Posted on 10/23/2005 9:53:44 AM PDT by Khankrumthebulgar
Writing recently in National Review Online, Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), describes the huge social costs of family breakdown and the benefits to children and society of marriage. He also points out that his agency spends $46 billion each year on programs "the need for [which] is either created or exacerbated by the breakup of families and marriages." He rightly argues that we need to address this costly "family breakdown" problem.
In fact, one could look beyond his Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and even HHS and make a similar point about virtually all programs for law enforcement, substance abuse, and school performance.
Indeed, his argument demonstrates more than that the runaway growth in domestic government spending is attributable to family breakdown. It is also an acknowledgement that the federal government and its hangers-on have a clear self-interest in broken families. ACF and the half-trillion dollar HHS generally constitute a massive in-house lobby of social workers, psychotherapists, lawyers and others who are not so candid as Dr. Horn about how they depend upon a steady supply of fatherless and troubled children to justify their huge consumption of tax dollars – dollars that in turn subsidize and increase the number of such children.
The fact that Dr. Horn has a tiger by the tail may explain why, as remedy, he can offer only palliatives in the form of yet another government program, this time state-sponsored psychotherapy: "Through marriage education, healthy conflict-resolution skills can be taught." In what Christina Sommers and Sally Satel have called in their book title, One Nation Under Therapy, does anyone really believe that our multi-billion dollar family crisis is due to a lack of communication workshops and anger-management classes? And do we really want the federal government defining (and potentially re-defining) the terms of marriage?
The smorgasbord of programs Dr. Horn lists is more than a response to broken families; it is a major cause of broken families. Before we initiate new federal programs, we ought to remember the first rule of public policy intervention, which is to first examine the effect of existing programs to see if adjusting them may correct the problem. Could our current public programs and policies be contributing to the family breakdown problem, and, if so, how can we alter them to yield better results?
Dr. Horn provides a good example of how a federal program can be altered to become much more socially productive. Our welfare system used to be a major direct cause of family breakdown or non-formation. We used to pay poor mothers not to marry or work. With welfare reform, we changed that system to allow them to marry and no longer pay them not to work. As he notes, this change in the system has been a huge success. Our welfare rolls have decreased, and child poverty has declined.
Similar political courage will be needed to address the other known public programs and policies that are undermining marriage. These include:
(1) The states have failed, since the 1960's, to treat marriage as a real contract.
Currently anyone who wants out of a marriage can unilaterally end it without penalty. This is not what was intended when marriage laws were changed in the 1970's. "No fault" divorce was to be allowed only when both parties agreed to it. This would have made marriage more like a real contract, with less interference by the state in the matter of its ending. Instead, marriage has become a non-contract, with no protection for those who invest in it.
(2) Paternalistic "family" courts and new laws have seriously undermined fatherhood.
There has long been a huge bias in divorce courts to grant custody of children to mothers. As this bias threatened to diminish, feminists pushed through the Violence Against Women Act, which makes it easy for any mother considering divorce to toss the father out of his own home and claim the family assets, including the children, simply by accusing him of domestic violence. No evidence or formal charge is required, and domestic "violence" need not even be violent. Shared parenting provisions would end this winner-take-all lottery.
(3) Federally funded state child support systems set excessive awards and penalize non-payment harshly, even when the circumstances for non-payment are clearly outside the control of the payer.
Child support awards are so high that the children have become a profit center for middle class divorcing moms – an additional financial incentive for them to divorce. As Kimberly Folse and Hugo Varela-Alvarez write in the Journal of Socio-Economics, "Strong enforcement…may… lead to the unintended consequence of increasing the likelihood of divorce." Yet in a striking slight-of-hand, disbursements under the "healthy marriage" mantra have actually gone less to counseling than to child support enforcement.
Is it any surprise that divorce in families with children is almost entirely instituted by the moms? But young men have gotten the message and are increasingly avoiding marriage and avoiding having children inside or outside of marriage. These men are scolded for their lack of "commitment" by the National Marriage Project, whose interpretation Dr. Horn is using to formulate policy. But no man in his right mind would start a family today if he understood how the federal government subsidizes the stealing of his children and his own incarceration for an assortment of newfangled gender "crimes" they make it impossible for him not to commit.
Exhorting people to marry is pointless so long as marriage is a bate-and-switch carrying financial rewards for those who break it. People will simply not invest in a worthless investment, no matter how much you preach at them. If marriage was a worthwhile investment, we would see more of it.
October 21, 2005
Stephen Baskerville [send him mail] is a political scientist and president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. The views expressed are his own.
Copyright © 2005 Stephen Baskerville
Bump! There is a lot of truth in this article. Family Court is a mess.
Baskerville's crusade is against no-fault divorce, when in fact the larger problem lies with non-marriage in the first place.
I agree with him about sole custody going mostly to women in divorce ... but the remedy for this is for Rebuttal Presumption of Joint Physical Custody ... a default position whereby a parent would have to petition a court to NOT have joint custody of his/her child rather than the other way around. Under RPJPC both parents would automatically be expected to spend equal amounts of TIME raising the child, and equal amounts of money raising the child, unless they petition the court for other arrangements. That would mean fathers as well as mothers would raise and support their child(ren) and all that entails ... not just write a check each month.
If I had my say, that would go for non-married people who have created chilren as well.
Baskerville has never written in support of RPJPC or in favor of men actually raising (as opposed to only supporting) the children they co-created out of wedlock.
If creating children meant taking on the FULL responsibility of parenthood (whether the parents are married, divorced, or whatever) ... we wouldn't be having this discussion.
In the fifties, although blacks were still struggling for equal opportunities and were on the low end of the economic ladder, the black family was for the most part strong and stable. Two parent families were the rule, not the exception. They attended church together, had strong moral values, and did not comprise a majority of the prison population. Compare that to the present state of the black community after 40 years of Liberal Socialism. Our prisons are disproportionably black, unwed mothers and single parent families are the rule, black youths without a strong male role model other than rap stars and basketball players, roam the streets and are drawn into a culture of drugs and crime.
The following statistics are provided by Star Parker's Coalition of Urban Renewal, (CURE).
*60 percent of black children grow up in fatherless homes.
*800,000 black men are in jail or prison.
*70 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers.
*Over 300,000 black babies are aborted annually.
*50 percent of new AIDS cases are in the black community.
Moynihan was an Undersecretary of Labor for policy in the Kennedy administration, and in the early part of the Johnson administration. In that capacity, he did not have operational responsibilities, allowing him to devote all of his time to trying to formulate national policy for what would become the War on Poverty. He had a small staff including Paul Barton, Ellen Broderick, and Ralph Nader who at 29 years of age, hitchhiked to Washington, D.C. and got a job working for Moynihan in 1963.
They took inspiration from the book Slavery written by Stanley Elkins. Elkins essentially contended that slavery had made the blacks dependent on the dominant society, and that that dependence still existed a century later. This was the beginning of much of the philosophy that the government must go beyond simply ensuring that members of minority races have the same rights as everyone else, and in fact give minority members benefits that others did not get on the grounds that those benefits were necessary to counteract that lingering effects of past actions. Moynihan found data at the Labor Department that showed that even as fewer people were unemployed, more people were joining the welfare rolls. These recipients were families with children, but only one parent (almost invariably the mother). The laws at that time permitted such families to receive welfare payments in certain parts of the United States. Moynihan's report was seen by people on the left as "Blaming the Victim", a slogan coined by William Ryan. He was also seen as propogating the views of racists, because much of the press coverage of his reports focused on the discussion of children being born out of wedlock. Despite Moynihan's warnings, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program had the "Man out of the house rule". Critics said that the nation was paying poor women to throw their husbands out of the house.
----- snip -----
He remained a member of the Democratic Party, although he feared that the party had moved too far to the left at that time.
He once wrote in a memo to President Nixon that "the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect". He argued that Nixon's conservative's tactics were playing into the hands of the radicals, but he regretted that he was misinterpreted as advocating that the government should neglect minorities.
wikipedia.org
Now instead of just having minorities dependent on government, the poor of all stripes are driven to its embrace. The "War on Poverty" became a war on the populous, and we're all the poorer for it.
Moynihan found data at the Labor Department that showed that even as fewer people were unemployed, more people were joining the welfare rolls.
What they didn't divulge was that the greater increase on the welfare rolls were whites, not minorities -- and mostly rural.
I do wish Pat had the cojones to stand against Johnson and his gang of miscreants; the country would be better off by far.
ping to myself
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