Tag Archives: Fusion

News

FRC releases new study on marriage and economic well-being

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Mary found this little blurb on the Christian Post.

Excerpt:

Marriage plays a big role in the well-being of the U.S. economy, such that sound and stable marriages keep the economy healthy while divorce helps the economy regress, a new report suggests.

The findings released by the Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute show how intact married-couple families outperform other family types, including remarried families, divorced families, single-parent families, and cohabiting families, in all of the following economic segments: employment, income, net value, net worth, poverty, receipt of welfare and child economic well-being.

Basically the stats show that the more intact the family remains, the less the difficulties and the inefficiencies the family encounters.

Married-couple families generate the most income with “the median household income twice that of divorced households and four times that of separated households,” reads the report.

Divorced families on the other hand experience a sharp decrease in income after the separation. Divorced women are affected the most as they are 2.83 times more prone to live in poverty than women who remain married.

MARRI Director Pat Fagan, Ph.D, said couples that remain stably married can provide a sound environment where children can be securely fostered while divorce triggers society’s reliance on government welfare programs – programs that currently cost tax payers around $112 billion per year.

Then I went looking for the research paper and found this press release.

Excerpt:

The economic well-being of the United States is strongly related to marriage, which is a choice about how we channel our sexuality. The implications of sexual choices are apparent when comparing family structures across basic economic measures such as employment, income, net worth, poverty, receipt of welfare, and child economic well-being. In all of these the stable, intact married family outperforms other sexual partnering structures; hence the economy rises with the former and encounters more difficulties and inefficiencies as it diverges from it.

Family Structures and Economic Outcomes:

  • Employment and Income. Married-couple families generate the most income, on average. Young married men are more likely to be in the labor force, employed, and working a full-time job than their nonmarried counterparts. Cohabiting men have less stable employment histories than single and married men. Married families generally earn higher incomes than stepfamilies, cohabiting families, divorced families, separated families, and single-parent families. According to one study, married couples had a median household income twice that of divorced households and four times the household income of separated households.
  • Net Worth. Intact, married families have the greatest net worth. A family’s net worth is the value of all its assets minus any liabilities it holds. Married households’ net worth is attributable to more than simply having two adults in the household: a longer-term economic outlook, thrift, and greater head-of-household earning ability (the marriage premium) all contribute to greater household net worth.
  • Poverty and Welfare. Poverty rates are significantly higher among cohabiting families and single-parent families than among married families. Over one third of single mothers live in poverty. Nearly 60 percent of non-teenage single mothers rely on food stamps or cash welfare payments.
  • Child Economic Mobility and Well-Being. Children in married, two-parent families enjoy more economic well-being than children in any other family structure. Children in cohabiting families enjoy less economic well-being than children in married families, but more than children in single-parent families. The children of married parents also enjoy relatively strong upward mobility. By contrast, divorce is correlated with downward mobility. A non-intact family background increases by over 50 percent a boy’s odds of ending up in the lowest socioeconomic level.

Having a high net worth is necessary if you want to have an impact. With money, you can buy people apologetics books, sponsor debates, get more degrees, and contribute to Michele Bachmann, and send your children to the best universities so they can have an influence. Therefore, we need to be extra careful who we marry, extra diligent about preparing for our roles in marriage, and extra persistent in staying married. We need the money for important things.

The FRC is my second favorite think tank, right behind the Heritage Foundation.

News

Fewer people are paying taxes because fewer people are married

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Here is an interesting essay from The Family in America.

Here’s the problem:

Just two days before Tax Day this year, the Heritage Foundation was quick on the draw with a Backgrounder by Curtis S. Dubay citing IRS data showing that the bottom 50 percent of tax filers pay less than 3 percent of all income taxes. According to Dubay, “the rapid increase in the number of nonpaying tax filers caused by tax credits is leading the country to a dangerous tipping point.” Like other conservatives and libertarians, he fears that once the bottom half of tax filers pay no taxes whatsoever, they “could vote themselves an increasing share of government benefits at no cost to themselves.”

And here’s what’s causing the problem:

More important, this relatively new concern about the growth in the number of Americans paying no income taxes overlooks the social roots of the problem, particularly the decline of the most economically productive segment of the population: the married-two parent family.5 Consequently, few economic conservatives seem willing to connect the dots between the changing demographics of the American taxpayer, which Hodge at least acknowledges,6 and the growth of Americans paying no taxes. They seem more eager to blame the latter on the addition and expansion of refundable credits, especially the child tax credit, not changing demographics. Yet Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, estimates that married couples are far less likely to be non-taxpayers in 2009 than single filers or head-of-household filers. In this last category, his model shows 72 percent paying no income taxes, the highest percentage of all tax filing categories. Only 38 percent of married-joint filers, and 26 percent of married-separate filers, pay no taxes.7

Indeed, the Tax Foundation’s own analysis of IRS data documents the decline in the proportion of married filers from 65 percent of returns in 1960 to 41 percent in the years 2000–02, and the dramatic growth of head-of-household filers, representing largely unwed mothers, from 2 percent to 15 percent during the same period. Moreover, looking at data from 2002 returns, the foundation finds that married couples, while they file less than half of all tax returns, pay nearly three-quarters of all income taxes paid by the American people.8 Even though the analysis does not include changes that might arise from the doubling of the child tax credit to $1,000 in 2003, the numbers nonetheless suggest that the growth in the number of Americans who pay no income taxes is driven more by the retreat from marriage than by the proliferation of credits in the tax code, as problematic as that might be. The numbers further suggest that if conservatives are serious about tax reform, they can no longer ignore the elephant in the room—the retreat from marriage and family life—that undermines the very economic growth they seek. Nor can they presume that a flatter tax system with lower rates and a wider base, favored by the  libertarian wing of the GOP, will lead to smaller government, as analysis by economist Gary Becker shows that countries with flatter tax systems tend to have larger governments.9 They must therefore be open to tax reform proposals that recognize the natural family as the social and economic ideal as well as reinforce the recovery of marriage and the child-rich family—not economic growth for its own sake—as centerpieces of American life.

This is yet another reason for fiscal conservatives to take notice that you cannot have economic growth if the traditional family is replaced with single-mother families. Single motherhood is not a situation where men are responsible and work hard as providers. It infantilizes men and rewards them for acting like nomads and barbarians. And the children who are raised without fathers are not going to be as mentally healthy or productive as the ones raised with fathers. The traditional family, with children raised by biological parents who are attached to them, is an important part of future economic growth. It’s all linked together – social conservatism and fiscal conservatism.