From yesterday’s Telegraph:
Mr Duncan Smith has made uncompromisingly clear that, in his commission’s view, it is the breakdown of the two-parent family and the decline of marriage that is at the heart of this collapse of values in British social life – and heaven be praised, Mr Cameron has indicated that he endorses this conclusion.
This is not to be construed – as everybody keeps hurrying to point out – as some sort of moralistic condemnation of existing single parents or an attempt by politicians to impose a particular pattern of personal life on the entire population.
It is simply a statement of hard fact based on overwhelming empirical evidence: children are far less likely to fall into crime and addiction, to fail at school and to end up as teenage parents if they are raised by two parents who remain together.
And those two parents are far more likely to remain together if they are married than if they are cohabiting.
The statistical support for these propositions is now so crushing as to extinguish any rational argument to the contrary.
trouble is, crushing statistical support never settles a case when the political elites have a vested interest in the continuation of the problem, which they themselves helped to cause. What politician could survive the hypocrisy of spending political capital on this now, when she made rather different choices in her own life? It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes down. Remember John Major’s “back to basics” campaign, shot to smithereens within three months because his cabinet’s major players (he himself included, as we learned later) never walked the walk…
I know that reducing the marriage penalty tax AND the increased “Earned Income Child Credit” helped us financially, which eased some family disputes about finances. I dread seeing these reforms lapse and we go back to the higher rates! 😛
# 1 – yes, public life would benefit from a bit more hyposcrisy from politicians. Looks like the UK is leading the way in illegitimacy as the norm (though Sweden probably still leads here) and the creation of an underclass who’ve never worked (while working couples both slave away to pay the mortgage).
Poverty in the western world is now taking on a quite different face from previous generations.
When I wrote my post (#2, above), I was referring to the U.S. version of the marriage tax breaks/penalties. Sorry for any confusion. 🙂
Welfare is the cause of the high rate of single motherhood. Why get married when you can make money having children?
Anybody can figure that out. And they did.
bl