Ann Coulter wrote a column last week attacking “post-Trump populists” including “Sens. Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, The New York Times’ Ross Douthat, and Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance” for wanting “to pay women to have children.”
And she actually gets most of her history… right, even if she does then misapply the lessons of that history to today’s conservative populists.
Coulter claims that “the worst calamity ever to befall this country” … “was the government paying women to have kids.” Specifically, Coulter writes:
Lots and lots of women started having babies — at a clip that didn’t allow time for acquiring a husband first.
Within a decade, the world had gone to hell, taking the black family down with it. While many blamed the implosion of the black family on African customs, slavery, the Middle Passage, Jim Crow and so on, a black demographer at the Rockefeller Foundation, Erol Ricketts, looked at the evidence.
It turned out the black family was thriving until the What-Could-Go-Wrong? Great Society programs of the 1960s. Based on nearly a century of U.S. Census reports, Ricketts found that between 1890 and 1950, black Americans married at higher rates than whites. …Today, we’d hold ticker-tape parades if 70% of black kids were being raised in intact families.
This is actually mostly true. Black people did have higher marriage rates than white people before the Great Society’s massive expansion of the welfare state.
What Coulter misses, however, is that the Great Society forced women to choose between marriage and welfare. It’s not that the government was paying women to have children. The government wasn’t paying married women anything.
The problem with the Great Society is that the government only paid unmarried women to have children. And the only way they could keep getting paid was to stay unmarried. This is what cratered the black family in America. And it is also what is causing unmarried births to rise among white families today. Most of our existing means-tested programs still punish marriage to this day. And far more families participate in one or more of these programs they than did in the ’60s and ’70s.
I actually agree with Coulter when she writes, “Human reproduction doesn’t require a P.R. team.” If we can just get more people to get married earlier (like they used to) and stay married, I think the baby thing will solve itself. And there is a lot we can do to make federal policy more friendly to marriage, especially for the young.
