Fifty-one years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty. Since then, taxpayers have spent more than $22 trillion fighting Johnson's war. Last year, taxpayers spent more than $920 billion on more than 80 different anti-poverty programs.
Despite this, the percentage of Americans who are poor has barely budged since the late 1960s. As President Ronald Reagan put it: “We declared war on poverty, and poverty won.”
A major reason for the lack of success in fighting poverty has been the collapse of marriage. Marriage is a powerful force in reducing poverty; a single mother with children is four times more likely to be poor than a similar mother who is married. More than two-thirds of all poor families with children in the U.S. are headed by single parents.
Since the beginning of the war on poverty, marriage has declined sharply. In 1964, 7 percent of U.S. children were born outside marriage. Today, the number is 41 percent. When compared to children in intact married homes, children raised by single parents are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems; be physically abused; smoke, drink and use drugs; be aggressive; engage in violent, delinquent and criminal behavior; have poor school performance; be expelled from school; and drop out of high school.
Given the overwhelming effectiveness of marriage in reducing poverty and other social problems, you would think that strengthening marriage would be a top priority for the welfare state. Wrong. The welfare system does the opposite. Welfare penalizes marriage by sharply reducing benefits when low-income couples marry.
For example, a single mother with two children who earns $15,000 per year will generally receive around $5,200 per year from the food stamp program. If she marries a father with the same earnings, her food stamps would be cut to zero. A single mother receiving public housing benefits would receive a subsidy worth on average around $11,000 per year if she was not employed. But if she married a man earning $20,000 per year, these benefits would be cut nearly in half.
The federal government runs more than 80 welfare aid programs; nearly all of them provide financial incentives for couples to remain unmarried.
Nearly everyone can agree that it is senseless for the welfare system to penalize couples who marry. But reducing welfare's numerous marriage penalties could cost more money because, in some cases, benefits for couples who did marry would need to go up. Is there a way to reduce welfare's marriage penalties without raising overall welfare spending and costing the taxpayer a bundle?
Yes. Shrink welfare fraud. The Earned Income Tax Credit provides more than $56 billion per year to low-income persons. But, according to the IRS, a quarter to a third of all EITC claims are fraudulent. It would not be hard to sharply reduce fraud in the EITC and save some $10 billion to $15 billion per year. These savings could be redirected toward reducing marriage penalties in welfare programs.
Reducing fraud in the welfare state would increase fairness by removing people who don't deserve benefits from the rolls. Reducing welfare's marriage penalties would aid moms, dads and kids. That's a win-win situation — a positive first step toward actually winning the war on poverty.
Robert Rector is a senior research fellow in the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation (heritage.org).
