Noli Irritare Leones

Family Scholars blog announces that their Center for Marriage and Families is putting out a new series of research briefs on the future of the black family.

Personally, I’m deeply ambivalent about laments about the state of the black family. On the one hand, they appeal to a value I hold very strongly – the importance of fathers standing by their children, and living in a world that supports and encourages them in doing so. On the other hand, any time white people start commiserating among themselves about the state of the black family, there’s a part of me that’s suspicious of scapegoating. It’s one thing when a black guy, like Steven Barnes or M. Vass, talks about black people taking more responsibility for their lives. And it’s another when the same thing is said by those of us who are white and middle class. Then, it has a tendency to turn into a matter of motes and beams.

Remember that speech by Dan Quayle at the Commonwealth Club in 1992? A few years later, I was reading a spate of columns about how Dan Quayle was right, and was mocked and criticized unreasonably at the time, etc., etc., and I wanted to scream, because, from my point of view, the columns were totally missing the point about what offended, in that speech, at that time. Quayle spoke in the wake of rioting in Los Angeles, which followed on the acquittal of police officers who had been videotaped beating Rodney King. And he gave the explanation of the riots that was most comfortable to those who are white and well off – the one that pointed the finger at absent fathers. And then, you know, we can all comfortably look down on those people, in their communities with missing fathers – think of it as pity, but look down on them – and feel that, after all, the good things in our lives come to us, to a large degree, through our own merit, and that of our families.

With that rant, you may think I’m gearing up to criticize the Family Scholars series. On the contrary. I haven’t read it all yet, and I may find things to be suspicious of, when I make my way through it, but for now, I find one part particularly intriguing. It’s the research brief on The Other Marriage Penalty: A New Proposal to Eliminate the Marriage Penalty for Low-Income Americans.

You see, whatever my worries about white discourse about black families – and the temptation that such discourse offers for us to slide into “welfare mother” and “inner city black” stereotypes that leave us shaking our heads at how much less family oriented those people are than good, responsible us – whatever my worries about such things, I do believe that marriage matters. Marriage matters because getting the world to recognize your commitments and responsibilities matters. And because marriage matters, it darn well matters when the poor are priced out of marriage.

As the benefits of marriage have become increasingly clear in recent years, the U.S. government has moved to promote and strengthen the institution, particularly among fragile families and low-income Americans. The 1996 welfare reform legislation, for example, sought to encourage marriage as a way to reduce poverty. More recently, the federal government’s Healthy Marriage Initiative has been funding programs to promote healthy marriages, particularly among low-income parents.

Yet, there remains a serious structural disincentive to marry for many poor Americans. The U.S. tax and transfer (welfare) systems frequently impose substantial financial penalties on low-income couples who choose to marry. In relative terms, these marriage penalties tend to be much greater than those experienced by non-poor couples, and in some cases amount to family income losses of 20 percent or more. These marriage-discouraging financial penalties markedly undermine efforts to strengthen marriage among low-income Americans.

This research brief provides a general introduction to the issue of marriage penalties and describes the uniquely high marriage penalty imposed on many low-income couples. The brief also features a new proposal to solve the problem.

For those of us who are middle class, we may experience a tax bonus on marriage, or we may experience a tax penalty (the research brief says the number of married couples who experience a penalty is now about equal to the number who experience a bonus). But, either way, our tax bracket isn’t going to make the difference between being able to marry at all and not. Not so when you’re poor, with one person having a minimum wage job and the other qualifying for a modest government benefit. The brief does the math, and shows how marriage can cost poor couples thousands of dollars a year – thousands of dollars out of not very much money.

Government assistance currently tends to create marriage penalties for two main reasons. First, it targets benefits towards needier families. After a family’s income rises past a certain economic threshold, its benefits are gradually reduced. Some programs such as Medicaid actually cut all benefits at once after a certain level of income is attained. Second, the assistance system allows a married-couple family to have only very slightly more income before its benefits are cut—or, to use an analogy, the government does not significantly increase a married couple’s “tax brackets.” This policy means that almost any income brought into the household by a new spouse will lead to a loss of benefits for the family. Thus, in the same way marriage might move a couple into a higher tax bracket or cause their standard deduction to be reduced, marriage can quite suddenly transfer a low-income family to a significantly reduced level of benefits.

Such a system encourages surreptitious cohabitation. Many low-income parents will cohabit without reporting it to the government so that their benefits won’t be cut. Other parents might live near each other, perhaps with the father staying at his parents’ house. In both cases the calculus is the same: Avoid marriage because marriage would result in a substantial loss of income for the family.

I haven’t gotten far enough in to see whether the authors mention this, but it occurs to me that health insurance might also be a significant factor in these calculations. One reason Joel and I are much better off, financially, being married than we would be if we were living together – regardless of whether we get a marriage bonus or penalty in our taxes – is that I can put him on my insurance, and you can bet that, with all his ailments, that’s a big deal. But I also know, through the support group that Joel attends for bipolar disorder, many people who are on disability, and who, therefore, are getting their insurance through the government. It’s not, generally, as good a deal as what I have. But it’s definitely a deal that people want to hang onto, once they have it. Disability for mental illness generally involves a long process of application, in which you pretty much expect to be rejected the first time around and to have to appeal. Once you have it, you don’t want to lose it, especially if it’s the only way you have of getting your meds covered. This is why it’s important that the system have ways for people to try out their return to work without immediately losing their benefits, since otherwise you could find out that you weren’t, after all, well enough to go back to work, and now no longer have disability (I won’t get into the details of how the system handles this, since that would digress too far from the topic of this post).

Now, government health insurance covers some low income people as well as some disabled people, and I could well see how, if you were in that position, the prospect of losing that insurance benefit (if marriage pushes your income too high to qualify) could be a major disincentive to marriage.

Anyway, I’ll be reading this research brief more fully, and am curious to see what their proposal is.

Links that are not all that closely related, but I’m sticking them here rather than doing a separate post:

Michelle Obama, feminism and the strong black woman (found via the Second Carnival of Radical Feminists).

Stentor on Listening To The Oppressed and discussions in which each person can claim membership in a different oppressed group.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 7:35 am and is filed under Marriage, Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.