Brad Wilcox of the National Marriage Project and Chris Bullivant of the Social Capital Campaign published an op-ed in the Deseret News this week on the growing divide between the family structures of rich and poor Americans.
“Of 18- to 55-year-olds, the share of those who are married from an upper-class background is 60 percent,” they note. “However, this figure falls to 20% for the poor. It is 40% for the working class. Again, what is especially striking about this divide is that it was basically nonexistent in the 1970s.”
Wilcox and Bullivant go on to march through all of the benefits that marriage provides to parents, children, and even entire communities, including Harvard economist Raj Chetty finding that “more than school quality, income inequality or race, the most predictive factor of upward mobility in a community is family structure.”
But Wilcox and Bullivant don’t really attempt to explain why the family structures of rich and poor families have diverged so greatly since the 1970s. They do, however, note that there is one community in America where there is no marriage divide.
“There is virtually no racial gap in marriage in the military. Whites and Blacks marry at about the same rate,” they write. “What’s the military’s secret? It provides great benefits and doesn’t give them to cohabiting couples. In other words, it privileges marriage. The rest of the government should do likewise.”
Wilcox and Bullivant mention this earlier in the piece but perhaps don’t stress it enough — not only does current federal policy not privilege marriage, but it actively punishes it!
Almost every means-tested government social safety net program (the earned income tax credit, the child tax credit, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Section 8 housing assistance, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act), actively punish marriage by decreasing benefits when two previously single people combine their incomes into one household when they get married.
Institute for Family Studies fellow Lyman Stone recently crunched the numbers on exactly this point and found that a couple with two children earning just $44,000 a year would face a yearly $10,500 penalty if they got married.
Now, there are undoubtedly a number of other reasons why the marriage gap has widened between wealthy and poor families since the 1970s. Increased trade with China, mass immigration of low-skilled workers, and technological advancement have all lowered wages for working-class families, especially for men. And there are policy changes we can make to address falling wages.
But the stark contrast between the military’s privileging of marriage and the federal government’s punishment of marriage (a punishment that has only grown with each expansion of the safety net) has to go a long way to explaining why marriage is a force for equality in the military but has become a force for inequality in the larger American society.
