American Dreams (18 page)

In his 2014 State of the Union speech, President Obama dedicated his remarks to combating income inequality and immobility. He went on to talk about many things—taxes, trade, job training, global warming, the minimum wage. He even brought up my name when he talked about the Earned Income Tax Credit. But never once did he mention the health of the American family. He and his liberal colleagues have declared income inequality the defining challenge of our time, but they have had little to say about what might be its greatest cause. This is a man—himself the child of a single mother—with a unique ability to reach the poor and minority communities most affected by the breakdown of the family. That he has chosen not to address this crisis is a tragically wasted opportunity.

Truth be told, no one in Washington has been very effective in addressing the crisis of marriage and the family. On the right, there are many voices raised in promotion and defense of two-parent families. But these advocates have often been portrayed, for reasons both fair and unfair, as judgmental and moralistic. The left has been worse. When those on the left have been forced to acknowledge the problem, they've tended to either deny that there is anything that can be done about it or to insist that poverty is driving the breakdown of the family rather than the other way around. But America has gone through tough economic times before without also seeing our families destroyed. The Great Depression, for instance, didn't result in families breaking apart at the rate they have been in the past four decades.

The fact is that the cultural and economic forces behind the decline in marriage and the two-parent family are complex. There is little doubt, for instance, that the decline of work among young men is a factor in declining marriage rates. For young mothers, men who are broke and out of work—despite the fact that they are the fathers of their children—are less attractive marriage prospects. Policies that encourage work, such as the Wage Enhancement Credit I described in Chapter Three, will allow these young men to better provide for a family. But to argue that poverty is the only thing driving the decline in marriage is to engage in deep denial. It is to deny the incentives built into government programs that discourage marriage among the poor. It is to deny the powerful pull of a culture that regards unwed childbearing as nothing more or less than a lifestyle choice—and vilifies those who would criticize it as perpetrators of a “war on women.” It is also to deny millennia of human history and hundreds of years of American history that put the family at the center of human progress. Throughout our nation's history, when families and the values they teach have flourished, so has our culture—and our economy.

The first step in restoring the American Dream for American families, then, is to simply recognize the link between strong families and a strong America. If we are willing to say that smoking causes cancer or that childhood obesity leads to serious health risks later in life, then we must also be willing to acknowledge that broken families cause poverty and diminished futures for our children.

Second, we must recognize that bad government policies are a contributing factor in the decline of families and the values they teach. Instead of fortifying our people through pro-family policy making, government has done the opposite. Consider the case of Darnell and Charlotte, a couple in Baltimore.

Darnell and Charlotte thought they were doing it right. Six months after they met, they married. A few months later, Charlotte was pregnant with their first child. She had been supporting a daughter from a previous relationship, along with a young cousin, with the $824 she made each month by working three jobs, plus food stamps and welfare benefits. But when she married Darnell, his additional income from a construction job made their family income too high to continue to receive government assistance. So when the new baby came, Charlotte failed to disclose that she was married to Darnell on her application for assistance for her new baby. She also had to report Darnell to another state agency as the father of her child in order to receive other assistance, which alerted the state that he owed child support for a daughter from a previous relationship. The rules are there for good reasons—to keep people from gaming the system and to make fathers support their children—but the net effect was to penalize Darnell and Charlotte from doing the right thing—getting married.

Incentives matter. Earlier, in Chapter Three, I talked about the way our existing poverty programs discourage moving from government assistance to work and independence by leveling an extremely high tax—in the form of decreased benefits—on the poor as they begin to work and earn more money. The example of Darnell and Charlotte shows that the same disincentives to work that are built into our government assistance programs are also a disincentive to marry.

These government-created disincentives to marriage affect the dependent poor and the working poor alike. In testimony before Congress in 2014, Robert Doar, who oversaw welfare reform for New York City, talked about the perverse incentives against marriage in the Earned Income Tax Credit, the refundable tax credit designed to boost the incomes of the working poor. A single parent of two children who earns $15,000 a year receives an EITC benefit of around $4,100. But if she marries, her benefit decreases by over twenty cents for every dollar the family earns above $15,040. So if she marries a man who earns just $10,000 a year, her EITC benefit drops by almost 50 percent, from over $4,000 to just over $2,000.
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The same kind of work and marriage tax is embedded in our other poverty programs. That's why I have proposed reforms that would build on the success of the EITC in encouraging work among the poor. My federal Wage Enhancement Credit, explained at length in Chapter Three, would give workers making less than $20,000 a year a 30 percent credit, making a job that might not make ends meet on its own a realistic alternative to welfare. A critical difference with the current EITC is that the Wage Enhancement Credit would be directed at the individual, regardless of family size. This means that a couple like Charlotte and Darnell wouldn't lose benefits when they combine their income in marriage. My proposal would also encourage marriage by encouraging work among young men, making them better prospects as husbands and fathers to their children.

The Wage Enhancement Credit would work hand in hand with a consolidation of federal poverty programs into a Flex Fund, which would give the states the freedom and flexibility to create programs to encourage work and marriage. The city of Baltimore, home to Charlotte and Darnell, is conducting such an experiment. Officials there have recognized that current public assistance programs were designed in another era, when most children ended up in homes with single moms because of divorce—thus leading to the emphasis on replacing or recovering the income lost with the husband. Today's couples are more likely to cohabitate and have children from previous relationships. Marriage remains a goal for many of them. So public officials are experimenting with ways to help couples stay together through job training, parent and financial counseling, and helping men like Darnell meet their obligations to their children without jeopardizing their relationships with their current partners and their ability to support new children.
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As we've seen, though, single-parent families aren't just a problem among the poor and government dependent. Unwed births are increasing—and marriage is declining—most rapidly among the high school–educated lower middle class. Our current tax code roundly penalizes marriage by hitting married couples with taxes that two otherwise identical singles would be spared from. Senator Mike Lee's and my pro-family tax plan will end the marriage penalty by doubling the tax threshold for joint filers. And it will make parents more financially stable by the addition of our new $2,500 per child tax credit and making it deductible, meaning whatever isn't saved through a reduction of a couple's income and payroll tax liability would be received in cash.

Finally, the institution of marriage itself is in need of defense today. Marriage is one of those things that, like having a child, is almost universally experienced but very personally lived. Government can play a role, but ultimately the decision to marry is a very personal one. And so it is that stopping the decline of marriage must begin on that personal level, by continuing to advocate for our values in the public square and by raising our children to perpetuate them in their own lives.

In our contemporary discussions on marriage, we must also acknowledge the national debate regarding the very definition of marriage. On this point, I—along with millions of my fellow Americans—firmly believe that marriage is a unique societal institution so important to the formation of strong and successful people that we have traditionally defined it and enshrined it in our laws as the union of one man and one woman.

We have done so because thousands of years of human history have taught us that the ideal setting for children to grow up in is with a mother and a father committed to each other, living together and sharing the responsibility of raising their children.

It is for this reason and this reason alone that I continue to believe marriage should be defined as one man and one woman. It is neither my place nor my intention to dictate to anyone who they are allowed to love or live with.

The question is not whether we should discriminate against anyone on the basis of his or her sexuality. We should not. The question is how our laws should define the union of two people in a marriage. And because I believe the marriage of one man and one woman is so important to a strong society, I believe that it should hold a special status in our laws. At a time when the American family is threatened as never before, redefining it away from the union of one man and one woman only promises to weaken it as a child-rearing, values-conveying institution.

My view on this places me opposite the views of a growing number of Americans. And as attitudes change, we have seen state laws change the definition of marriage as well. I do not agree with or support these changes. But I also do not question that the elected representatives in the individual states have the right to make these changes.

The trend that I will not accept, however, is the growing attitude that belief in traditional marriage equates to bigotry and hatred. Just as California has a right to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, Florida has a right to define it as one man and one woman.

Furthermore, while I oppose redefining marriage, I also oppose discrimination, harassment and violence against anyone because of his or her sexual identity. It is possible to believe that marriage should remain the union of one man and one woman while also condemning violence or abusive behavior toward gay people, or those instances around the world of nations attempting to criminalize homosexuality.

Some activists will not accept this, of course. They seek to have gay marriage serve as a litmus test for how we view or treat gay people. As of late, they have sought to punish and ostracize those who do not agree with them. But tolerance is a two-way street. Those who advocate for gay marriage should not allow their passion to blind them to the fact that they must share our nation and its challenges with what remains a sizable percentage of Americans who continue to support traditional marriage. Just as we must respect their right to advocate for changes in our marriage laws, they must also recognize our right to stand up for our own views.