Are Government Policies Causing a Decline in Marriage?

             Children who live with their married biological parents have greater opportunities to thrive and be successful than in any other type of situation. However, many couples do not marry for fear that they will lose their government assistance.

            Two experts on marriage and family believe that they have an answer to this problem. Brad Wilcox is an American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. Erik Randolph is director of research at the Georgia Center for Opportunity and author of a three-part series on how to reform welfare to address welfare cliffs and marriage penalties. 

            The Institute for Family Studies and the Georgia Center for Opportunity convened a focus group to gain greater understanding about “major family issues facing working-class Americans.” One of the participants said, “I chose not to marry. For one, I get a lot of assistance. I have a disabled child. So being if I did marry or put any other type of income in, I would not qualify for anything.”

            In their article, Wilcox and Randolph stated that the above comments “are indicative of one of the major issues that emerged in our focus groups across the nation.” The wrote, “Many of the parents gathered in those groups indicated that either they or family and friends had steered clear of marriage for fear of losing their government benefits, from Medicaid to childcare subsidies.” They continued with their explanation.

They are not alone. More than 1 in 10 unmarried Americans whose income falls below the median reported they were not married for fear of losing “access to government benefits,” according to a recent Institute for Family Studies/Wheatley Institution survey. These marriage penalties tend to hit hardest the working-class couples with children and household incomes between about $28,000 and $55,000. The research indicates that the penalties can amount to between about 10% and 30% of household income for many families in this income bracket.

            The authors believe that Republican governors can take steps to help parents “work to eliminate or minimize the marriage penalties that keep all too many parents from marrying. This is important because children are much more likely to thrive – to avoid poverty, flourish in school and steer clear of prison, for instance – when they are raised by their own married parents.” [Emphasis added.]

            Wilcox and Randolph laid much of the blame on federal policymakers for “the way Congress set up tax and safety-net benefits over the last six decades.” Congress fixed “many of the marriage penalties hitting upper-income families in 2017, [but] they have left penalties hitting lower-income families in means-tested programs like Medicaid and child care.” Only Congress has authority and power to change “some of the marriage penalties embedded in our social welfare programs.” However, there are some steps that state legislatures and governors can take to help, according to the authors.

Take some funding from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which is designed to help lower-income families, to address this issue. After all, TANF was specifically designed to promote marriage, reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies and assist with the formation and maintenance of two-parent families, goals that have all too often been ignored by both the federal government and the states.

Because TANF is a block grant, states control how the money is spent within the program’s broad parameters. Governors could take advantage of this flexibility to direct its funding at the marriage penalty problem….

One way TANF funds could be used to promote marriage would be to provide a bonus to low-income couples with children under 5 who wish to marry. This bonus could be pegged to remedying the actual penalty they would incur by tying the knot….

Another way would be to let newly married couples with children continue to receive welfare benefits even after they marry for a full two years after they marry – so long as their total family income is not above the state’s median family income (about $79,000 across the country) ….

Another way states could minimize marriage penalties is by reforming their child care policies. Federal block grants subsidize child care for low-income families. These child care programs have some of the largest marriage penalties. States could fix this by doubling the income threshold for child care subsidies for married families with your children.

            The important thing to remember is, “Poor and working-class parents should not have to choose between seeking government benefits for their children and giving their children the benefit of two married parents." Children and families thrive when parents are married, and thriving families strengthen communities and nations.