Following a weekend rant against the economic value of people, Paul Krugman followed up in his column today by hearkening back to 1992 when Vice President Dan Quayle attacked sitcom character Murphy Brown for choosing to have a child without a husband.
“The whole focus on ‘family values’ — as opposed to concrete policies that help families — turns out to have been an epic intellectual misfire,” Krugman concluded.
Was Quayle’s focus on “family values” an epic intellectual misfire?
Not according to The Brookings Institution’s Isabel Sawhill, who wrote in 2012 under the headline “20 years later, it turns out Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown and unmarried moms”:
Even Brown agrees Quayle was right. In 2002, Candice Bergen, the actress who played Murphy Brown, told Entertainment Weekly, “His speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable, and nobody agreed with that more than I did.”
To be fair, Krugman doesn’t address marriage at all. He keeps punching a straw man of “family values,” which to him apparently has nothing to do with marriage.
Instead, Krugman focuses on the benefits of Biden’s child tax credit to “poorer families with children.”
But what Krugman doesn’t tell you is that, like the rest of our welfare system, Biden’s child tax credit plan includes a penalty that punishes people for getting married. It’s not that the Biden child tax credit invented this penalty, but by building off the EITC that has a marriage penalty, Biden made existing marriage penalties worse.
For each welfare program, these marriage penalties can be pretty small. But taken together across Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, food stamps, Section 8 housing, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, these penalties can add up, especially for low-income families. A recent American Enterprise Institute study found that a working-class family with two children making $44,000 a year would face a $10,500 penalty from government programs if they chose to get married.
Now, $10,500 may not be a lot for a New York Times columnist, but for a working family making $44,000, it is definitely enough to either a) make a couple think twice about tying the knot or b) make life difficult for those who do.
At best, Krugman and the rest of the progressive movement are indifferent about marriage. If people want to, fine, that’s “their personal life decision,” as Krugman might say.
But as Sawhill and many, many, many other researchers have shown, marriage may be a personal life decision. Still, it is also one that has great consequences for the children and communities involved.
It is far past time our public policies made marriage the priority it should be.
