Posted on 02/20/2006 6:31:39 PM PST by wjersey
The sad watershed is in sight. Before 2012, future historians will say, most babies were born of married parents; after it, not. Figures released yesterday show that already 42.3 per cent of children are born out of wedlock, up from 8.4 per cent in 1961.
This astonishing shift is not happening because married people are having proportionately fewer children: married couples continue to produce more babies than the unmarried. It is happening, quite simply, because fewer people are getting married in the first place. Marriage rates are at their lowest since records began 160 years ago.
What is causing the decline? The fact is that, through its well intentioned efforts to compensate lone parents for the struggles they face raising children alone, the state's fiscal and legal arrangements effectively discourage family stability.
Most obviously, the tax credit system does not acknowledge the need for a second adult in a child's life, as the previous benefit system did by granting higher allowances to two-parent families.
Jill Kirby, of the Centre for Policy Studies, has calculated that, overall, an "average" couple, on a single income with a mortgage and two young children, pay £7,600 a year more in tax than they receive in benefits. If they break up, however, the two households can receive £400 more in benefits than they pay in tax.
The expense to the Exchequer is as nothing to the social damage done by the fall in marriage. According to research cited by Mrs Kirby, within five years of the birth of a child, only eight per cent of married couples have split up, compared with 52 per cent of cohabiting couples. The consequences are obvious and appalling.
Policy makers face an invidious choice. If they reward marriage, they subsidise those who are, by definition, best able to withstand the shocks of life, and punish those who are not - most of all single mothers, who are often single through no fault of their own, but because of feckless and irresponsible men.
But incentives work perversely, too: the policy of the past two decades has been to encourage lifestyles that no amount of state cash can render as safe as the married state.
People lead complicated lives, and no single legal model can comprehend the diversity of modern families. But policy makers are obliged to legislate for the general population. The weight of evidence supports the obvious truth that marriage - more than any other model - holds couples together and helps children grow up healthy and happy.
As in France and Germany, the state should act to support marriage through the fiscal system. Only then can the decline in marriage be reversed.
In the USA, the man-hating-punishing divorce courts help out a lot!
Already here in the underclass, and spreading among the rest.
In the U.S., there's another factor at work. The population is getting older and there are a growing number of baby boom widows and widowers who have no interest in remarrying.
at the end of the day, marriage is the institution that has worked best for the propagation of the human race for thousands of years. The sanctity of marriage is an integral part of the way societies the world over structure themselves.
Our civilization will crash and burn long before marriage does- and I'm thinking that won't happen any time soon.
I agree.
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