In the 2016 election, marriage is a concern for both parties for different reasons. While Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders desire paid family leave, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio want more people to get married.
Cruz and Rubio believe marriage is a solution to poverty. But using marriage to move up a tax bracket seems more like a problem.
While the institution of marriage has always had economic consequences, marriage is no longer framed as a business transaction.
Marriage is now something that requires a shared history with mutual love and respect.
Finances cause martial stress among couples. A 2012 UCLA study showed poor people aspire to get married more often than higher-income people. It also showed marriage between poor people often leads to divorce.
From 2000-14, the federal government spent over $800 million to promote marriage under the Healthy Marriage Initiative. It was meant to aid low-income families in building better marriages.
Not surprisingly, the $800 million did nothing to convince Americans to stay together or get married. Marriage rates continued to fall from 2000-14, according to the Manhattan Institute.
The thing that really gets me is that, in the light of Cruz and Rubio logic, marriage is supposed to make Americans less poor when reality totally contradicts their point. The Government Accountability Office published a statistic demonstrating that 28 million married American families lived at or below the poverty line in 2013.
Either Cruz and Rubio have never heard of poor married people or they will just continue to ignore and sacrifice their standard of living in the name of the American Dream.
Instead of urging poor people to get married in order to struggle only slightly less, we should at least acknowledge the contributing factors to poverty.
We live in a world where income inequality is rampant, especially among minorities. Economic instability is an everyday threat.
We could try and provide livable incomes not only for married Americans, but single Americans too. We could recognize day-to-day struggles of single-parent families.
The truth is that we are not going to eradicate poverty by throwing money into government sponsored programs that prey on the desperation of poor people and convince them to legally shack up together. We’re also not going to eradicate poverty by requiring businesses to give workers paid family leave.
We need to acknowledge the source of the problem before discussing possible solutions. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, folks.
