“The Poverty Cure: Get Married” promises one recent Wall Street Journal headline. Marco Rubio has called marriage “the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty.” The George W. Bush administration established a (now-defunct) $150-million-a-year effort to shore up people’s marriages, in the hopes of shoring up their finances too.
And yet, as a new report from the left-of-center think tank the Center for American Progress (CAP) documents, millions and millions of married Americans continue to live in poverty. More than half (55 percent) of the nearly 28 million people in low-income families with children are in households headed by a married couple.
“There are a lot of people struggling who are married, and, increasingly, unmarried, couples with children,” says Shawn Fremstad, the author of the report. “Just putting two people together, including in marriage, isn't enough.”
This is not to say that marriage is not correlated with greater economic well-being. Married families are much less likely to be in poverty than families with a single parent. According to the CAP report, 26 percent of people in families with children and married parents fall below 150 percent of the Supplemental Poverty Measure ($38,000 for a family of four), while 60 percent of people in families with children and a single parent do so.
[For more of this story, written by Rebecca J. Rosen, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...iage-poverty/473019/]
Comments (0)