Some interesting stats...
How to Fight Income Inequality: Get
Married
In families headed by married couples, the poverty level in 2012 was just 7.5%. Those with a single mother: 33.9%.
By Ari Fleischer
Jan. 12, 2014 6:07 p.m. ET
"Marriage inequality" should be at the center of
any
discussion of why some Americans prosper and others don't
According to
Census
Bureau information analyzed by the Beverly LaHaye Institute, among families
headed by two married parents in 2012, just 7.5% lived in poverty. By
contrast,
when families are headed by a single mother the poverty level jumps to
33.9%.
And the number of children raised in
female-headed
families is growing throughout America.
A 2012 study by the
Heritage Foundation found that 28.6% of children born to a white mother were
out
of wedlock. For Hispanics, the figure was 52.5% and for African-Americans
72.3%.
In 1964, when the war on poverty began, almost everyone was born in a family
with two married parents: only 7% were not.
Attitudes toward
marriage
and having children have changed in America over the past 50 years, and
low-income children and their mothers are the ones who are paying the
price.
The statistics make clear what common sense tells
us:
Children who grow up
in a
home with married parents have an easier time becoming educated, wealthy and
successful than children reared by one parent. As the
Heritage
study states:
"The U.S. is steadily
separating into a two-caste system with marriage and education as the
dividing
line. In the high-income third of the population, children are raised by
married
parents with a college education; in the bottom-income third, children are
raised by single parents with a high-school diploma or
less."
One of the
differences
between the haves and the have-nots is that the haves tend to marry and give
birth, in that order. The have-nots tend to have babies and remain
unmarried.
Marriage makes a difference. Heritage reports that among white married
couples,
the poverty rate in 2009 was just 3.2%; for white nonmarried families, the
rate
was 22%. Among black married couples, the poverty rate was only 7%, but the
rate
for non-married black families was 35.6%.
Marriage inequality
is a
substantial reason why income inequality exists. For children, the problem
begins the day they are born, and no government can redistribute enough
money to
fix it. If redistributing money could solve the problem, the $20.7 trillion
in
2011 dollars the government has spent on welfare programs since 1964—when
President Johnson declared the "war on poverty"—would have eliminated income
inequality a long time ago.
The matter is influenced strongly by decisions
and
values. The majority of women who have children outside of marriage today
are
adult women in their 20s. (Teenagers under 18 represent less than 8% of
out-of-wedlock births.)
Rather than focusing
on
initiatives that might address this issue, President Obama, as well as
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York City's new mayor,
Bill de
Blasio, believe that the income gap
can
be closed by increasing taxes on the better-off and transferring the money
to
the poor.
Good luck with that. The tax code is already
extremely progressive, as a December study by the Congressional Budget
Office
makes clear, yet poverty remains a significant problem.
According to CBO, the
top
40% of wage earners, those who make more than $51,100 a year, paid 86.4% of
all
federal taxes in 2010, the most recent data available. The bottom 40% of
earners
paid just 4.2% of all taxes. The top 40% paid virtually all of the income
tax
collected, while the bottom 40% paid a negative 9.1% of all income taxes.
Paying
"negative" taxes is possible because of the earned-income tax credit and
other
public-assistance measures that give the bottom 40% refunds for taxes they
didn't pay.
Given how deep the
problem of poverty is, taking even more money from one citizen and handing
it to
another will only diminish one while doing very little to help the other. A
better and more compassionate policy to fight income inequality would be
helping
the poor realize that the most important decision they can make is to stay
in
school, get married and have children—in that order.
