Archive for the ‘poverty’ Category
Response to proponent of government-funded marriage promotion
Recently we were tickled to discover that the Fatherhood and Marriage Leadership Institute is using the existence of our new Get Marriage Out of TANF Coalition as a threat to mobilize pro-marriage-promotion forces to defend their federal funding.
On seeing FAMLI’s dire warning, the director of a marriage counseling program sent AtMP this friendly inquiry:
Wow! You must really believe that you are promoting a good cause.[1] One of my areas of disagreement would be that funding TANF efforts takes away from poverty projects.[2]
Married couples often have a higher family income. Isn’t that in itself proof that poverty is diminished through promotion of healthy marriage?[3]
Why do the two programs have to be mutually exclusive? Your choices are your choices. My choices are mine. If you want to promote your cause, why down play mine?[4]
Here’s a fleshed-out version of the brief response I sent him:
1. Yes, we really do believe our cause is a good one. AtMP’s cause is fairness and equality for all unmarried people, societal support for all healthy relationships, and the end of marital status discrimination, singlism and couplism. Admittedly, a very big vision! There are an infinite number of ways we could work towards our vision; we pick just a handful to work on at a time, and protesting welfare-funded marriage promotion is just one of many issues we have tackled over the years. One reason this issue captures our attention is that many of AtMP’s staff and board members over the years have personal histories and values that center on social justice and anti-poverty work. So it is particularly galling to see anti-poverty funds redirected to marriage promotion.
2. In fact, the federal TANF budget (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) was not increased to fund marriage programs; rather, marriage programs took a slice out of the pie that would otherwise fund more directly targeted anti-poverty programs. Similarly, the FAMLI-led campaign to get each state to allocate 1% of state-controlled TANF funds to marriage programs does not increase the state’s TANF budget to 101% of its former size; rather, it decreases state-funded anti-poverty programs to 99% of their former size. Furthermore, federally funded marriage programs are explicitly not anti-poverty programs: they need not serve low-income people, and their effect on participants’ economic well-being barely made it into the evaluation criteria. (For detail on that, see Let Them Eat Wedding Rings pages 4 and 14.)
[3] The correlation of marriage with family income does not prove that marriage diminishes poverty! If that’s not obvious, read this. In fact, researchers recognize the importance of the selection effect: people with higher incomes, more education and maybe even more ambition are more likely to choose marriage and to choose to marry similarly situated people. The academic debate is about whether marrying has any significant impact on income beyond the selection effect. Even a glowingly pro-marriage-promotion literature review found that marriage increased men’s incomes by well under 10%.
[4] “Your choices are your choices. My choices are mine.” This could not be better said! That’s why so many Americans are dismayed that their tax dollars are being spent to tell people that one choice (marriage) is better than another.
Better ways to fix what’s left of the income tax marriage penalty
Last week Forbes magazine ran a commentary by two Notre Dame professors about the income tax penalty faced by low-income couples who marry.
The Bush tax cuts attempted to make tax rates “marriage-neutral”; for most middle-class taxpayers, there is now, in fact, little if any difference between filing as a married couple or as unmarried singles. … [But a] single parent earning $21,000 with two children would receive an earned income credit and child tax credit of $5,460. Say that same parent is living with, but not married to, another single parent with two children who earns the same amount. Their combined income is $42,000. Unmarried and filing their taxes separately, they would receive a total of $10,920 in earned income credits and child tax credits. If they were to marry and file jointly (listing four dependent children), they would receive only $3,400 in earned income credits and child credits. So it would cost them $7,520 to be married. To make the situation worse, this “penalty” will occur every year, adding up over time to a huge amount.
AtMP believes that taxing people based on their marital status is wrong, and that it’s especially wrong to tax lower-income people more heavily than higher-income for the exact same behavior (in this case, marrying). Naturally, we’re less concerned than those professors about rising rates of cohabitation. More importantly, we’ve heard more creative solutions than the two options they propose:
If you “remove” the marriage penalty by lowering the credits for single taxpayers, you invoke the wrath of those who would say you’re “raising” taxes (by reducing their credits) on people who can least afford it. On the other hand, if you raise the credits for married taxpayers to the point where getting married offers the same tax result as being single, you’ve got a budgetary issue–where is the money to compensate for these additional credits going to come from?
In fact, we printed another professor’s more creative solutions in our newsletter last year!
Given the many forms of modern families, two policy alternatives are clearly preferable…. First, policymakers should expand the definition of family for tax purposes to include unmarried opposite- and same-sex couples, single parents, cohabiting unmarried family members, and perhaps even platonic roommates demonstrating economic interdependence. These families share the same kind of expenses, responsibilities, and liabilities as married families. There is no reason for the tax system to treat them differently. Under an expanded definition of the family unit, “marriage” penalties would become “family” penalties, and doubling tax brackets for families would benefit all multi-person households.
Second, we could abandon the family as a unit of taxation altogether and move to a system of individual filing. This approach would effectively eliminate all marriage tax penalties. As importantly—and unlike preserving the family as a unit of taxation—individual filing would eliminate the secondary-earner bias in the tax system that currently taxes the first dollar earned of the lesser-earning spouse (disproportionately women) at the higher rates associated with the last dollar earned of the primary-earning spouse.
Either approach—expanding our concept of “family” under the family tax unit or adopting as the norm the individual unit—would more effectively address the concerns of the modern American family in its various forms.
Gifts for Unmarried & Single Americans Week
Last week we discovered that it’s not easy to send an e-card for USA Week. How about sending a gift? Today I received a sweet gift from Ellen Kaye in the form of a fresh list of unmarried songs to add to our collection.
Today I also added a gift to my wish list: the new book Changing Poverty, Changing Policies, featuring an essay by Cancian and Reed which finds that
the economic benefit of marriage isn’t what it used to be … because single women, even those with kids, have an easier time supporting themselves outside of marriage than they used to. [And ] that replicating marriage wouldn’t necessarily generate more per-person wealth.
Thanks to Jessica the intern for finding the Time Magazine article about this new book. I look forward to incorporating more of its findings into our campaign to get marriage programs out of the federal anti-poverty budget.
Recession’s impact on unmarriage
The news that one-third of workers under age 35 live with their parents really caught my eye, because one of the big factors in people’s likelihood to marry is whether they feel economically independent. It is probably fair to predict that the longer people feel economically unstable, the later they’ll put off marriage, and the larger the unmarried population will grow.
Though much of the article is about union organizing, it is full of economic and cultural insights that make it worth reading in its entirety. For example:
In the age group 25 through 34 years old, traditionally a prime age range for getting married and starting a family, just 81 of 100 men were employed.
News like this makes it especially infuriating that the federal government and many states spend over $150 million per year on marriage programs instead of helping low-income people get and keep jobs.
Of course, some people do make marital decisions regardless of their economic situation, as the article nicely captures:
After getting married, my wife and I decided to move in with my parents to pay off our bills. We could afford to live on our own but we’d never be able to get out of debt. We have school loans to pay off, too. We’d like to have children, but we just can’t manage the expense of it right now…so we’re putting it off till we’re in a better place. My [work] position is on the edge, and I feel like if my company were to cut back, my position would be one of the first to go.
I’ve also seen articles about the recession causing couples to delay divorce. But my instinct says that people increasingly delaying marriage will have bigger demographic impact.
Unmarried, uninsured, out of luck?
Hunter, our demographic research intern, has put together some important, disturbing and highly motivating statistics.
Unmarried people are concentrated in economically disadvantaged categories. For example, unmarried Americans are disproportionately
- African-American: 69.1% of blacks adults are unmarried; 19.8% of all unmarried Americans are black.
- Women: 56.4% of unmarried adults are female.
- Young: 33.7% of unmarried adults are 18-29 years old.
- Poor or low-income: 14.7% of unmarried people aged 16 years or older live below the poverty level; 38.6% of unmarried households earn under $30K.
- LGBT: 100% of people in same-sex partnerships are currently counted as unmarried (though it looks like the Census will start crediting same-sex marriages soon!); of course, many bisexuals and transgendered people are married to different-sex partners, as are some people who identify as lesbian or gay.
Not coincidentally, the demographic groups that are most likely to be unmarried are also the same groups that get less health care, get sick more and don’t get well as much as other Americans. Making health insurance more affordable for unmarried people, and taking other measures to increase their access to care, could decrease disparities and increase health equity.
Unmarried workers disproportionately lack health insurance: 40.5% of the workforce is unmarried, yet unmarried people constitute 59.7% of all workers without coverage and only 36.4% of workers with coverage. The impact of marital status is even more pronounced among part-time workers, who more frequently lack coverage: 67.1% of uninsured part-time workers are unmarried. Unmarried people are also the majority (56.4%) of the unemployed uninsured. In all, 59.8% of uninsured Americans are unmarried.
Obviously, these stats do not mean that all unmarried people are out of luck, and clearly getting married would not solve everyone’s problems. But they should make you wonder, why aren’t health care reformers promising equal costs and access to all Americans regardless of marital status?
Do something about it! Download our free one-page fact sheet or tri-fold brochure “Why You Should Care about Barriers to Coverage for Unmarried People” and get it into the hands of the health reform advocate you admire most – be it your doctor, your state health coalition, your Congressperson, or the President. And let us know what they say!
