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Two-parent households should be a policy goal

88 points by 4AoZqrH2fsk5UB 3y ago

michaelleland 3y ago
The tax credits for married people here in the US seem to be part of this type of policy, no?
- ConfusedDog 3y ago
  Being single parent can also file for the deduction. Receiving supposal and child support after tax also encourages divorce, which also encourages the benefiting party not to go to work or do works that doesn't pay taxes. I'd say the current policy is more encouraging of divorce than two-parent household.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    Unless someone is severely disabled, spousal support is a horrible thing. Even worse are the states that make it compulsory after a certain number of years. Child support makes sense in theory, but is butchered in practice. The judgements often have little to do with how much it actually costs to support the child and is more about a percentage of income. Let's not forget, the state is the third party in a divorce. They do not want to support anyone when they can force one of the other parties to do so.
    - User23 3y ago
      The state also gets a 10% rake off the top, which is why child support judgments are so enthusiastically enforced.
      - giantg2 3y ago
        Is that the court fee or something else?
        User23 3y ago
        It's not a flat percentage exactly and it varies by state[1]. I'm not sure how I got 10% in my head maybe that's roughly the average? [1] https://calmatters.org/projects/california-keeps-millions-in-child-support-while-parents-drown-in-debt/ https://calmatters.org/projects/california-keeps-millions-in...
        giantg2 3y ago
        That article says the average retained is about 3.8% nationally. It sounds like what the government is getting it from interest on unpaid support.
    - ConfusedDog 3y ago
      Except if the benefiting party receiving spousal support and child support is after tax, so they don't report that as income. So, if they don't work, they qualify for unemployment benefits (at very least the Medicaid) - the government still pays. Speaking from my own experience. My ex is now trying to fight to get more child support because my son is on my healthcare plan my employer offers, she wants to put him on Medicaid like her and get the money instead. In other words, government still going to pay. I think her lawyer didn't agree with her because it's not the best interest for our kid and could be a waste of time. Although I think it's terribly for the higher earner in the divorce, I can't blame her for gaming the system. It is well set up for her to take advantage of this divorce situation. I even know there are women have multiple children from different men just so they can live luxuriously - none of child support is counted towards income when calculating other child support - the only risk is some men rather go to prison than paying lol.
  - mortureb 3y ago
    Spousal support is an archaic holdover that doesn’t belong anymore and child support should not be a thing offered in at fault divorces. For the latter I’m not sure how you can go about implementing that ethically though. If the dad cheated, fine, he should pay child support. If the mom cheats, maybe the state can subsidize daycare while the mom is forced to work. Otherwise there are no consequences for the mom who can just “divorce him and take his house and half his money”.
    - RestlessMind 3y ago
      Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Draconian laws tilting in favor of women definitely contribute to reluctance of men to get married or to have kids.
      - mortureb 3y ago
        It’s going to be downvoted for a few years while the true state of things permeates through the society. It’s just a matter of constantly educating the 10,000 new people that learned about it today.
- PopAlongKid 3y ago
  There are no U.S. tax credits per se for married vs. unmarried taxpayers. Depending on the relative incomes of two spouses, there can be a so-called "marriage penalty" or "marriage reward" from combining two incomes on a joint return, but that alone probably has very little impact on whether people choose to get or remain married. In fact, a large chunk of existing tax law deals with all the possible combinations of households with children and parents, where the parents may or may not be living together, and may or may not be married to each other. It is designed to fairly accomodate unmarried people, not to encourage marriage.
  - bradlys 3y ago
    The tax penalty (which is very real for many SV and NYC earners) is one reason I’ve decided to never get married. The other being that the insane one-size fits all contractual aspects of marriage that cannot be changed. A vengeful judge and spouse can easily wreck one’s finances unfairly.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    When only one of the people has an income, there's definitely a benefit for married-filing-jointly over MFS or being unmarried.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  There are still tax disadvantages for some married couples (used to be all, assuming both worked). However, there are also plenty of welfare programs that are means tested so marriage is ruled out. (One of the leading theories for the number of babies born out of wedlock rising so much since the early 1960s is the end of the shotgun wedding: the baby daddy counters by pointing out that the mom will lose out on a lot of benefits if she gets married)
  - darth_avocado 3y ago
    There is an additional Medicare tax of 0.9% if single income exceeds 200k, but if you file jointly, that limit is 250k. So a married couple with each earning 125k+ would pay more tax than an unmarried couple where person made 200k. This hardly mattered years ago, but with median wages getting around 70k+, a lot more people pay this penalty for getting married.
- giantg2 3y ago
  You can actually benefit from being single filers (non-married) by choosing who claims what to get the biggest breaks. Not being married means you can also mix and match certain things that you otherwise might not be able to, like regular vs Roth IRAs (although I think this is state level).
- codexb 3y ago
  There aren't any tax credits for married couples. There are tax credits for parents, and they aren't reduced by divorce. The tax benefits of filing "married" isn't any better than filing as "head of household" (which doesn't require marriage), and filing as either sometimes provide a disadvantage when both parents are working and earn similar incomes. In the US at least, the financial and legal incentives for women to divorce is far, far greater.
noteflakes 3y ago
https://archive.ph/na61F https://archive.ph/na61F
pjc50 3y ago
Can't read the article even with archive.ph, but do they have an analysis of why relationships break down?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  For me, I click the "I'm not a robot" captcha checkbox, and it just reloads the captcha. I'm nervous and concerned that I'm not human. I distinctly remember having a childhood and living a human life, but those might just be uploaded memories. What is my best course of action to get to the bottom of this mystery?
  - giantg2 3y ago
    I once got a captcha featuring a street sign with a picture of a traffic light on it. It told me I had to click all the squares work traffic lights in it. But it's not a traffic light - it's a street sign depicting a traffic light. I'm not human afterall.
  - Analemma_ 3y ago
    archive.is has some kind of really aggressive captcha protection set up. I find it doesn't like public DNS servers like Google's or CloudFlare's: on my home wifi which points to 8.8.8.8 I always get the captcha loop, but then if I switch to accessing over a cell network it works fine.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  > the idea is that as some men have become less reliable as financial providers for their family, the value proposition of marriage between a man and a woman has fallen. > Multiple studies document a causal link between the economic struggles of men and the growth in single-mother families. > To give disadvantaged children better futures, policy makers should promote widespread employment and economic security among a wider segment of the population—particularly non-college-educated men.
  - lokar 3y ago
    Perhaps as women have gained more financial independence they no longer need to adopt a submissive attitude towards men to survive?
bbor 3y ago
Serious question: why not three parent? Does every stable relationship involve sexual aspects? Seems like an article stating an obvious fact but missing the bigger picture
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  The triple-stranded DNA isn't very stable with Earth lifeforms.
- tkahnoski 3y ago
  Or more to the point, lean heavily into "it takes a village to raise a child".
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    What that means is that it takes parents and extended family and the close-knit community you'd find from a church and from schools, for example. Millions of people do this today. It's odd to see people think this is a revelation or something.
    - tkahnoski 3y ago
      I'd agree and my comment is more of a critique on the evolution of American society leading away from community building. Whether it be subtle things like suburban homes with giant privacy fences or larger topics like the affordability of housing to be able stay in the community you grew up in. I'd much rather see policies towards solving these problems versus one that has the government getting in the middle of my marriage or parenting.
- malfist 3y ago
  Did you ever read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? They have the concept of a "line marriage" where a marriage keeps going by marrying more people into the marriage. So you can have a married group that have been married for more than a generation.
- bluescrn 3y ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
I don't think that's been sociologically plausible for many decades. Some things are easy to tear down and nearly impossible to build back up. In some circles, the mere suggestion that this should be a policy goal is insulting, as it hints that single-parent homes are inferior. Our government isn't really allowed to prefer one over the other, even if it would result in less misery. Furthermore, the tools that government has at its disposal to encourage two-parent households are few and clumsy. No decision to stay together has ever hinged on a slightly higher tax exemption, or some other priority access to the bureaucracy. The writer's room of some Hollywood sitcom has more power than Congress in these matters. I doubt very much that they are interested in giving up on the show that makes jokes that discourage such, but even if they did, that's one show when the real culprit is the entire weight of the entertainment industry. We might as well talk about how it should be a policy goal to raise the speed of light to 750,000 miles per second.
- NDizzle 3y ago
  Single parent households are inferior, so why not spell it out?
  - ormaybejust 3y ago
    Well, sorta. In America we don't build communities as well, so a single parent is alone to raise their kids and also work. A single parent with a strong local community of caregivers who can help perform the work of raising a kid in their community is probably not worse off than the standard, alienated two parent household in America. So while what you say might be true in America, I don't think it's axiomatic.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    Because the politicians who suggest any such policy, when it gets to the point where people demand they explain why they're proposing it, either has to come clean, or dissemble. The latter is obvious lying and deflection, and that's a PR disaster. The former is an absolute shitstorm. Single-parent celebrities that have five different kids by four different baby-daddies go on talk shows and Twitter, start calling you a Nazi. Whatever passes for newspaper editorials now days start whining for the next 6 months that it's anti-inclusive and undermines diversity. Invitations at colleges to speak at graduation are rescinded, some of your campaign donors stop taking your calls even though the mid-terms are coming up in less than a year. LGBT activists then crawl out of the woodwork saying that what we really need aren't two-parent households, because anyone can be a parent. We just need two-plus income families, and that poly-amory is superior because it can potentially bring four or more incomes into the house. Only cis-bigots really want just two parents there. And then you back off. Not a battle worth fighting. None of this, even if it worked, could be milked for votes in an effort to get promoted from the House to the Senate (or the White House). And since it would be attacked from day one with the possibility that it might fail, why even try? It's far from a sure thing. All we know is the correlation, not the causation.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
There was an excellent NYT article about this as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/opinion/single-parent-poverty.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/opinion/single-parent-pov... > We are often reluctant to acknowledge one of the significant drivers of child poverty — the widespread breakdown of family — for fear that to do so would be patronizing or racist.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  If we are concerned about poverty, maybe we could just give them money? I understand the fairly small child tax credit had a huge positive impact on child poverty.
  - bunbunbun 3y ago
    The policy solution for poverty seems to be to punish the poor for not working hard enough
  - codexb 3y ago
    And further incentivize divorce? It's a dual-headed problem. Much of what has fueled the breakdown of family structure are policies that incentivize women to become single mothers. Children being raised by single mothers is not a good outcome. We need to stop pretending that it is.
    - ajmurmann 3y ago
      No, just do UBI or a version of UBI that's only for kids. That way you get rid of the harmful step function we always pack into social programs.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > And further incentivize divorce? One way to give them more money and not incentivize single parenthood (which is the issue, not divorce, and treating them as equivalent has always been wrong and is increasingly so as marriage rates drops) is to go to UBI instead of means-tested aid, or, if using means testing, use a means-testing formula which doesn't punish two-parent families. > Children being raised by single mothers is not a good outcome. Its a lot better than children being raised by two parents together, one of which is abusing them and/or the other parent, which any change which does more to avoid incentivizing divorce or single-parenthood more than eliminating any two-parent penalty would incentivize, especially for the poor.
a-user-you-like 3y ago
Nothing better than a father and mother in a stable, loving relationship for a child. Yes, let’s encourage this.
- lokar 3y ago
  How exactly is that better the two mothers? Do you have evidence?
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    I would be very surprised if GP thought that only father/mother combos are the best and instead was just agreeing with TFA.
    - nicholasjarnold 3y ago
      Yep, I don't have the source to cite right now, but I recall reading research indicating that the important factor was 2 loving and supportive parents regardless of their sex or sexual orientation.
    - ormaybejust 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - digging 3y ago
      It feels extremely unusual to me to specifically call out a mother/father relationship if they weren't intending to exclude queer relationships. A note for all readers: don't say "nothing better than a [straight relationship]" if that's not what you mean.
      - vorpalhex 3y ago
        Most relationships, especially with kids, are heterosexual.
        deleted 3y ago
matthewfelgate 3y ago
The 1970s called; they'd like their arguments back! Arguing that children with married parents fare better, thus promoting two-parent families, is akin to suggesting that since blue cars have fewer accidents, everyone should drive a blue car. Pressuring dissatisfied couples to stay together or marry benefits no one. The article fails to provide actionable recommendations on promoting marriage.
- version_five 3y ago
  Western society peaked in the 80s so maybe we should listen to some of the arguments from back then.
  - mbfg 3y ago
    based on what metric?
  - doingwellthanks 3y ago
    Peaked for whom exactly?
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    "Western society peaked in the 80s" By what metric?
    - mbg721 3y ago
      By the metric of best new-wave hair, for sure.
  - notpachet 3y ago
    Things may look like they were working better in hindsight, but we just hadn't started choking to death on all of the unchecked externalities yet.
    - itsanaccount 3y ago
      Maybe thats the real evolutionary path going on, as we humans grow to have a more temporally aware mindset. That ability to see how past actions effected the future hopefully allows for more predictive capabilities.
Dig1t 3y ago
>The scholar to whom the question was directed looked annoyed and struggled to formulate an answer. The panelists shifted in their seats. The moderator stepped in, quickly pointing out that poverty makes it harder for people to form stable marriages. She promptly called on someone else. If we valued free speech more, we might be able to have more open, honest conversations in the public realm here. In a society where people are easily fired, or have their lives disrupted in other ways, for expressing the wrong opinion or saying the wrong thing, there is no upside to having this conversation. The only rational decision is to ignore the question and move on. The fewer conversations we have, the less likely we are to be able to solve problems.
- iteratethis 3y ago
  I couldn't agree more. Progressive discourse has turned so ideological that perfectly normal mainstream conversations make people anxious. People shiver to even discuss the idea/benefits of a heterosexual marriage. As if its some rogue legacy structure. As if single parent situations are some higher moral good to strive for. A portion of men, especially the lower classes, are facing severe issues. But this can hardly be addressed as the very idea of men in need of social justice does not fit the "all men are oppressors" narrative. These politics achieve worse outcomes, not better ones, and they alienate vast groups of people.
_greim_ 3y ago
The problem with two-parent is you're a single misstep away from one-parent. Multi-generational and communal households would be more resilient, and easier to accommodate via tax incentives and housing policy.
- anon291 3y ago
  A multi generational household occurs naturally when grandma and grandpa had a stable two parent households and now mom and dad do too. Moreover, it's not necessary to force everyone in the same house. My parents and inlaws are within 20 minutes. It's great and since they are both married and happy, there's little family stress and the kids get ample time with both grandparents. God forbid, if anything were to happen to either my wife or I, they would be well taken care of. Eventually our parents may move in or closer by, but right now, it's nice for everyone to have some separation.
  - digging 3y ago
    > A multi generational household occurs naturally when grandma and grandpa had a stable two parent households and now mom and dad do too. More importantly, young people need a reason not to move hundreds or thousands of miles away from their stable household. Investing in community resources, local economies, and infrastructure that promotes health and opportunity are all necessary.
    - morkalork 3y ago
      WFH solves this too. RTO policies are anti-family. Hell, unchecked corporate work culture is part of why Japan and Korea's birth rates are so low. Can't be out having babies if you're at the office at all hours.
      - digging 3y ago
        Fully agreed! But it's not enough.
      - RestlessMind 3y ago
fasthands9 3y ago
I can't read the whole article but remember learning in the past that children of widows have outcomes more similar to two-parent households than divorced parent households. This would seem to suggest the divorce is more of a signal of family/status than something which is driving bad outcomes. At the same time, I do think people have gone a bit too far in their want to not give anyone shame. Yes - some shame is not going to help single-parent households now but I would think some societal shame would prevent people from being reckless with having kids or maybe make people think twice about leaving their partner when it really is just a rough patch. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566757 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566757
- peteradio 3y ago
  Shame could be the active ingredient in poorer outcomes of children of divorce, I'm not sure casting it more broadly will help the general picture.
  - fasthands9 3y ago
    I agree shame does not help once you are divorce, but there is some envelope math which seems fair. If divorce makes outcomes 10% worse but makes divorce with children 20% less likely, maybe it's a wash? At the very least, it seems incorrect to insist to me the downsides of shame always outweighs the benefits from it. Even if putting numbers on it is kinda farcical, but I think the point still stands.
- brightball 3y ago
  There could be a lot of contributors to that. A child of a widow will deal with grief but hopefully move forward together as a family. Potentially even trying to honor their fathers memory in the process. A child of a divorce is likely to deal with anger, instability from custody agreements, custody battles, emotional fights and manipulation between parents, new relationships on both sides and the changes that come with that including issues with step siblings. Divorce comes with so many negatives for children. A “healthy” divorce is rare from what I’ve seen to this point in my life.
dingi 3y ago
In other words, invest more in men. Years of neglection on their education and up bringing, downright ignoring the needs of young/adult males. And you wonder why the family situation is fucked up. This is a symptom of the end of western civilization. Populations are on the decline. If you don't have strong men, they will come from outside. Just don't expect them to hold on to your fucked up "values".
baq 3y ago
People don't want to have children because: 1) they can't afford it, or 2) they don't have a reasonable apartment/home (same thing as 1. really) 3) they don't want to give up their lifestyle 4) they're genuinely afraid the future is dystopian and dark (which is rather interesting since I can't imagine a future more dystopian than one without children) So if you want to fix the society to want to have children again you have to make it 1) affordable, 2) less inconvenient, 3) (not really sure what to do about being afraid of the future) if that sounds like socialism... too bad. Capitalism evidently makes people prefer capital (both money and time) over children.
- dagw 3y ago
  So if you want to fix the society to want to have children again you have to make it 1) affordable, 2) less inconvenient, Sweden has done about as much as any country reasonably can do address those two, and it hasn't had much effect on improving the birth rate.
  - NeoTar 3y ago
    How do you know what the birth-rate would be without those policies?
    - jdasdf 3y ago
      By looking at other similar countries that havent gone that far.
- helen___keller 3y ago
  I just want to add that some people simply don’t want to have children. This is important to note because “should I have children” is kind of a novel question, especially for women, in the context of human history. If you go back a century or three, women (especially from a middle class or upper class family) were expected to wed. And wives were expected to bear and care for children. Choice was not particularly involved, and most career paths were unavailable for self-sufficiency in the first place. A question like “would I be happier advancing my career as a scientist or choosing to raise children” is a foreign question a century ago. Now it is a question that the modern woman must grapple with. This is similar to what you are saying, but it’s the social side of the coin rather than the economic one: an upper middle class family may easily be able to afford raising children, yet the wife still does not want to sacrifice her career which embodies her ambitions, her passions, and her sense of worth.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
blargey 3y ago
Flipping the script from "both parents working to stay afloat" to "a stay at home parent in every home" takes strong financial incentives. But the stronger the incentives to start and keep such parental arrangements, the stronger the forces keeping dysfunctional and harmful relationships together, at the expense of everyone involved. People fought for divorce for a reason, that needs to be addressed somehow.
- mortureb 3y ago
  Those incentives will be self manifesting. If every household did this we would have a much smaller labor force, essentially forcing companies to pay more.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 3y ago
How do we know that the causal relationship is this way and not the other way around, if there is one at all? Raising children and generating income at the same time requires teamwork in most cases. That's immediately obvious, and there's probably not much more to it than that.
abeppu 3y ago
I find it interesting/surprising that the word "divorce" never appears in this article. My understanding was that the divorce rate also was lower for college-educated people. I'm also surprised by lack of mentions of family planning -- are single parents without college educations actively choosing to be parents or tripping into it? But overall, this seems circuitous. The author acknowledges that inequality is both a cause and effect interacting with marriage, and cites several ways that kids are better off in two-parent families -- but the description of those comparisons makes no mention of controlling for these other factors. So one can have a lot of skepticism that a poor two-parent household, where both parents need to work long hours or multiple jobs to cover rent, where housing is less stable, where surprising costs (a broken-down car etc) turn into catastrophic disruptions, will turn out healthy successful kids. But the finding that kids do better in two parent families already selects out a number of metrics -- educational attainment, future earnings, lower rate of getting in trouble at school or with law enforcement - all of which are desirable irrespective of family structure. Those seem like better goals, which we are already pursuing just relatively ineffectively. You want more kids to go to college? Make college cheaper, make colleges spend more money on instruction and less on administration and coaches. Want kids to have fewer behavioral issues at school? Well, stuff that could make their home life more stable whether their parents are married or not may include safe, affordable, stable housing, and IDK, schools that don't have to do active shooter drills b/c of the real threat of being invaded by a well-armed crazy person might be nice. Want kids to grow up to earn more? I think Piketty's focus on the share of growth that goes to capital versus labor is important. Generational wage stagnation in real terms is still critical. Want kids to get in trouble with the law less? In my city, the police did a mass arrest of hundreds of kids skateboarding recently. No one's top concern about crime here is "too many kids are skateboarding". Maybe law enforcement should focus more on e.g. corrupt local officials, employers with systemic wage theft, landlords dangerously skipping repairs and maintenance, etc etc rather than kids on skateboards?
- landoftheice 3y ago
  [dead]
ZoomerCretin 3y ago
> To give disadvantaged children better futures, policy makers should promote widespread employment and economic security among a wider segment of the population—particularly non-college-educated men. And therein lies the problem. We've seen for years how every call for minimum wage increases or labor rights is met with "You're only worth what the market will bear. If you want more money and better treatment, you'd better make yourself worth more to the market!", yet when the shoe is on the other foot, and the labor market favors workers, policymakers treat it as an _emergency_ requiring immediate correction. Unemployment expansion was cancelled at the state level (despite evidence that people on unemployment assistance find work faster), employers strongly resisted any call for wage increases or working condition improvements, opting to whine "No one wants to work anymore" to anyone who would listen, and the Federal Reserve started hiking rates as quickly as it could despite little evidence that inflation was caused by anything other than supply chain difficulties. The unspoken yet universal policy preference of our governments is to weaken and impoverish workers to the greatest extent possible to ensure enough of us are compliant and desperate enough to take any job at any wage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K1tqDyN4xE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K1tqDyN4xE Tim Gurner was recently excoriated for saying the quiet part out loud from the perspective of the rich and powerful: "The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment" so we can have less "arrogance" from workers.
- em-bee 3y ago
  If you want more money and better treatment, you'd better make yourself worth more to the market there is another approach besides just a higher minimum wage. provide better education to everyone so that they can achieve higher qufications and get better jobs. that will solve the problem of minimum wage jobs because noone wants those anymore. (but, just to be clear, i am not against raising the minimum wage, just that by itself it's not really going to solve the problem)
  - em-bee 3y ago
    qufications -> qualifications
bradlys 3y ago
I think the biggest contributor we can do is change culture to where women are not looking for significant financial benefit when marrying a man. As it stands, men already don’t look at women for their financial prospects like women do towards men. If we can change this aspect of our culture, I think this will give to one of the largest rises in two parent households. I don’t expect it to ever change though.

michaelleland 3y ago

The tax credits for married people here in the US seem to be part of this type of policy, no?

ConfusedDog 3y ago
Being single parent can also file for the deduction. Receiving supposal and child support after tax also encourages divorce, which also encourages the benefiting party not to go to work or do works that doesn't pay taxes. I'd say the current policy is more encouraging of divorce than two-parent household.
- giantg2 3y ago
  Unless someone is severely disabled, spousal support is a horrible thing. Even worse are the states that make it compulsory after a certain number of years. Child support makes sense in theory, but is butchered in practice. The judgements often have little to do with how much it actually costs to support the child and is more about a percentage of income. Let's not forget, the state is the third party in a divorce. They do not want to support anyone when they can force one of the other parties to do so.
  - User23 3y ago
    The state also gets a 10% rake off the top, which is why child support judgments are so enthusiastically enforced.
    - giantg2 3y ago
      Is that the court fee or something else?
      - User23 3y ago
        It's not a flat percentage exactly and it varies by state[1]. I'm not sure how I got 10% in my head maybe that's roughly the average? [1] https://calmatters.org/projects/california-keeps-millions-in-child-support-while-parents-drown-in-debt/ https://calmatters.org/projects/california-keeps-millions-in...
        giantg2 3y ago
        That article says the average retained is about 3.8% nationally. It sounds like what the government is getting it from interest on unpaid support.
  - ConfusedDog 3y ago
    Except if the benefiting party receiving spousal support and child support is after tax, so they don't report that as income. So, if they don't work, they qualify for unemployment benefits (at very least the Medicaid) - the government still pays. Speaking from my own experience. My ex is now trying to fight to get more child support because my son is on my healthcare plan my employer offers, she wants to put him on Medicaid like her and get the money instead. In other words, government still going to pay. I think her lawyer didn't agree with her because it's not the best interest for our kid and could be a waste of time. Although I think it's terribly for the higher earner in the divorce, I can't blame her for gaming the system. It is well set up for her to take advantage of this divorce situation. I even know there are women have multiple children from different men just so they can live luxuriously - none of child support is counted towards income when calculating other child support - the only risk is some men rather go to prison than paying lol.
- mortureb 3y ago
  Spousal support is an archaic holdover that doesn’t belong anymore and child support should not be a thing offered in at fault divorces. For the latter I’m not sure how you can go about implementing that ethically though. If the dad cheated, fine, he should pay child support. If the mom cheats, maybe the state can subsidize daycare while the mom is forced to work. Otherwise there are no consequences for the mom who can just “divorce him and take his house and half his money”.
  - RestlessMind 3y ago
    Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Draconian laws tilting in favor of women definitely contribute to reluctance of men to get married or to have kids.
    - mortureb 3y ago
      It’s going to be downvoted for a few years while the true state of things permeates through the society. It’s just a matter of constantly educating the 10,000 new people that learned about it today.
PopAlongKid 3y ago
There are no U.S. tax credits per se for married vs. unmarried taxpayers. Depending on the relative incomes of two spouses, there can be a so-called "marriage penalty" or "marriage reward" from combining two incomes on a joint return, but that alone probably has very little impact on whether people choose to get or remain married. In fact, a large chunk of existing tax law deals with all the possible combinations of households with children and parents, where the parents may or may not be living together, and may or may not be married to each other. It is designed to fairly accomodate unmarried people, not to encourage marriage.
- bradlys 3y ago
  The tax penalty (which is very real for many SV and NYC earners) is one reason I’ve decided to never get married. The other being that the insane one-size fits all contractual aspects of marriage that cannot be changed. A vengeful judge and spouse can easily wreck one’s finances unfairly.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
- sokoloff 3y ago
  When only one of the people has an income, there's definitely a benefit for married-filing-jointly over MFS or being unmarried.
readthenotes1 3y ago
There are still tax disadvantages for some married couples (used to be all, assuming both worked). However, there are also plenty of welfare programs that are means tested so marriage is ruled out. (One of the leading theories for the number of babies born out of wedlock rising so much since the early 1960s is the end of the shotgun wedding: the baby daddy counters by pointing out that the mom will lose out on a lot of benefits if she gets married)
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  There is an additional Medicare tax of 0.9% if single income exceeds 200k, but if you file jointly, that limit is 250k. So a married couple with each earning 125k+ would pay more tax than an unmarried couple where person made 200k. This hardly mattered years ago, but with median wages getting around 70k+, a lot more people pay this penalty for getting married.
giantg2 3y ago
You can actually benefit from being single filers (non-married) by choosing who claims what to get the biggest breaks. Not being married means you can also mix and match certain things that you otherwise might not be able to, like regular vs Roth IRAs (although I think this is state level).
codexb 3y ago
There aren't any tax credits for married couples. There are tax credits for parents, and they aren't reduced by divorce. The tax benefits of filing "married" isn't any better than filing as "head of household" (which doesn't require marriage), and filing as either sometimes provide a disadvantage when both parents are working and earn similar incomes. In the US at least, the financial and legal incentives for women to divorce is far, far greater.

noteflakes 3y ago

https://archive.ph/na61F https://archive.ph/na61F

pjc50 3y ago

Can't read the article even with archive.ph, but do they have an analysis of why relationships break down?

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
For me, I click the "I'm not a robot" captcha checkbox, and it just reloads the captcha. I'm nervous and concerned that I'm not human. I distinctly remember having a childhood and living a human life, but those might just be uploaded memories. What is my best course of action to get to the bottom of this mystery?
- giantg2 3y ago
  I once got a captcha featuring a street sign with a picture of a traffic light on it. It told me I had to click all the squares work traffic lights in it. But it's not a traffic light - it's a street sign depicting a traffic light. I'm not human afterall.
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  archive.is has some kind of really aggressive captcha protection set up. I find it doesn't like public DNS servers like Google's or CloudFlare's: on my home wifi which points to 8.8.8.8 I always get the captcha loop, but then if I switch to accessing over a cell network it works fine.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> the idea is that as some men have become less reliable as financial providers for their family, the value proposition of marriage between a man and a woman has fallen. > Multiple studies document a causal link between the economic struggles of men and the growth in single-mother families. > To give disadvantaged children better futures, policy makers should promote widespread employment and economic security among a wider segment of the population—particularly non-college-educated men.
- lokar 3y ago
  Perhaps as women have gained more financial independence they no longer need to adopt a submissive attitude towards men to survive?

bbor 3y ago

Serious question: why not three parent? Does every stable relationship involve sexual aspects? Seems like an article stating an obvious fact but missing the bigger picture

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
The triple-stranded DNA isn't very stable with Earth lifeforms.
tkahnoski 3y ago
Or more to the point, lean heavily into "it takes a village to raise a child".
- nemo44x 3y ago
  What that means is that it takes parents and extended family and the close-knit community you'd find from a church and from schools, for example. Millions of people do this today. It's odd to see people think this is a revelation or something.
  - tkahnoski 3y ago
    I'd agree and my comment is more of a critique on the evolution of American society leading away from community building. Whether it be subtle things like suburban homes with giant privacy fences or larger topics like the affordability of housing to be able stay in the community you grew up in. I'd much rather see policies towards solving these problems versus one that has the government getting in the middle of my marriage or parenting.
malfist 3y ago
Did you ever read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? They have the concept of a "line marriage" where a marriage keeps going by marrying more people into the marriage. So you can have a married group that have been married for more than a generation.
bluescrn 3y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

I don't think that's been sociologically plausible for many decades. Some things are easy to tear down and nearly impossible to build back up. In some circles, the mere suggestion that this should be a policy goal is insulting, as it hints that single-parent homes are inferior. Our government isn't really allowed to prefer one over the other, even if it would result in less misery. Furthermore, the tools that government has at its disposal to encourage two-parent households are few and clumsy. No decision to stay together has ever hinged on a slightly higher tax exemption, or some other priority access to the bureaucracy. The writer's room of some Hollywood sitcom has more power than Congress in these matters. I doubt very much that they are interested in giving up on the show that makes jokes that discourage such, but even if they did, that's one show when the real culprit is the entire weight of the entertainment industry. We might as well talk about how it should be a policy goal to raise the speed of light to 750,000 miles per second.

NDizzle 3y ago
Single parent households are inferior, so why not spell it out?
- ormaybejust 3y ago
  Well, sorta. In America we don't build communities as well, so a single parent is alone to raise their kids and also work. A single parent with a strong local community of caregivers who can help perform the work of raising a kid in their community is probably not worse off than the standard, alienated two parent household in America. So while what you say might be true in America, I don't think it's axiomatic.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  Because the politicians who suggest any such policy, when it gets to the point where people demand they explain why they're proposing it, either has to come clean, or dissemble. The latter is obvious lying and deflection, and that's a PR disaster. The former is an absolute shitstorm. Single-parent celebrities that have five different kids by four different baby-daddies go on talk shows and Twitter, start calling you a Nazi. Whatever passes for newspaper editorials now days start whining for the next 6 months that it's anti-inclusive and undermines diversity. Invitations at colleges to speak at graduation are rescinded, some of your campaign donors stop taking your calls even though the mid-terms are coming up in less than a year. LGBT activists then crawl out of the woodwork saying that what we really need aren't two-parent households, because anyone can be a parent. We just need two-plus income families, and that poly-amory is superior because it can potentially bring four or more incomes into the house. Only cis-bigots really want just two parents there. And then you back off. Not a battle worth fighting. None of this, even if it worked, could be milked for votes in an effort to get promoted from the House to the Senate (or the White House). And since it would be attacked from day one with the possibility that it might fail, why even try? It's far from a sure thing. All we know is the correlation, not the causation.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

There was an excellent NYT article about this as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/opinion/single-parent-poverty.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/opinion/single-parent-pov... > We are often reluctant to acknowledge one of the significant drivers of child poverty — the widespread breakdown of family — for fear that to do so would be patronizing or racist.

ajmurmann 3y ago
If we are concerned about poverty, maybe we could just give them money? I understand the fairly small child tax credit had a huge positive impact on child poverty.
- bunbunbun 3y ago
  The policy solution for poverty seems to be to punish the poor for not working hard enough
- codexb 3y ago
  And further incentivize divorce? It's a dual-headed problem. Much of what has fueled the breakdown of family structure are policies that incentivize women to become single mothers. Children being raised by single mothers is not a good outcome. We need to stop pretending that it is.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    No, just do UBI or a version of UBI that's only for kids. That way you get rid of the harmful step function we always pack into social programs.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > And further incentivize divorce? One way to give them more money and not incentivize single parenthood (which is the issue, not divorce, and treating them as equivalent has always been wrong and is increasingly so as marriage rates drops) is to go to UBI instead of means-tested aid, or, if using means testing, use a means-testing formula which doesn't punish two-parent families. > Children being raised by single mothers is not a good outcome. Its a lot better than children being raised by two parents together, one of which is abusing them and/or the other parent, which any change which does more to avoid incentivizing divorce or single-parenthood more than eliminating any two-parent penalty would incentivize, especially for the poor.

a-user-you-like 3y ago

Nothing better than a father and mother in a stable, loving relationship for a child. Yes, let’s encourage this.

lokar 3y ago
How exactly is that better the two mothers? Do you have evidence?
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  I would be very surprised if GP thought that only father/mother combos are the best and instead was just agreeing with TFA.
  - nicholasjarnold 3y ago
    Yep, I don't have the source to cite right now, but I recall reading research indicating that the important factor was 2 loving and supportive parents regardless of their sex or sexual orientation.
  - ormaybejust 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - digging 3y ago
    It feels extremely unusual to me to specifically call out a mother/father relationship if they weren't intending to exclude queer relationships. A note for all readers: don't say "nothing better than a [straight relationship]" if that's not what you mean.
    - vorpalhex 3y ago
      Most relationships, especially with kids, are heterosexual.
      - deleted 3y ago

matthewfelgate 3y ago

The 1970s called; they'd like their arguments back! Arguing that children with married parents fare better, thus promoting two-parent families, is akin to suggesting that since blue cars have fewer accidents, everyone should drive a blue car. Pressuring dissatisfied couples to stay together or marry benefits no one. The article fails to provide actionable recommendations on promoting marriage.

version_five 3y ago
Western society peaked in the 80s so maybe we should listen to some of the arguments from back then.
- mbfg 3y ago
  based on what metric?
- doingwellthanks 3y ago
  Peaked for whom exactly?
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  "Western society peaked in the 80s" By what metric?
  - mbg721 3y ago
    By the metric of best new-wave hair, for sure.
- notpachet 3y ago
  Things may look like they were working better in hindsight, but we just hadn't started choking to death on all of the unchecked externalities yet.
  - itsanaccount 3y ago
    Maybe thats the real evolutionary path going on, as we humans grow to have a more temporally aware mindset. That ability to see how past actions effected the future hopefully allows for more predictive capabilities.

Dig1t 3y ago

>The scholar to whom the question was directed looked annoyed and struggled to formulate an answer. The panelists shifted in their seats. The moderator stepped in, quickly pointing out that poverty makes it harder for people to form stable marriages. She promptly called on someone else. If we valued free speech more, we might be able to have more open, honest conversations in the public realm here. In a society where people are easily fired, or have their lives disrupted in other ways, for expressing the wrong opinion or saying the wrong thing, there is no upside to having this conversation. The only rational decision is to ignore the question and move on. The fewer conversations we have, the less likely we are to be able to solve problems.

iteratethis 3y ago
I couldn't agree more. Progressive discourse has turned so ideological that perfectly normal mainstream conversations make people anxious. People shiver to even discuss the idea/benefits of a heterosexual marriage. As if its some rogue legacy structure. As if single parent situations are some higher moral good to strive for. A portion of men, especially the lower classes, are facing severe issues. But this can hardly be addressed as the very idea of men in need of social justice does not fit the "all men are oppressors" narrative. These politics achieve worse outcomes, not better ones, and they alienate vast groups of people.

_greim_ 3y ago

The problem with two-parent is you're a single misstep away from one-parent. Multi-generational and communal households would be more resilient, and easier to accommodate via tax incentives and housing policy.

anon291 3y ago
A multi generational household occurs naturally when grandma and grandpa had a stable two parent households and now mom and dad do too. Moreover, it's not necessary to force everyone in the same house. My parents and inlaws are within 20 minutes. It's great and since they are both married and happy, there's little family stress and the kids get ample time with both grandparents. God forbid, if anything were to happen to either my wife or I, they would be well taken care of. Eventually our parents may move in or closer by, but right now, it's nice for everyone to have some separation.
- digging 3y ago
  > A multi generational household occurs naturally when grandma and grandpa had a stable two parent households and now mom and dad do too. More importantly, young people need a reason not to move hundreds or thousands of miles away from their stable household. Investing in community resources, local economies, and infrastructure that promotes health and opportunity are all necessary.
  - morkalork 3y ago
    WFH solves this too. RTO policies are anti-family. Hell, unchecked corporate work culture is part of why Japan and Korea's birth rates are so low. Can't be out having babies if you're at the office at all hours.
    - digging 3y ago
      Fully agreed! But it's not enough.
    - RestlessMind 3y ago

fasthands9 3y ago

I can't read the whole article but remember learning in the past that children of widows have outcomes more similar to two-parent households than divorced parent households. This would seem to suggest the divorce is more of a signal of family/status than something which is driving bad outcomes. At the same time, I do think people have gone a bit too far in their want to not give anyone shame. Yes - some shame is not going to help single-parent households now but I would think some societal shame would prevent people from being reckless with having kids or maybe make people think twice about leaving their partner when it really is just a rough patch. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566757 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566757

peteradio 3y ago
Shame could be the active ingredient in poorer outcomes of children of divorce, I'm not sure casting it more broadly will help the general picture.
- fasthands9 3y ago
  I agree shame does not help once you are divorce, but there is some envelope math which seems fair. If divorce makes outcomes 10% worse but makes divorce with children 20% less likely, maybe it's a wash? At the very least, it seems incorrect to insist to me the downsides of shame always outweighs the benefits from it. Even if putting numbers on it is kinda farcical, but I think the point still stands.
brightball 3y ago
There could be a lot of contributors to that. A child of a widow will deal with grief but hopefully move forward together as a family. Potentially even trying to honor their fathers memory in the process. A child of a divorce is likely to deal with anger, instability from custody agreements, custody battles, emotional fights and manipulation between parents, new relationships on both sides and the changes that come with that including issues with step siblings. Divorce comes with so many negatives for children. A “healthy” divorce is rare from what I’ve seen to this point in my life.

dingi 3y ago

In other words, invest more in men. Years of neglection on their education and up bringing, downright ignoring the needs of young/adult males. And you wonder why the family situation is fucked up. This is a symptom of the end of western civilization. Populations are on the decline. If you don't have strong men, they will come from outside. Just don't expect them to hold on to your fucked up "values".

baq 3y ago

People don't want to have children because: 1) they can't afford it, or 2) they don't have a reasonable apartment/home (same thing as 1. really) 3) they don't want to give up their lifestyle 4) they're genuinely afraid the future is dystopian and dark (which is rather interesting since I can't imagine a future more dystopian than one without children) So if you want to fix the society to want to have children again you have to make it 1) affordable, 2) less inconvenient, 3) (not really sure what to do about being afraid of the future) if that sounds like socialism... too bad. Capitalism evidently makes people prefer capital (both money and time) over children.

dagw 3y ago
So if you want to fix the society to want to have children again you have to make it 1) affordable, 2) less inconvenient, Sweden has done about as much as any country reasonably can do address those two, and it hasn't had much effect on improving the birth rate.
- NeoTar 3y ago
  How do you know what the birth-rate would be without those policies?
  - jdasdf 3y ago
    By looking at other similar countries that havent gone that far.
helen___keller 3y ago
I just want to add that some people simply don’t want to have children. This is important to note because “should I have children” is kind of a novel question, especially for women, in the context of human history. If you go back a century or three, women (especially from a middle class or upper class family) were expected to wed. And wives were expected to bear and care for children. Choice was not particularly involved, and most career paths were unavailable for self-sufficiency in the first place. A question like “would I be happier advancing my career as a scientist or choosing to raise children” is a foreign question a century ago. Now it is a question that the modern woman must grapple with. This is similar to what you are saying, but it’s the social side of the coin rather than the economic one: an upper middle class family may easily be able to afford raising children, yet the wife still does not want to sacrifice her career which embodies her ambitions, her passions, and her sense of worth.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

blargey 3y ago

Flipping the script from "both parents working to stay afloat" to "a stay at home parent in every home" takes strong financial incentives. But the stronger the incentives to start and keep such parental arrangements, the stronger the forces keeping dysfunctional and harmful relationships together, at the expense of everyone involved. People fought for divorce for a reason, that needs to be addressed somehow.

mortureb 3y ago
Those incentives will be self manifesting. If every household did this we would have a much smaller labor force, essentially forcing companies to pay more.

ahf8Aithaex7Nai 3y ago

How do we know that the causal relationship is this way and not the other way around, if there is one at all? Raising children and generating income at the same time requires teamwork in most cases. That's immediately obvious, and there's probably not much more to it than that.

abeppu 3y ago

I find it interesting/surprising that the word "divorce" never appears in this article. My understanding was that the divorce rate also was lower for college-educated people. I'm also surprised by lack of mentions of family planning -- are single parents without college educations actively choosing to be parents or tripping into it? But overall, this seems circuitous. The author acknowledges that inequality is both a cause and effect interacting with marriage, and cites several ways that kids are better off in two-parent families -- but the description of those comparisons makes no mention of controlling for these other factors. So one can have a lot of skepticism that a poor two-parent household, where both parents need to work long hours or multiple jobs to cover rent, where housing is less stable, where surprising costs (a broken-down car etc) turn into catastrophic disruptions, will turn out healthy successful kids. But the finding that kids do better in two parent families already selects out a number of metrics -- educational attainment, future earnings, lower rate of getting in trouble at school or with law enforcement - all of which are desirable irrespective of family structure. Those seem like better goals, which we are already pursuing just relatively ineffectively. You want more kids to go to college? Make college cheaper, make colleges spend more money on instruction and less on administration and coaches. Want kids to have fewer behavioral issues at school? Well, stuff that could make their home life more stable whether their parents are married or not may include safe, affordable, stable housing, and IDK, schools that don't have to do active shooter drills b/c of the real threat of being invaded by a well-armed crazy person might be nice. Want kids to grow up to earn more? I think Piketty's focus on the share of growth that goes to capital versus labor is important. Generational wage stagnation in real terms is still critical. Want kids to get in trouble with the law less? In my city, the police did a mass arrest of hundreds of kids skateboarding recently. No one's top concern about crime here is "too many kids are skateboarding". Maybe law enforcement should focus more on e.g. corrupt local officials, employers with systemic wage theft, landlords dangerously skipping repairs and maintenance, etc etc rather than kids on skateboards?

landoftheice 3y ago
[dead]

ZoomerCretin 3y ago

> To give disadvantaged children better futures, policy makers should promote widespread employment and economic security among a wider segment of the population—particularly non-college-educated men. And therein lies the problem. We've seen for years how every call for minimum wage increases or labor rights is met with "You're only worth what the market will bear. If you want more money and better treatment, you'd better make yourself worth more to the market!", yet when the shoe is on the other foot, and the labor market favors workers, policymakers treat it as an _emergency_ requiring immediate correction. Unemployment expansion was cancelled at the state level (despite evidence that people on unemployment assistance find work faster), employers strongly resisted any call for wage increases or working condition improvements, opting to whine "No one wants to work anymore" to anyone who would listen, and the Federal Reserve started hiking rates as quickly as it could despite little evidence that inflation was caused by anything other than supply chain difficulties. The unspoken yet universal policy preference of our governments is to weaken and impoverish workers to the greatest extent possible to ensure enough of us are compliant and desperate enough to take any job at any wage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K1tqDyN4xE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K1tqDyN4xE Tim Gurner was recently excoriated for saying the quiet part out loud from the perspective of the rich and powerful: "The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment" so we can have less "arrogance" from workers.

em-bee 3y ago
If you want more money and better treatment, you'd better make yourself worth more to the market there is another approach besides just a higher minimum wage. provide better education to everyone so that they can achieve higher qufications and get better jobs. that will solve the problem of minimum wage jobs because noone wants those anymore. (but, just to be clear, i am not against raising the minimum wage, just that by itself it's not really going to solve the problem)
- em-bee 3y ago
  qufications -> qualifications

bradlys 3y ago

I think the biggest contributor we can do is change culture to where women are not looking for significant financial benefit when marrying a man. As it stands, men already don’t look at women for their financial prospects like women do towards men. If we can change this aspect of our culture, I think this will give to one of the largest rises in two parent households. I don’t expect it to ever change though.