Ruth Institute Blog

by Robert W.  Patterson

This article was first published at WashingtonExaminer.com on April 27, 2011.

Third of a three-part series

It may be unfair to indict the political class for lack of nerve in addressing family breakdown.

Even as the retreat from family life became pronounced among the low-income population and has devastated the poor, Congress deep-sixed Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996 in hope of reversing the rise in out-of-wedlock births among African Americans that had raised the Irish ire of Daniel Patrick Moynihan 30 years before.

Yet the architects of welfare reform were whistling past the graveyard if they thought that changes to one program could undo the effects of the massive War on Poverty, which continued to displace fathers and marriage from families at the lower-end of the income scale.

The means-tested welfare system remains as bloated as it was in 1996, with direct costs to taxpayers of nearly $1 trillion this year, according to the Heritage Foundation. Moreover, family disintegration has spread to the middle class, with four of every 10 children born out of wedlock today and cohabitation at epidemic levels.

A more strategic reform would have nixed President Nixon’s version of the Great Society, which concentrated on dispensing heavy doses of free contraception to unmarried women via Title X of the Public Health Services Act and especially through Medicaid.

Like other 1960s welfare schemes, the War on Fertility’s approach to reducing “unintended” pregnancies and facilitating “family planning” backfired. Even as defended today under the pretense of promoting “women’s health,” the federal sanctioning and subsidizing of sex sans commitment conceived more social disorder — as skyrocketing births out of wedlock have contributed mightily to the perpetuation of poverty.

Yet the paramount need is to change the incentives affecting family formation across all sectors of society, not just among the poor. Take the distorted tax code, which for decades has favored business profits at the expense of the home economy.