a brand new Lexus is not likely doing so only in order to safeguard his son in the event of an accident many years in the future. New cars depreciate so ridiculously off the lot and the cost vs. safety improvement for a Lexus hardly compares to that of other, less fashionable vehicles. Buying a one year old Volvo would have served the safety purposes as well or better, no? I’m not damning the guy for buying a Lexus, but anyone who says that was primarly a safety move lives in a different world from mine. And I have to say that if he has done what many do, bought a Lexus “for his son’s safety” instead of stocking his son’s college account so his son can avoid debt, that’s no virtue. Not that he has an obligation to buy his son college, but if he’s going to buy either college or a Lexus. . . .
What people often buy, also, with expensive purchases is a sense of security. Sure, apples to apples a civic will be crushed at 70 more easily than a Lexus. But neither are likely to come out well. You could easily make the fictional argument that a woman who teaches her children that family and people are more important than products is securing their safety more than the man who teaches his only son that he can’t have siblings because dad can’t afford a Lexus for any more kids — because the behavior of that son when he does drive is likely to be far more reckless than that of the kids in a well-adjusted family. Fictional, but still.
It’s true for the story and your examples, choices are complicated things. If Stacy thought that by marrying her boyfriend she might wind up driving a Lexus, or even that she thought her kids might wind up going to…
March 5th, 2013 | 2:01 pm
Wanted to note briefly as it’s off topic that yes, our state solution to the problem of portability is going to be replaced by the federal solution. The state solution was a lot better, it will be a loss for us and many others.
Within the system (always a disclaimer when you’re stuck with a system where a third party pays all medical bills) we currently have 15 to 30 different choices for how we would like to be insured. Once the reforms go through, looks like we’ll be looking at as many as 3 choices, as few as 1.
The theory behind insurance is not that you shuck off your costs on others — the theory is that you shuck them off on your past and future self, and that it averages out over a pool of years and a pool of people. Theory. But since health care costs are so high, it’s probably that almost all of us at some point in our lives will be facing an expensive medical event, so we really can’t approach the issue as a winner/loser gamble. Even with my kid’s expensive condition, the insurers and state have still come out way ahead on my family’s premiums — and that’s how it should be, since we need margins to keep the system solvent.
March 5th, 2013 | 9:24 pm
It’s hard to say, of the 15-30 companies offering different policies now where will they be in 2014? I suspect many will want to be in the exchanges grabbing customers. I also suspect that states that opt the Feds run their exchanges either because their Republicans hate all things Obama or they just don’t want to do it, will end up creating a huge multi-state market for insurance that private companies will find very tempting.
I disagree about past.v.future selves in regards to health insurance. People change insurance companies so often that even if you do spend many years paying as a healthy person and some years receiving as asick person, it’s very unlikely a single insurance company will reap both sides of the equation. One solution would be to force you to be with one insurance company your whole life. But then so much for choice and competition. If you increase the choice and competition aspect, then you create a game where the most a company can win by selling to the most healthy people and scaring away the most sick people.
I think this is the motivation for some plans to offer things like aromatherapy or cheap gym membership. That’s the sort of thing that sounds great to a young 20-something who never had a major illness ever. To someone who beat cancer two times, they probably want to see a plan that covers all the best oncologists and not gym memberships.
To me it seems like if you want to keep private health insurance as the norm then there’s not many ways to do anything other than Obamacare. You need to say insurance has to cover ‘all the basics’ and not price sick pepole out of the market. The flip side will be insurance companies will demand that people not simply enter the market when they get sick but carry insurance when they are well too.
March 7th, 2013 | 9:15 am
But most folks get their insurance through an employer, and there’s very few companies out there. Competition is already severely limited because of these factors, which are largely artificially drive by federal policy. Most folks don’t choose Humana when they are young and healthy and Aetna when they are older and sick — they go with what their employer picks, so it winds up being generally a wash.
The current system most states use covers private insurance well. Insurance is not about health care, it’s about not being bankrupted. A very poor person can’t be bankrupted, and so can get care and be billed and ignore the bills, as you say, or receive state care to cover them. The problem is the person who has no insurance but substantial equity in a home, for example. The solution is that this person must buy insurance to protect his assets. If he is low income, the state subsidizes the insurance he purchases. The portability problem is simply that folks fear they will not be able to buy insurance at any price if they get a condition that excludes them from insurance. The states solved this problem with high risk pools that are subsidized if you are poor. The catch is, if you have continuous coverage (lose your job with benefits, for example) you can come onto the program, but if you don’t (just didn’t get insurance until you got sick) you have 6 months before you’re covered. So everyone gets care, but the folks who decide not to insure until they get a condition wind up losing their assets. The folks who have maintained insurance don’t.
The problem was solved already. The issue was that some of the solutions were burdensome and Byzantine and people didn’t know about them, and they were inefficent (e.g. the emergency room for a cold scenario). The answer was to set up clinics instead of ERs, to clarify and enhance subsidies to purchase…
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