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.

Marriage-absence is a problem caused by decades of breezy liberal “change” agenda for which Conservatives have never had sound socioeconomic policy or legislation.  Liberals attempt to enact ideas into law to give the appearance of solving social problems.  Our culture of honoring marriage has suffered decades of incremental losses for lack of a better policy.  Today’s seemingly unrelated budget battles are the end-stage consequence of years of using “no” as our only social policy, and assuming marriage would survive despite societal erosion and new anti-family policies.

We must now ask ourselves an important question: Why do Republicans usually lose on social issues?

The Limitations of Reaganomics

Reagan knew that “welfare’s purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.” This directly implies more is needed than budget cuts to deal with massive welfare expansion.  Reagan and his descendants were unable to translate this vision into effective policy.  For this reason, conservative social policy has been a risky exercise in economic crisis management often exacerbating the root causes.

One of Reagan’s biggest regrets, as expressed in his memoirs, was signing the first “no-fault” divorce law into effect as Governor of California.  Passage of no-fault divorce laws by all other states were followed by explosions of divorce, illegitimacy, and uncontrollable social spending, empowering Democrat administrations while Republicans nervously stood aside.

Historically, Republicans fail when it comes to delivering both a strong economy and a balanced budget. Republicans have done well on the economic side, but have had difficulty articulating the right way to accomplish strong social policy.  Democrats have demonstrated incompetence on economic issues, but rely on social problems — powered by class and gender warfare organizers — to escalate welfare spending.

The lack of monetaristic social policy, combined with Milton Friedman’s liberal views on social issues, precluded the invention of technically-sound conservative social policy.  The liberal followers of Keynes hence enjoyed sole control of social policy, and America is nearly bankrupt.

During the Reagan, H.W. Bush, and G.W. Bush years, the debt-to-GDP ratio skyrocketed by 62.7%.  This is partially attributable to a combination of lower tax rates and increased defense spending — but is predominantly the result of out-of-control “War on Poverty” spending.

The 1996 welfare reforms, primarily focused on cutting budgets, aggressively attacked the consequences of marriage-absence instead of addressing problems at the source.   Social expenditures were privatized as aggressive “child support” recoupment programs, and more single mothers were forced to work full time.  This did not lift unmarried mothers out of poverty or resolve their problems.  Many mothers ended up doing double-duty as mothers and full-time workers, while legions of un-parented children failed in school, went to prison, and gave birth to the next unfortunate generation to be raised without married parents.

Recasting “welfare” as a “child support collections problem” also transformed welfare into an inbred policy structure effectively taking from the poor to help the poor — pitting poor women against poor men.  This proved to aggravate the unmarried underclass — still believing it was getting welfare — only to find it taken back four or five years later by the Title IV-D collections system.  The resulting disparity between rich and poor provided powerful ammunition for the “social justice” movement to organize large urban areas during the run-up to the 2008 elections.

A “family values” cultural clash emerged – hallmarked by the policy-free “family values” debate and punctuated by Gingrich’s strident call for more orphanages.  In their efforts to appear politically correct many Republicans became squeamish about social issues.   Between 1998 and 2008, Democrats wrenched social issues away from the Republican Party and positioned themselves as the only ones who care about the hardships of single mothers, retirees, and the ever-expanding cotillion of interests being brought under the “welfare” model.

Budget-cutting is a necessary tool but is not a substitute for well-crafted policy that ends social problems and precludes subsequent spending needs. Cutting builds a backlog of social problems inuring to the benefit of opportunistic politicians and bleeding-heart media.

By 2008, the burgeoning underclass and community organizers leveraged enough energy to provide the rocket fuel for the Democrat’s “free health care” welfare-state landslide.  Once again, Republicans forfeited political power by having weak and incoherent social policy.

Obama entered territory far beyond that charted by Lyndon Johnson and his predecessors by launching a wild social spending spree, doubling the size of the welfare state, on the Democrat scorecard, in full defiance of the values of most Americans.  While social issues elected President Obama in a strong victory, it was his social spending that also purchased Republican victories in 2010.

Republicans celebrated as they regained control of the House in 2010.  The credit for most of the gains belongs primarily to energetic Tea Partiers and Constitutionalists – who focused on cutting budgets and limiting government — not the Republican Party itself.  The lack of enticing, visionary reconstruction agenda prevented a Republican takeover in the Senate, despite a magnificent political opportunity not unlike the Zeitgeist that drove the Republican landslide in 1994.

Haley Barbour offered a sobering bookmark: “Republicans now [only] own one-half of one-third of government“.  The 2010 elections were a step in the right direction, but not the sweep anticipated after two tumultuous years of bankrupt quangocratic rule that sent the nation into a state of horrified uproar. With little more than budget reforms in the toolbox, Republicans are walking a political tightrope that could become a third rail. We won a skirmish, but are a long way from winning the war in 2012.

With a nation drowning in spending driven primarily by marriage-absence we must change our game.  Winning the future still hinges on Republicans’ ability to seize the upper hand on social policy.

The economic necessity of marriage

Conservatives are more outspoken about the importance of marriage than ever before.  At CPAC, Representative Allen West said “We cannot continue in an America where we are making more and more people wedded to government either by subsistence check or by unemployment check… we must hold sacred the privilege of marriage between a man and a woman … because we cannot allow the destruction of the American family.”

Referring to overlapping problems of marriage-absence and education, Governor Mitch Daniels said, “we must never yield to the self-fulfilling despair that these problems are immutable or insurmountable.” Mitt Romney knows that “Liberal welfare policies condemn generations to dependency and poverty.” Most notably, Mike Huckabee expressed a vitally-important point on Stephen Colbert recently when he said, “social issues are economic issues”.

The Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, the American Family Association, and many other organizations have emphatically recommended a return to marriage decades.

Conservatives uniformly realize that rebuilding marriage, to serve its necessary civilizational role, is an important goal.  Most do not yet understand that rebuilding marriage is also a mandatory cornerstone of economic reconstruction. Without a visionary policy Republicans will never have the ability to reverse the troubling trend of marriage-absence, and America will sink ever-deeper into financial insolvency.

Marriage-absence is the greatest economic problem we face and is the primary driver of uncontrollable spending and deficits at both state and federal levels.  Economic and social conservatives need a unified agenda.  William F. Buckley’s conservative political revolution will be reborn when social conservatives deliver productive socioeconomic policy capable of balancing the budget.

Establishing prevailing conservative socioeconomic policy

The Center for Marriage Policy is launching the science of Marriage Values socioeconomic policy.  Our policy establishes a pillar of “monetaristic socioeconomics” to complement settled conservative economic policy.  “Marriage Values” policy naturally builds marriage, actively deflates social problems driving deficit spending, naturally balances federal and state budgets, reduces poverty, and uplifts the poor.

The principles of the two pillars are very similar.  One builds business, economy, and tax revenues.  The other builds marriage and structural socioeconomic strength while deflating large amounts of unproductive government spending.  Together, jobs and marriage are the two necessary safety nets assuring the best outcomes, even when the job market contracts.

Marriage is social currency, which if invested in, builds nations.  When our social currency contracts, like the money supply shrunk just before the Great Depression, the economic and social consequences are profound.  Today’s problems are compounded because about half of individuals lack the social safety net of marriage in a tough job market.

Marriage is an irreplaceable structural necessity because each family has two incomes, four hands, and two brains to support the household, raise children, and save for retirement, in a healthy form of mutual socioeconomic interdependency.   This fundamental truth is often ignored by trendy social re-engineers who coincidentally believe that government can somehow replace both the social and economic benefits of marriage.

Going forward, we must establish an enduring stewardship of our most valuable national socioeconomic currency — marriage.

Marriage Values policy will transform government from marriage-destructive to marriage-positive activities.  Government must stop financially coercing or baiting citizens into pursuit of bad choices that often destroy their futures.  We will lead Americans from the intergenerational trap of welfare, poverty, and crime to happier, richer, more stable married lives – where temporary employment difficulties are mitigated by the fact that married families have two income sources and only one roof to support.

Our “10 Marriage Values Policies” are founded on scientific knowledge that will deliver improved marriage rates, reduced poverty, illegitimacy and cohabitation rates; and deliver substantial improvements in criminal, health care, retirement, and educational metrics.  Spending decreases will be substantial, answering the most serious state and federal budgetary shortfalls, while we grow the tax base.

The body of reliable studies proves that marriage is the foundation for low poverty rates.  Married individuals and their children are the happiest, are most likely to succeed in work and school, and retire on roughly three times the assets of unmarried individuals.

We cannot end the myriad problems associated with marriage-absence by ignoring or complaining about them, forcing marriage, or solely slicing budgets.  We will succeed by giving Americans better choices leading to personal independence and happier lives, at little or no cost to government.

Marriage Values policy marks a sea-change in approach to “social issues”.  Socioeconomic policy will be empirically defined and measured in non-confrontational scientific contexts.  In the past, social issues have been staged as religious or cultural collisions with class or gender activists – with policy essentially driven by street culture.  This approach may make for exciting headlines, but leaves a lot of people with hurt feelings, ruins political careers, and prevents development of well-crafted policy founded on peer-reviewed science.

Marriage Values policy avoids the third rails of feminism, racism, multiculturalism, and religious debate.  Anti-marriage and anti-American special interest groups cannot effectively challenge science and civil instinct that will deliver what most Americans want and need.

High employment and marriage rates structurally benefit all Americans, and are necessary pillars for any successful society.  This truth speaks to atheists, libertarians, constitutionalists, conservatives, mainstream feminists, women, children, and especially the poor most severely impacted by marriage-absence.  Jobs and marriage are everyone’s issues.  The scientific evidence supporting the benefits of marriage to individuals cannot be deconstructed by progressives no matter how hard they try.

Marriage is the leading women’s issue

All arrows point to the fact that past social policy has tremendously harmed most women caught up in the welfare state.  Mothers who are divorced or never married the fathers of their children suffer many disadvantages.  We must reach out to show poor women the road map to a better life.

Despite years of intergenerational non-marriage, the core belief in marriage remains very strong according to reliable studies.  The human dynamic of Marriage Values policy begins with tapping the unparalleled economic and social benefits of marriage to individuals, and leading them out of the welfare-poverty trap.  Coordinated changes to welfare and family law have the potential to gently transition large numbers of women from welfare to marriage.

Current practices take women who would be winners and turn them into losers by baiting them out of marriage with trinkets and baubles. Winners will pick themselves, avoid troublesome government solutions, and the majority will succeed out of self-interest.  Our policy works by giving Americans better choices – the ones individuals wanted in the first place – pre-empting existing programs and in many cases relegating them to handle much smaller numbers of temporary crises.

Ending America’s silent civil war

Our approach ends the fifty-year battle between the Great Society and Daniel Patrick Moynihan — on a positive note — with everyone emerging a winner. Marriage Values policy is the only road map addressing the root causes of America’s greatest economic and social problems within a single, inseparable policy framework.

America is near insolvency due to socialist expansions of the welfare state by Democrats.  Anti-American activists sense the tipping point is near, and hope to push America over the edge into collapse by organizing class-based civil war on our economic institutions. We must not let Marxists end the American Experiment when we now have the tools to eviscerate their insidious rich vs. poor revolution.

The Republican Party desperately needs the unifying strategic model of Marriage Values policy to achieve landslide victories in Congress and the Presidency in 2012, and to reconstruct America to be the self-determined and self-governing prosperous Republic it was designed to be.  All Americans must heed the Patriot call to win America’s second civil war – a Donnybrook lost by decades of values attacks from the rear – and which will be won by frontal assault with non-contentious sound socioeconomic policy.

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

Allen Icet is the former State Representative for Missouri’s 84^th District,

Chairman of The Missouri Club for Growth, and Vice President of the Center for Marriage Policy

Cynthia Davis is the former State Representative for Missouri’s 19th District and Executive Director of the Center for Marriage Policy

© 2011

By David R. Usher and Missouri Representative Cynthia Davis

Marriage is one of the top five issues of the 2010 elections.  It will remain a controlling factor in the American dilemma until some form of the “10 Marriage Policies to rebuild America” is enacted at federal and state levels.

Why?  Marriage-absence is driving federal and state deficits.  Health care coverage, personal bankruptcy, and home loan defaults are infrequent problems for married couples.  Children raised in intact families are the last to get in trouble, flunk out of school, join a gang, have babies, become chronic substance abusers, commit crimes, or grow up to be criminals.

Social spending – with government rushing in hoping to mitigate problems arising from marriage-absence — is by far the largest line and fastest-growing item in federal and state budgets.  Social spending does not put out fires, nor does it save the starfish.  It buys another round of marriage-absence and deficits.

Government always creates more of what it subsidizes. Since 1963, we have spent more than the national debt on social spending, and we have nothing to show for it but more marriage-absence and an insolvent America in precipitous political turmoil.

Consider Missouri, which is in much better shape than many other states, but typical in its spending priorities:

The cost of marriage-absence to taxpayers in Missouri is at least $1.8 billion per year.  Missouri had 23,299 divorces in 2009, each costing the state at least $18,000 per year, and as much as $27,600 annually depending on the analysis applied.  Out-of-wedlock births add another 78,624 cases at perhaps similar cost.

Social services spending is the largest growing line item in Missouri’s budget, at 32.7% of total spending (for which there are no visible results).  It eviscerates funding for necessary visible items such as education, roads, and other state responsibilities.  The welfare state is eating Missouri alive.  Only marriage will resolve this problem to everyone’s satisfaction.

In Missouri, social spending is 50% higher than spending on education.  High marriage-absence rates means that schools are shortchanged and saddled with an impossible unfunded mandate – making up for what children lack by not having both a mother and a father in the home.  Under-parented children are predominantly the ones with aggravated behavior problems and low test scores.  If most children came to school disciplined and ready to learn, schools and children would succeed – and so would America.

The cost of criminal interdiction arising from marriage-absence is alarming.  85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home. Improving marriage rates will translate into immediate and substantial reductions in spending on crime and prisons.

Many incorrectly assume that recent increases in poverty rates are primarily a result of today’s high unemployment rates. Wrong. The “war on poverty” will be won only by improving marriage rates.  When two adults support one household, high unemployment rates are far more survivable. The latest census income data proves the fact that unmarried households are the highest-risk group for poverty regardless of job availability.  In good times or bad times, their incomes are only 35% to 67% of what married couples earn.

Missouri is facing a $1-billion deficit in 2012.  If sensible marriage policy reduced illegitimacy and divorce by half (also happily resolving the greatest problems many Missourians face), it would today be running significant surpluses and could realistically look forward to a balanced budget or surplus in 2010.  Why continue forking out fortunes cleaning up the marriage-absence mess, when brilliant marriage reforms will satisfactorily end this nightmare for everyone?

America would be a strong nation today had Ronald Reagan envisioned the need for trickle-down social policy interlocked with trickle-down economic policy.  Both are required to create a strong economy on balanced federal and state budgets.  Both are mandatory to rebuild the strength of the dollar and monetize our retirement systems.

For example, existing federal welfare laws ignore the principles of trickle-down social policy. Welfare actively destroys marriage in economic downturns.  Instead of using unemployment insurance for its proper purpose, individuals divorce or simply cohabit to qualify for years of comparatively rich welfare benefits, and then remain unemployed or underemployed for decades.  The corrosive interaction between existing unemployment and welfare policy predicts today’s record cohabitation and illegitimacy rates (and the deficits America is drowning in).

Eight years ago, James Q. Wilson pointed out the nexus between marriage, freedom, and economic success:  “the nation is becoming divided into two nations; not a nation of the rich and the poor, but a nation of the married and the unmarried bearing children.   The effort of the United States to expand freedom and economic opportunity to everybody is now running up against this wall”. Eight years later, we collided with the wall and wonder where our freedoms, economy, and future went.

America is in sociopolitical economic meltdown.  Our freedoms, economy, political and administrative systems, and banking systems are crumbling.  Everyone is desperately seeking answers, but nobody has yet mentioned the one answer addressing the majority of America’s economic problems, human needs, and dreams.

Republicans and Tea Partiers are hopeful that America can be restored solely by executing traditional conservative fiscal and constitutional ideals.  Given the unquestionable hierarchy of America’s contemporary problems, it is naïve to think we can avoid fiscal collapse or re-establish constitutional order without first correcting the underlying social collapse actively driven by federal and state policies.

America must actively engage the new school of trickle-down social policy leaders. The Republic of the United States was founded on the bedrock of marriage before God and civil government.  America’s future depends on a resurgence of policies that will bolster marriages and return government to perform the duties envisioned by our Founders.

“Marriage Values” policies created by the Center for Marriage Policy match precisely with core conservative and libertarian principles. Marriage naturally establishes and ensures the fundamental freedoms, rights, and limited government that Republicans and Tea Partiers now demand.  “Marriage Values” policies will deliver the balanced budgets and low tax rates America requires to continue as a world leader.

“Marriage Values” is not a cultural debate, nor does it force anyone to marry.  It marks the terminus of today’s government-driven gender war, the war on marriage, and the war on church first launched by Betty Friedan.

Marriage is the leading women’s issue of the 21^st century.  Today, millions of unhappy welfare mothers must “do it all”, live in poverty in unsafe streets, while waiting for some politician in Washington to save them.  We are confident that most women will prefer the many benefits Marriage Values policy offers.

How does “Marriage Values” work?

We will establish a non-combative “mutual consent” model as the preferred method of dissolution, while providing an efficacious model of “responsible dissolution” for spouses facing a dangerous or seriously irresponsible spouse.

86% of serious domestic violence involves substance abuse.  Instead of letting families “hit the wall”, Family Intervention Orders will give responsible spouses a long-overdue tough-love tool to convince the substance abuser that getting well is far better than immediately being “shown the door”.

Marriage is the institution establishing one cooperative human race from two remarkably different sexes.  “Welfare to marriage” will happily reduce poverty, build naturally-sustainable communities, end the government-financed gender war and the majority of domestic violence, and make urban cores attractive places for job-creating business to grow and thrive.

Community Marriage Policies will inexpensively provide friendly optional volunteer-driven resources for couples to iron out the common minor problems of marriage and aging, and re-seed marriage culture for young Americans who could not learn how marriage works from their parents.

We have one simple choice to make: Marriage or monstrous quongocratic government.  All grassroots organizations, conservatives, libertarians, and Tea Partiers must focus on real policies that will rebuild America.  Join with us in enacting the 10 Marriage Policies to rebuild America.  The erosions of rights everyone is bemoaning, the high taxes we cannot afford, and the deficits of monolithic helicopter government will naturally abate when marriage is restored as the social norm.

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

Cynthia Davis is State Representative for Missouri’s 19^th District.