The Success Sequence: Why Education, a Job, Marriage, Then Kids Is the Working Order

June 14, 2017

Ah, millennials. In some ways, they’re very traditional, suggesting that women should stay at home to raise their kids. In other ways, they are very Bohemian, doing as they please when the mood hits. But it turns out, the old-fashioned “success sequence” — a (high school or higher) degree, job, marriage, then children, in that order — is still the winning combination for securing financial well-being, even for this late-day-and-age group.

The term “success sequence” isn’t new. It was coined in the last decade by researchers looking for policy ideas that could help break the cycle of poverty. Of course, it was criticized for pointing out that the cycle of poverty is more likely to be perpetuated for kids born into poorly educated households without two parents and few economic opportunities. It has become rude to point this out even though that’s the problem the research is trying to solve.

But facts are facts, as it were, and a new study by W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and Wendy Wang, of the Institute for Family Studies, found that the success sequence holds up as a guidepost for today’s Millennials as it did for Baby Boomers, even after adjusting for a wide range of variables like childhood family income and education, employment status, race/ethnicity, sex, and respondents’ scores on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT), which measures intelligence and knowledge of a range of subjects.

The study found that “diverging paths into adulthood” taken by 28- to 34-year-olds — the eldest of the Millennial age group — produce very different economic outcomes.

Among the findings:

  • Millennials who follow the “success sequence” almost always avoid poverty, with 97 percent of Millennials who married first not being poor by age 28, compared to 72 percent who had children first.
  • 71 percent of Millennials from lower-income families who put marriage before children made it into the middle class or higher when they reached adulthood. Conversely, 41 percent of Millennials from lower-income families who put children first made it into the middle class or higher when they became adults.
  • Among black young adults, those who married before having children are almost twice as likely to be in the middle- or upper-income groups (76 percent) than those who had a baby first (39 percent).

success sequence statistics

Since 55 percent of 28- to 34-year-old millennial parents had their first child before marriage, the economic and family impacts will be felt for decades.

Millennials are more likely than previous generations to delay marriage and parenthood, but that doesn’t mean that they have to forego the order of education, work, and marriage. Indeed, there’s a reason the success sequence works.

Why might these three factors be so important for young adults today? Education confers knowledge, skills, access to social networks, and credentials that give today’s young adults a leg up in the labor force. Sustained full-time employment provides not only a basic floor for household income but, in many cases, opportunities for promotions that further boost income. Stable marriage seems to foster economies of scale, income pooling, and greater work effort from men, and to protect adults from the costs of multiple partner fertility and family instability.

Moreover, the sequencing of these factors is important insofar as young men and women are more likely to earn a decent income if they have at least acquired a high school education, and young marrieds are more likely to stay together if they have a modicum of education and a steady income. So, it’s not just that education, work, and marriage independently seem to matter, but the sequencing of education, work, and marriage may also increase the odds of financial success for today’s young adults.

Wilcox and Wang point out that there’s no statistical model to perfectly predict a youth’s future success. Some who succeeded came from roots missing those steps. Others who lived in households that followed the sequence ended up in the bottom third of the income scale. Lastly, there’s no conclusive evidence that the “sequence plays a causal or primary role in driving young adult success.”

The researchers also note that it’s easier to follow the success sequence when one is born into it, as opposed to young adults who came from poor neighborhoods, bad schools, and less educated households. It’s also easier to follow the success sequence when one comes from a cultural background that adopts these ideals and expectations rather than those groups who hold these values in lower regard.

But there’s no mistaking that the numbers overwhelmingly favor those who do follow the course, and that’s where both one’s personal “agency” and public policy come into play.

This report suggests that young adults from a range of backgrounds who followed the success sequence are markedly more likely to steer clear of poverty and realize the American Dream than young adults who did not follow the same steps.

Given the value of the success sequence, and the structural and cultural obstacles to realizing it faced by some young adults, policymakers, educators, civic leaders, and business leaders should take steps to make each component of the sequence more accessible. Any initiatives should be particularly targeted at younger adults from less advantaged backgrounds, who tend to have access to fewer of the structural and cultural resources that make the sequence readily attainable and appealing. The following three ideas are worth considering in any effort to strengthen the role that the success sequence plays in the lives of American young adults.

Read the full report here.

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Rebuilding America: An Investment in Social Capital

May 19, 2017

With the advent of modern transportation, community certainly extends beyond the boundaries of one’s home, so it shouldn’t be a great surprise that the percentage of adults who say they spend a social evening with a neighbor at least several times a week fell to 19 percent in 2016 from 30 percent in 1974.

No longer is this country based on loving they neighbor, but perhaps neighborliness is a lost art in need of a renaissance.

That’s the gist of a new report just released by the Joint Economic Committee on Capitol Hill. “What We Do Together: The State of Associational Life in America,” is part of the Social Capital Project, run by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah.

Its stated purpose?

The Social Capital Project is a multi-year research effort that will investigate the evolving nature, quality, and importance of our associational life. ‘Associational life’ is our shorthand for the web of social relationships through which we pursue joint endeavors—namely, our families, our communities, our workplaces, and our religious congregations. These institutions are critical to forming our character and capacities, providing us with meaning and purpose, and for addressing the many challenges we face.

The goal of the project is to better understand why the health of our associational life feels so compromised, what consequences have followed from changes in the middle social layers of our society, why some communities have more robust civil society than others, and what can be done — or can stop being done — to improve the health of our social capital. Through a series of reports and hearings, it will study the state of the relationships that weave together the social fabric enabling our country — our laws, our institutions, our markets, and our democracy — to function so well in the first place.

The first report from the project is a bit dispiriting. While Americans are much more materially better off, the social fabric is frayed, fractured, and seemingly coming apart. At risk is pretty much the social norms that allow a middle class and the sustainability of a “free, prosperous, democratic, and pluralistic country.”

Some of the findings in the report reveal that social capital is dropping because Americans are spending less time socializing with neighbors, declining to vote, and lacking in trust of fellow Americans (from 46 percent in 1972, the report to 31 percent in 2016, according to the General Social Survey).

Political columnist Ramesh Ponnuru points out some exceptions raised in the report.

Rates of volunteering have increased. Some kinds of political engagement have also risen: The percentage of the population that reports having tried to influence someone else’s vote has gone up over the last few decades. The overall story, though, is one of fewer and weaker interpersonal connections among Americans.

Social scientists Charles Murray, who testified to the Joint Economic Committee this week, described the impact of a decline in social capital: fewer people are getting married and fewer men are working. He said that the government can try to find policies to encourage behavioral changes, but the declines are symptoms of a larger, more visceral problem.

If I had to pick one theme … it is the many ways in which people (behave) impulsively — throwing away real opportunities — and unrealistically — possessing great ambitions but oblivious to the steps required to get from point A to point B to point C to point D in life.

In other words, the desire for instant gratification has its consequences. Another problem he cited is a general self-destruction created by the squandering of an ample number of opportunities to get ahead.

The solution?

It comes down to the age-old problem of getting people, especially young people, not to do things that are attractive in the short term but disastrous in the long term and, conversely, to do things that aren’t fun right now but that will open up rewards later in life. The problem is not confined to any socioeconomic class. The mental disorder known as adolescence afflicts rich and poor alike. And adolescence can extend a long time after people have left their teens. The most common way that the fortunate among us manage to get our priorities straight — or at least not irretrievably screw them up — is by being cocooned in the institutions that are the primary resources for generating social capital: a family consisting of married parents and active membership in a faith tradition.

I didn’t choose my phrasing lightly. I am not implying that single parents are incapable of filling this function — millions of them are striving heroically to do so — nor that children cannot grow up successfully if they don’t go to church. With regard to families, I am making an empirical statement: As a matter of statistical tendencies, biological children of married parents do much better on a wide variety of important life outcomes than children growing up in any other family structure, even after controlling for income, parental education, and ethnicity. With regard to religion, I am making an assertion about a resource that can lead people, adolescents and adults alike, to do the right thing even when the enticements to do the wrong thing are strong: a belief that God commands them to do the right thing. I am also invoking religion as a community of faith … For its active members, a church is far more than a place that they to worship once a week. It is a form of community that socializes the children growing up in it in all sorts of informal ways, just as a family socializes children.

Murray said his ideas are not meant to generate policy recommendations, but more a warning.

I would argue that it is not a matter of ideology but empiricism to conclude that unless the traditional family and traditional communities of faith make a comeback, the declines in social capital that are already causing so much deterioration in our civic culture will continue and the problems will worsen. The solutions are unlikely to be political but cultural. We need a cultural Great Awakening akin to past religious Great Awakenings.

Will the social capital project be able to trigger a “Great Awakening”? Perhaps not, but a disconnect in society will most certainly cause bigger problems that will ultimately cause a larger breakdown that will rely on homegrown gumption to fix.

As Ponnuru explains, a return to the aspirational nature of social capital may require a “rediscovery of Tocqueville.”

Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another. … In order that men remain civilized or become so, the art of associating must be developed and perfected among them.”

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Paid Family Leave: Economical Conclusions From Three U.S. States

March 21, 2017

President Trump, with the encouragement of his daughter Ivanka, has been promoting paid family leave as a means to help families with income and work after the birth of a child or to care for a loved one who falls ill.

Democrats have long supported such plans, and Republicans are coming on board. That may surprise many who think paid leave is an unaffordable boondoggle, but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that it’s a boon not a boondoggle, and not just for families but for businesses that offer paid family leave.

Evidence of such claims are drawn from studies of paid family leave programs in three U.S. states — California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island — that have already implemented such programs. Here are some of the conclusions:

  1. Paid leave raises the likelihood that a new mother will remain in the labor market, which can help boost her lifetime income and contributes to our economic productivity overall.
  2. Women who take parental leave are less likely to suffer from maternal depression and are more likely to  breastfeed— and do so for longer periods of time — outcomes that are beneficial for the lifetime health and development of the child.
  3. Paid leave encourages men to help more at home, freeing up time for women if they want to work, which boosts household income and spurs economic growth.
  4. Fathers who take time off work at and around childbirth are more likely to be involved in childcare later in the child’s life. Children whose fathers are more involved in their early years perform better on language and cognitive tests, and social development than those with fathers who are less involved.
  5. Paid leave has had a positive or neutral effect on profitability, according to employers in California and New Jersey.
  6. State paid leave programs have helped employers recruit and retain talent, lower turnover, and boost morale and worker productivity.
  7. Paid leave reduces the burden on government assistance in states, suggesting potential longer-term positive budgetary implications.
  8. Uneven availability of paid family leave in the private sector ends up disproportionately benefiting higher-income workers, while low-wage workers also often lack other forms of paid days off that higher-wage workers can use for family leave. Providing low-wage, low-skill workers time to care for their families encourages work.

OK. There must be downsides, right? There are some potential hazards. These are some:

  1. States looking to develop their own paid leave policies will have to build an administrative structure to create the system.
  2. Lawmakers will grow government rather than make cuts to other programs to pay for paid family leave.
  3. Employers dropping their paid leave programs for a federal program could become quite expensive if not offset.
  4. There is the potential for “time-off creep” and the costs associated with that. Paid leave programs are now only four-six weeks, but New York has already passed a law to make its program 12 weeks.

The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not offer paid family leave.

What do you think of implementing a universal system?

Read the entire blog series on the impact of paid family leave.

Filed Under: Happiness, Life Tagged With: , , ,

Vast Array of Government Assistance Programs Ready for a Reboot

February 11, 2017

Reducing poverty is one of the biggest issues that TPOH discusses, with good reason. The expression that “a rising tide lifts all boats” is especially true in a liberal democratic society that values a free market. However, despite a vast array of government assistance programs, it doesn’t seem the tide is lifting the poverty blues.

For many Americans, the elusive path to success has not been found, and the promise of upward mobility has not felt like a reality for many families stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder. Various polls show that efforts to reduce poverty and expand opportunity are lacking. In an AEI/Los Angeles Times poll, 70 percent of Americans said they believe the conditions for the poor had either stayed the same or gotten worse over the past 10 or 15 years. A study by Pew Charitable Trusts found that 43 percent of Americans born in the bottom fifth of the income distribution remain there as adults.

Sadly, more than 20 percent of children lived in poverty in 2014.

Of course, the poverty rate is a flawed metric because it does not consider a significant amount of government-provided assistance that raises families’ incomes above the poverty line. On top of that, people in poverty are living with less material hardship than 50 years ago. The poor today are better off materially than in the past.

But as Robert Doar, the former commissioner of New York City’s Human Resources Administration, the city’s agency for managing 12 public assistance programs, notes in the introduction to a new volume of essays on reducing poverty in America, government assistance has helped people live with more stuff, but government has not created the outlets to get people working or earning on their own.

This is the cause of that swirling dissatisfaction even among those recipients of government benefits. More than half of people living in poverty surveyed in The AEI/Los Angeles Times poll said that the main purpose of welfare programs should be to help the poor get on their own two feet.

Able-bodied adults need to work because steady employment almost always leads a family out of poverty, provides opportunities for upward mobility, and is a source of dignity and purpose. Children are best off when they are raised by two committed parents, which is most likely to happen in marriage. And society must maintain a safety net that reduces material hardship, ensures that children can be raised in healthy environments, and rewards individuals who work.

The volume of essays offers ways to turn good ideas into legislative reform. The volume covers poverty assistance programs from housing and child support to food stamps and welfare. Doar acknowledges that none of the authors present all the answers, but he notes that the analyses and proposals can help move America toward finally living up to the goals of the War on Poverty, a war that needs to be won if everyone is going to do better.

Of course, not all of the problems facing low-income Americans will be solved by federal antipoverty programs. But political reality dictates that these major programs are not going to disappear anytime soon, meaning leaders who are serious about helping poor Americans should learn how they work and develop an agenda for improving them. Moreover, many of these assistance programs do reduce poverty and, with thoughtful reform, could be even more effective in helping struggling Americans move up. This volume intends to help policymakers understand how each program functions—its strengths, as well as its weaknesses.

Download the book in PDF form.

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A Better Measure of America’s Poverty Rate

December 2, 2016

Sen. Mike Lee is proposing legislation that, if instituted correctly, could more accurately reflect America’s poverty rate to better determine the impact of welfare assistance and whether it is doing the job it is supposed to do.

Lee’s proposal is called the Poverty Measurement Improvement Act. The point of it is just as the title explains: to more accurately measure household incomes to see if poverty is as bad as the data indicate.

As Lee, R-Utah, explains:

This bill would improve the data available to lawmakers by authorizing a new Census Bureau survey that would more accurately calculate income by including wages and federal means-tested benefits. This information would then be linked with individual records from the IRS and other federal agencies that administer means-tested benefit programs.

The Census Bureau calculates the official poverty rate, but the results are based on families’ pre-tax, cash income, and ignores assistance like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP) and tax credits for working families.  The result is that the Census counts the people who are being helped by these programs as still living in poverty when in fact they may be living in much better conditions.

Poverty has been a persistent and seemingly intractable problem for decades. President Lyndon Johnson launched the Great Society in 1964 with the goal of eradicating poverty. But in 1966, the poverty rate was 14.7 percent while in 2012, it was 15 percent. The lowest the poverty rate ever reached was during the Nixon administration, when it dove to 11.1 percent (1973).

In 2012, the amount spent on poverty programs was 20 times higher than when the anti-poverty programs were instituted in 1964, and during that time assistance has increased from $160 to more than $2,000 per person in real dollars.

As an aside, the number of children being raised by a single mother rose from 8 percent in 1964 to 23.7 percent in 2013 while the number of working-age men (25-54) participating in the labor force has dropped by shocking amounts.

As demographer Nick Eberstadt tells it, 7 million working-age men are currently not seeking work:

In fact, if work rates for men were only as high today as in 1965—a time when we enjoyed true “full employment”—nearly 10 million more men would have paying jobs today. Think of the difference that would make to our country.

In other words, what used to be a “nuclear household” has seemingly been nuked.  Lee noted the impact of government programs that discourage one of the most important relationships individuals have and society benefits from: families.

The core problem with our welfare system today isn’t just its bloated annual budget, but its tendency to undermine the two most dependable routes out of poverty: marriage and work.

But we can’t improve these programs until we have better data on how they are affecting working families. The Poverty Measurement Improvement Act will do just that.

Poverty researchers on both sides of the political aisle agree that government assistance helps pull people out of poverty. Accurately measuring the role of public assistance will help determine where opportunities lie to increase workforce participation, encourage stronger households, and inform the role of programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit that are used to get people into the workforce. That’s a goal to encourage, and measuring the data correctly seems like an easy starting point.

Filed Under: Happiness, Life Tagged With: , , , , ,

Does Character Matter in Election 2016?

October 23, 2016 by Arthur C. Brooks

Does character matter when it comes to the 2016 presidential election?  Many campaign operatives and pundits say that elections are no longer about persuasion to any meaningful extent. Instead, they argue, campaigns are purely a turnout game and campaigns should focus exclusively on turning out their base.

But recent research shows this argument might not be valid. Political scientist Danny Hayes, a friend dating back to my days in academia, studies political traits — the qualities and characteristics people assume you possess because you are a conservative or a liberal.

He finds that if you are a liberal, people overwhelmingly assume you are empathetic and compassionate. For conservatives, the traits people assume are good morals and strong leadership.

Hayes’ research also suggests a moral double standard among the public. In other words, people are especially hard on politicians who betray the traits they’ve already ascribed to them. For instance, people would probably be more outraged if a liberal politician were a jerk to his interns than if a conservative politician did the same thing. And they get madder at conservatives than liberals when they are sexually immoral.

At the same time, voters seem to go out of their way to reward candidates who attempt trait-trespassing. Hayes found that candidates win roughly 60 percent of the vote when they take on traits not usually associated with their party. So for Democrats, the prototypical untapped trait is strength; for Republicans, it’s empathy — a reverse of the standard assumptions about the parties.

Knowing about this huge windfall in voter rewards would have been good for both candidates if they could project authentic character traits not typically ascribed to them. Instead, they missed a golden opportunity. Trump could have started to close the gap by embracing empathy and  compassion for the vulnerable. Clinton could have tried to shut the door on Trump by focusing on projecting strength, upright moral leadership, and a modicum of traditional values.

If you’re interested in a more detailed account of this research – including the specifics about what candidates stand to gain from being unconventional, take a look at this column on breaking out of the party box.

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Major Life Decisions: How Much Influence Does a Coin Toss Have?

September 26, 2016 by Arthur C. Brooks

Steven Levitt, a well-known economist of “Freakonomics” fame, has a new paper on a topic that we can all relate to: How do people make big, pivotal life decisions? And how can we evaluate whether we make good ones?

When I stop and think about it, the relative scarcity of a robust literature on this topic is surprising. What could be a more pressing or pertinent subject? But — among other difficulties — it is incredibly difficult to create a controlled environment with the kind of randomization that you need for rock-solid results.

Let me explain. To try and measure whether some small behavior makes people happier, researchers could simply randomly assign participants into “Group 1” and “Group 2” and impose different conditions on each. This ensures that people with preexisting differences aren’t self-selecting into different groups and polluting the direct causal link that you’re trying to measure.

This approach — create a controlled environment, randomly divide your participants into “treatment” and “control” groups, and then measure how they fare — works great for studying things like new medications. But not so much for studying major life decisions: whether to get married, what kind of person to marry, and whether to move across the country for a new job. It turns out people aren’t willing to surrender those decisions to a social scientist in the name of advancing science. Weird, I know.

That’s where this study gets creative. Levitt did the best he could to “randomize” decisions by looking at the impact of a coin toss on people’s likelihood of making certain decisions. First, he recruited more than 10,000 volunteers. Each one took a survey that asked about a big decision they were facing. Then came the interesting part: Levitt’s website presented participants with a coin flip that “told” them which choice to make. After the experiment, Levitt followed up with the recruits to see what they decided and how happy they were.

Obviously, participants weren’t bound to follow through and obey the virtual coin. So the first question the study examined was: How much does a virtual coin flip impact which choice people end up making? And as funny as it seems, it turned out that the coin flip influenced participants’ decision making a lot. Taking account of a range of other factors, Levitt finds participants who got heads were about 25 percent more likely to make the change they were considering. And these weren’t insignificant decisions. Some of the changes the participants were mulling included quitting their job or separating from their spouse.

Equally interesting, the people who went ahead and made the change they were considering usually wound up happier as a result. Among the participants who were considering “important” decisions, those who decided to make a change later reported being a full point happier (on a 1–10 scale) than those who stuck with the status quo. Maybe there’s a lesson here: If you find a potential decision sufficiently compelling that you can’t get it off your mind, you should probably just pull the trigger. (Check out my Valentine’s Day column from 2015, “Taking Risks in Love,” for one practical application of this principle.)

The potential lesson here is intriguing. The results suggest that people leave a chunk of potential happiness untapped simply by tethering themselves to the status quo. Even a randomized virtual signal from a stranger in academia was enough to give people a little momentum and push them toward improving their lives.

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Florida: Study Shows Impact of Marriage on Children’s Graduation Rates

September 23, 2016

Brad Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies does some great research, and part of its greatness is that his results force policy makers to confront wisdom that is sometimes hard to hear, but ultimately super helpful in developing action plans.

The latest is a study he did on Florida schools, called Strong Families, Successful Schools, which builds on conclusions reached in a recent MIT study of 1 million Florida school children and found that poor boys are much more negatively impacted than poor girls, even within the same family, when families break up, and more so, that high-school graduation rates see a smaller gender gap when parents are married.

Wilcox and psychologist Nicholas Zill took the MIT study a step further and looked at the relationship between these variables on a macro-level — the county rates of high school graduation versus the number of married households with children in the county, across a five-year period.

Here’s what the researchers started out questioning:

We hypothesize that counties with more married families enjoy higher levels of parental engagement, better parental discipline, and more parental involvement in PTO groups, all factors that would likely redound to the social and educational benefit of children in these counties.”

This is what he found:

 

Specifically, Strong Families, Successful Schools finds that the share of married parent families in a county is one of the strongest predictors of high school graduation rates in the 67 counties across Florida, as well as recent growth in high school graduation rates in the Sunshine State.

The share of married families also is the strongest predictor of county school suspension rates in Florida in our models. Moreover, the share of families headed by married couples is a more powerful predictor of high school graduation and school suspension rates than are income, race, and ethnicity in Florida—factors that tend to get more attention in media and policy circles.

The report also finds that parental education is the best predictor of county high school graduation rates in Florida, according to our models (emphasis added). In sum, Florida counties that enjoy strong and stable families also tend to enjoy more successful and safer schools. Accordingly, policymakers, educators, and civic leaders should work to strengthen families—as well as schools—across the Sunshine State.

The study looks at several factors that play bear on high school graduation and suspension levels across the counties,  including marriage rates, adult education levels, income, race, and the size of the child population in the county.

The researchers acknowledge that the report does not look at the quality, character, and spending of county schools as they relate to graduation and suspension rates, and note that school quality obviously is a factor in performance. At the same time, however, the role of the family, specifically the relationship of parents, is a major variable in outcomes.

Click here to read the entire report.

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The Persistent Marriage Penalty and Its Impact on Family Formation

July 29, 2016

You thought this was resolved in the ’90s, didn’t you? It wasn’t.

“Almost one-third of Americans aged 18 to 60 report that they personally know someone who has not married for fear of losing means-tested benefits.”

That’s right, the marriage penalty still exists on families who receive government subsidies, and it is impacting more families as the safety net expands.

Now, the bias up the social ladder has traditionally been to assume that people who have kids without getting married are of questionable moral character because who would go have a baby without having a stable household, right? After all, studies show that children raised by their biological parents in married households have a likelier chance of success in school, a stable job, and upward mobility.

That notion of planning your marriage, then your family is outdated in a lot of communities, not least because when is it ever a good time to have a kid? So maybe the decision to not marry is not a question of moral repute, but in fact a question of public policy working against a loving family whose only commitment phobia is filling out the paperwork.

At least 43 percent of families with children 18 and under receive some kind of means-tested aid from the federal government, from Medicaid to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds. That number goes up to 47 percent for families with children five and under. And this is what they are likely to face if they marry.

… 82 percent of those in the second and third quintiles of family income ($24,000 to $79,000) face this kind of marriage penalty when it comes to Medicaid, cash welfare, or food stamps. By contrast, only 66 percent of their counterparts in the bottom quintile (less than $24,000) face such a penalty. …

Couples where each partner’s individual income is near the cut-off for means-tested benefits—are about two to four percentage points less likely to be married if they face a marriage penalty in Medicaid eligibility or food stamps. Most of these couples are in the second and third quintiles of family income for families with children two and under ($24,000 to $79,000).

Indeed, this recent report on the marriage penalty notes that couples’ combined income in that second and third quintile of earners ($24,000 to $79,000) could face penalties of lost benefits up to one-third of their income if they were to marry.

A valid question is why has the social safety net grown so large that families making nearly $80,000 are still receiving benefits? That may make sense if you’re talking about a family in Brooklyn or around the Beltway outside Washington, D.C., or  Honolulu, or San Francisco, for example, but that’s certainly not the situation in Indianapolis, Louisville, Omaha, Memphis, Tulsa, and so on.

The answer lies in the decision not to marry. If one unmarried person is reporting income to an agency, then the household earnings don’t get counted as $80,000, it only gets counted as the one family member’s income. A combined income would phase out benefits whereas a reported single income would qualify.

Certainly, no one wants to see anyone in need unable to receive the staples of shelter and food, but as the below infographic demonstrates, 59.7 percent of cities surveyed by Experian (click on it to enlarge) have a lower median income and a lower cost of living than the national average so many recipients can in fact afford to live without federal benefits.

Cost of living in America infogrpahic

The report does not challenge the expansion of the safety net to the lower-middle class, but it does raise the question of whether public policy discourages couples from marrying. And as the evidence shows, a significant minority of Americans say they have seen marriage ruled out because of the policies.

So how does government policy correct itself to not penalize lower-middle-class couples for being married when they start their family? The report makes four suggestions:

– In determining eligibility for Medicaid and food stamps, increase the income threshold for married couples with children under five to twice what it is for a single parent with children under five. Such a move would ensure that couples just starting a family do not feel pressured to forgo marriage just to access medical care and food for their families. The cost of this policy change would be limited, since it would only affect families with young children.

– Offer an annual, refundable tax credit to married couples with children under five that would compensate them for any loss in means-tested benefits associated with marrying, up to $1,000. This would send a clear signal that the government does not wish to devalue marriage and, for couples, it would help to offset any penalties associated with tying the knot.

– Work with states to run local experiments designed to eliminate the marriage penalty associated with means-tested policies. States could receive waivers to test a range of strategies to eliminate penalties in certain communities, and to communicate to the public that the penalties are no longer in force there. Successful experiments could then be scaled up to the national level in future efforts to reform means-tested policies.

– Encourage states and caseworkers working with lower-income families to treat two-parent families in much the same way as they do single-parent families. For instance, states could ease the distinctive work requirements that many have in place for two-parent families receiving cash welfare. Reforms such as this one would put two-parent and single-parent families on a more equal footing when it comes to public assistance. More generally, policymakers and caseworkers should try to eliminate policies and practices that effectively discriminate in favor of single-parent families.

Read the report on the marriage penalty’s impact on lower-middle income families.

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