Marriage And Poverty

See Can Marriage Cure Poverty? by Annie Lowrey, NY Times magazine, 2-9-14. Excerpts:

"Almost no marriages in which both partners work full time fall below the poverty line; about one-third of households headed by a single mother are poor. One in eight children with two married parents lives below the poverty line; five in 10 living with a single mother do. And income aside, children raised by two parents are less likely to have behavioral problems, be asthmatic or hungry; they are more likely to achieve at school and so on. The effects are perhaps even larger than researchers had previously grasped. In a new study, the economist Raj Chetty and his co-authors found that, in terms of income mobility, nothing matters more for a low-income child than the family structures she sees in her community — not neighborhood segregation, school quality or a host of other factors."

"about four in 10 children are born to an unmarried mother."

"Some of the government’s programs seem to have had an effect on the low-income folks they targeted: Couples who participated in an Oklahoma initiative called Family Expectations were about 20 percent more likely to stay together for three years than couples in a control group, for instance. But over all, Uncle Sam tends to make a poor Cupid. The preponderance of evidence is that Washington instead has, over the years, wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on relationship counseling"

"Imagine a working husband making $25,000 a year whose wife decides to take a job for $25,000 a year. Melissa S. Kearney, the director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, and a co-author have estimated that the couple would keep only about 30 percent of the wife’s earnings, after you factor in the loss of breaks like the earned-income tax credit."