Democrats such as South Dakota Rep. Erin Healy may believe
that
it is “dangerous and un-American” to suggest that the best environment for raising children is in a married household, but conservatives know the truth.
Volumes
of the best social science research show that married families are far more stable and likely to raise
healthy
,
happy
,
educated, and employed
adults than other types of households.
BIDENFLATION IS NOT GOING AWAY
Federal and state governments should be doing what they can to make married life affordable for working couples, but instead, the opposite is true. Means-tested programs such as Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and food stamps all discriminate against married families. A single mother who qualified for benefits under any of these programs would lose those benefits if she married a man of equal income.
These programs send
over $1 trillion in benefits
to families each year. Every one of the programs punishes married couples by denying them benefits if they choose to get married. One
study
found that a working-class family with two children making $44,000 a year would face a $10,500 penalty if they marry.
Now, these are all federal programs (although some of them, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Medicaid, also include a state spending component). But they are all primarily funded by Washington.
That is not the case for 26 state-level preschool programs. Each of these allows a single mother to send her child to preschool for free, but if she gets married, she loses the benefit entirely.
No one expects California, Delaware, or New Jersey — blue states all — to care if preschool programs punish marriage. After all, an
overwhelming majority of Democrats
believe unmarried families raise children as well as married families.
But Republicans know better. Red states with preschool programs should not penalize marriage. But a new report from The Heritage Foundation finds that eleven Republican states do so. The offenders are Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah.
The cutoff levels for benefits in each of these states are not the same, but the pattern is. At some point in each state, a working couple would receive more benefits if they stayed single than if they got married.
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Considering all the benefits of stability and shared expectations marriage brings to a couple, these states should remove these marriage penalties. These changes may raise the cost of the programs, but the added protections for married families would be worth it.
Red states cannot reverse the massive marriage penalties contained in the federal welfare state on their own, but they can show leadership and protest marriage first.
