Today’s social policy is a very sick donkey.  Social problems, “social issues”, and endless spending are what comes out of the animal.  Democrats rush in to clean up the mess and are seen as being helpful.  Republicans stand around hoping not to spend money – but eventually cave in because of the “Titanic Principle”:  we must rescue women and children before the ship goes down.

Both parties are buried under the consequences. Washington has been deadlocked for decades, for lack of policy that works for Americans.  Obamacare — the largest expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society was invented — is now sinking the ship.  The new Millennial welfare state is a certainly-fatal drag on the economy, the dollar, and the taxpayer.

Supply-side socioeconomics gets in front of our very sick donkey.  It leads individuals out of poverty, crime, and socioeconomic bedlam by establishing positive choices and futures for low-income Americans that do not exist today.

The choices government offers to individuals today penalize attainment of the American dream that most of us want.  Existing policy does not empower individuals – or the Nation — to succeed.  It “suckers” Americans into becoming institutionalized failures of the state.

Welfare is a government-sponsored underground economy producing nothing but crime, illegitimacy, poverty, deficit spending, high taxes, and an overwhelming majority of unhappy voters in all income brackets.

We are all much the same. Everyone, regardless of sex, age, or income wants a reasonable place to live in a relatively safe neighborhood.  We all want food, decent schools, and items such as a television, computer, car, and cell phone.  We all hate waiting in lines, filling out government forms, and waiting for somebody to help us out.  We all want to achieve our dreams.  But today, only the most determined and lucky individuals escape the underground welfare economy and make it to the middle class.

Today, 70% of women and 66% of men still strongly believe in marriage (many more are not averse to it). If socioeconomic policy encourages marriage instead of dependency, sustainable communities will rise with  rebirth of the “contented” middle class (which exists naturally when marriage is the social norm).

How does supply-side socioeconomics work?  Here are four simple highlights of supply-side socioeconomic policies:

• If your spouse has a serious substance abuse problem, a “family intervention” restraining order makes your partner choose between growing up and losing it all. Most individuals do not want a divorce or to end up in a women’s shelter.  They want their partner to recover.  We merely empower the responsible spouse to pull the relationship out of the quicksand. The cost to the state is negligible and reduces annual social spending by at least $20,000 per marriage created or saved.

• “Responsible Dissolution” divorce reform legislation replaces existing predatory divorce laws (famously misused by both Newt Gingrich and John Edwards to replace their wives).  Retooled divorce policy makes mutual consent the norm, except where serious problems exist in the marriage.  When divorce must be a unilateral action, the spouse most responsible to the marriage receives at least 70% of marital assets.  Mutual consent takes the fight out of ending a marriage while making marriage a safe investment to begin with.

• Marriage Savers support group meetings in every community provide very effective free help to troubled couples.  Just walk in the door of your church or civic center and a mentor couple who survived the same problems you have will guide your marriage back on track.  Retired Americans are our strongest asset.  Let us harness their knowledge and willingness to volunteer.
• Welfare-to-marriage policy is a multidisciplinary approach rebuilding marriage culture where it does not exist today.  It provides educational resources for married couples who have time to attend school and increase earning capacity to move into the middle class.  Small economic incentives to marry are offset by decreases in long-term welfare expenditures and increases in taxes from larger numbers married couples.

Marriage is the necessary cornerstone we can no longer afford to waste.  Let us apply supply-side socioeconomics to lift America out of the modern dark-age that has become a national nightmare.

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David R. Usher is President of the Center for Marriage Policy.

The leading hierarchical driver of poverty in America is marriage-absence.  Economic downturns and joblessness play a secondary role.  The following table, compiled by the Center for Marriage Policy from government data proves this is the case.

We see that poverty for married families has consistently ranged between about 5 and 7% since 1975 across five economic downturns. But poverty has averaged approximately 500% to 600% higher for unmarried female-headed households – closely following the unemployment rate.

Bicycles have two wheels for good reason, and fish do not ride them.  Married families consistently have income redundancy required to weather market cycles and the necessary built-in human resources to withstand illness, child-rearing, and retirement gracefully; while paying taxes.  We can no longer afford our failed cultural experiment propping up unicycles on the highway of life.

Marriage guarantees the lowest poverty rates regardless of economic conditions.  Marriage is the best pathway to upward mobility and economic success, most notably for individuals in lower income groups. 

The graph reveals other astonishing truths:

1. Significant reductions in poverty levels occurred during the economic boom prior to implementation of the first “Great Society” programs, when marriage rates were high. Programs implemented since 1964 have demonstrated no impact reducing poverty, but enabled growth of destructive cultural thinking deprecating marriage.
2. The “number of individuals in poverty” statistic widely recited in horror is misleading because it reflects population growth in addition to poverty. The “percent in poverty” is credible.
3. We are nowhere near the poverty level of 23% in 1959. Government programs have demonstrated little or no impact on this metric since 1970.
4. The number of individuals lacking health care coverage has hovered around 15% since 1986.  Lack of coverage is not the pandemic misused to ram National Health Care through Congress.
5. Poverty rates for unmarried women (most often with children) are approximately six times higher than for married women.  Recessions impact unmarried mothers more steeply than the general population, most likely due to the fact that these households have only one income stream.

Two related exponential trends are revealed that track in parallel.  Illegitimacy increased 1000% since 1959, and nearly doubled since 1986. Secondly, the percentage of households receiving some form of government assistance has increased 142% since 1986.

Welfare reforms enacted in 1996 are not a success.  Policy to reverse the trend of marriage-absence did not exist in 1996 and was not considered, but was called for in the PROWRA template.

We have spent 16-trillion on welfare since 1964, and another $953 billion this year.  Budgets must be cut, but only a scrooge would do it by throwing unmarried mothers on the street.  To get our economic house in order, our first priority must be to restore marriage as the structural social norm.

Teachers, lawyers, insurers, doctors, judges, hospitals, real estate companies, banks, Fannie, Freddie, and taxpayers have a profound stake helping restoring marriage.  Their greatest industry problems are substantially caused by marriage-absence.

Eighty-six percent of women, and two-thirds of men still believe in marriage.  Marriage is the most pressing contemporary women’s and children’s issue.  The majority of problems liberals, conservatives, Libertarians, and Constitutionalists abhor can be greatly resolved by restoring marriage.

The Center for Marriage Policy, founded this month, has created the “10 Marriage Values Policies” designed to complete welfare reform, improve the lives of millions of unmarried adults and children, balance budgets without raising taxes, reduce poverty, and restore our core social fabric.

American cannot afford to waste another election cycle multiplying past mistakes.  The time to restore marriage is now.

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David R. Usher is President of the Center for Marriage Policy.

• Poverty and across-the-board growth in runaway social entitlement and other spending attempting to artificially reduce the economic consequences of marriage-absence.
• A shrinking middle class and widening income gap due to transmogrification of two-income families to structurally-weak single-income families.
• Growing tax burdens and fewer taxpayers, driving class-warfare between rich and poor.
• Large numbers of single-income, unmarried individuals cannot afford health insurance, resulting in nationalization of the medical care industry.
• High taxes on businesses and subsequent loss of jobs and factories to foreign soil.
• Destabilization of the dollar due to high rates of home loan foreclosures, business bankruptcy and consumer loan defaults by economically-weak unmarried households.
• An overall moral decline affecting our nation at every level.
• A lack of consistency in legal jurisprudence.
• A false perception that spending massive sums for in-school parenting, discipline, and remedial education can somehow prepare large numbers of children to do well in school.
• Migration of large numbers of individuals into underground informal economies of crime and violence stimulated by and adjunct to the welfare-state apparatus.
• The highest incarceration rates in the industrialized world, at great public expense and loss of productivity.

The consequences of marriage-absence to individuals include:

• Growing numbers of struggling unmarried mothers requiring costly government husbandry and increasing numbers of unmarried men unable to support two households.
• A willingness to destroy unborn children and large numbers of out-of-wedlock pregnancies
• A proliferation of serious and often incurable sexually-transmitted diseases.
• An increase of child abuse, sexualizing of children, and child neglect.
• Participation in the underground economies of crime, drugs, gambling, prostitution, perversion, and pornography.
• Children’s psychological problems, poor school performance, involvement in gangs, the drug culture, teen pregnancy, incarceration, and failure to enter the workforce and advance to higher income levels.
• Insufficient assets for retirement.
• Emotional distress and insecurity for adults and children without intact families.