I’m late to this as this weekend’s kerfluffle about marriage and poverty rates. Let me start with the appropriate level of snarking from Lawyers, Guns and Money:
Speaking of conservatives who want to pretend to talk about inequality while not actually talking about it, Edroso finds this gem from Kathleen Parker:
Obviously, marriage won’t cure all ills. A single mother could marry tomorrow and she still wouldn’t have a job. But in the War on Poverty, rebuilding a culture that encourages marriage should be part of the arsenal.
See, if you want to make it to the real big leagues, it’s better to let snarky critics refute your smarm than just doing it yourself. I’ll leave the rest to Roy:
There are strong arguments for actual long term gains from marriage in that two people and two close-tie support networks provide for a system of shock absorbers and support that one person can’t easily match, but a decent chunk of the “marriage” gain is a coding artifact of how poverty is federally defined. This coding error does lead to some people having an incentive to not get married. This is not unique to Obamacare, it is an artifact of any progam that relies on federal poverty guidelines and household size. The first person in a family unit has a federal poverty level of $11,490. Each additional member of a family unit adds $4,020 in 2013. This arrangement assumes Ozzie and Harriet nuclear families with signficant economies of scale. It does not account for co-habitating long term relationships .
When I first moved in with my long term girlfriend and future wife, we filed separate tax returns.That year, we were both under the federal poverty level as individuals because we were grad students. If we had married that year for love or health insurance we would have been significantly over the poverty level for a family unit of two. Yet, there would have been no additional resources available to us. We still would have been broke.
My friends Annie and Beth have been together for almost as long as my wife and I have been. They’re not married as our state is governed by bigots. Last year, Annie did not work too much as she was laid off at the start of the year, and then took time to take care of her mother. Beth worked all year and did well for herself. Beth has insurance through work, and her work offers domestic partner benefits for employees who live in bigot states (SSM states benefits only extend to married couples for Somewhat Evil Medium Size Corp), so Annie was covered as well. However, Annie went on the Exchange and since she had minimal income and is not married, she qualified for a very large subsidy and Silver cost-sharing assistance. If the two of them were in a federally recognized marriage, she would not have qualified for any subsidies for two reasons. First, one person in the marriage had access to affordable employer provided health insurance. Secondly, the combined income of the family would have been over 400% of federal poverty line. These corner cases do exist, and it is an artifact of how poverty is defined in America.
A marriage neutral poverty measure that somehow looked at household size and characteristics of the relationships between the people in the household so that two committed adults with significant ties between them (financial, longevity of relationship, cats etc) would be an improvement. Such a marriage neutral poverty measure would treat Annie and Beth the same as my wife and I and it would remove some perverse incentives. It would be an administrative bear to set-up as it would have to differentiate the roommate relationship I had with one of my best friends in college when I lived with her for two years. We split the bills and I argued ferociously against buying a bunny for anything other than dinner. This must be differentiated from a long term romantic relationship with my girlfriend, then fiancee and now my wife. The simplest take might be a formula where Adult Value is a constant so the poverty level would be Adult Value+Adult Value + X(kids value) instead of the current Single Adult value+X(related others) formula where the Adult Value is someplace around the current Single Adult value.
pluege
once you established an economy that required both parents in a relationship to work full-time in order to have decent standard of living, marriage no longer is relevant – when every able-bodied adult must work full-time to survive and provide for their kids, then it truly takes a village raise children. So conservatives should just look in the mirror when they wring their hands about marriage – they ruined its purpose when they trashed the economy in their blind servitude to the ubber rich.
Ash Can
I have a feeling this approach is far more practical, productive, and sensible — and far less morally scolding — than the self-proclaimed marriage proponents would like. After all, if it doesn’t shame the poor (because they wouldn’t be poor if they weren’t doing something wrong), then what good is it?
PS: Great title for a phantom post (referring to the link above and below to the next post, which leads nowhere).
ETA: And now that’s gone too. Oh well. I’m off to scrounge up some coffee.
Soonergrunt
Another thoughtful, informative post. Thanks, Richard.
This does have a lot to do with not just insurance, but a host of other benefits, as you’ve pointed out, and it presents a piece of the puzzle explaining why poor un-marrieds choose to stay that way.
It’s also another form of discrimination aimed at the poor.
maurinsky
I am engaged and living with my fiance. We are currently planning to get married next year, but that may change depending on the FAFSA. He makes more than double what I make, but he pays child support and has student loans and his money is very committed, but FAFSA would consider his income and expect him to subsidize my daughter’s education. I make little enough money that I qualify for Pell Grants, and I’m counting on them to help with my daughter’s education.
bemused
Parker is simply demonstrating what happens when conservatives explain how they understand cause and effect, get everything ass backwards.
rikyrah
Hoboken mayor reveals new documents
Anderson Cooper 360|Added on January 20, 2014Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer reveals to CNN new documents she says back up her case against the Christie administration.
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2014/01/21/ac-intv-dawn-zimmer-responds-new-docs.cnn.html
rikyrah
Fans Help Pay Jamaican Bobsled Team’s Way to Sochi Olympics
January 20, 2014
In less than two days, a crowdfunding site has helped raise more than $25,000 for the Jamaican bobsled team headed to the Sochi Olympics, reports ESPN.
Donations came pouring in to the website Crowdtilt after a collection page was set up following word the two-man team had qualified for the Olympics but needed $80,000 to get to the Games.
The last time Jamaica sent a bobsled team to the Olympics was in 2002. Chris Stokes, general secretary of the Jamaican Bobsled Federation, said the idea that the team wouldn’t go was never the reality.
The team, he said, pays for its way to Sochi while the local organization committee takes care of the athletes once in Russia. He did, however, say that the team still needs $80,000.
Stokes said the team, which trained in Evanston, Wyo., wasn’t quite running on the shoestring budget memorialized in the movie “Cool Runnings,” the film loosely based on the exploits of the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team, but it surely hasn’t been working with all the essentials either.
“We have not come close to covering our costs,” Stokes told ESPN.com on Monday. “We have many outstanding obligations, and we have to pay three more weeks of training. We’ve had very lonely days when we struggled to make ends meet by borrowing equipment. Our guys haven’t had the proper jackets.”
Funding issues hampered the Jamaicans’ hopes of competing just four years earlier in Vancouver.
http://www.eurweb.com/2014/01/fans-help-pay-jamaican-bobsled-teams-way-to-sochi-olympics/
rikyrah
January 18, 2014
Newark school boss Anderson cracks down on critics, suspends five principals in one day
At Newark’s Hawthorne Avenue School, the test scores are up, higher than state-imposed goals—and certainly better than those of the highly touted “Renew” schools favored by the administration. The hallways are quiet. Teachers and administrators get along. And this was all done despite central office’s stripping away of faculty resources and shameful neglect of the building. So, in the crazy, bullying logic of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration of city schools, it was time to suspend the school’s successful principal, H. Grady James. He was just too good to be allowed to stay.
Time to suspend him—and to try to smear his reputation by saying he was involved in some sort of “incident” now under “investigation.” The “incident” was a community meeting at the Hopewell Baptist Church last Wednesday where he spoke, praising the efforts of his students, teachers and parents.
James was one of five principals indefinitely suspended in one day by Cami Anderson, Christie’s agent in Newark. The others were Tony Motley, Bragaw Avenue School; Dorothy Handfield, Belmont-Runyon School; Deneen Washington, Maple Avenue School, and Lisa Brown, Ivy Hill School.
Four of the principals—James, Motley, Handfield, and Washington—had spoken at the community meeting two days earlier. They tried to answer questions from local residents worried about what would happen to their children as Anderson moves toward a wholesale transfer of public school assets to the KIPP Schools, a charter organization that operates TEAM Academy Charter Schools. Questions Anderson wasn’t answering. See and hear what they said here.
http://bobbraunsledger.com/newark-school-boss-anderson-cracks-down-on-critics-suspends-five-principals-in-one-day/
dmsilev
That’s really TMI.
(sorry)
rikyrah
Unemployment extension will need citizen action
By George Zornick
January 20 at 11:37 am
The economic fortunes of nearly 5 million Americans will be determined in the next two weeks, as Congress moves to consider an extension of long-term jobless benefits for perhaps the last viable time. At this point, it appears only one thing can save those benefits: loud voices from constituents that wavering members are unable to ignore. And they have to arise immediately.
Congress is home for one week and members will no doubt be pressing the flesh as the midterm elections approach. When senators return in two weeks, there is likely to be a vote on the Reed-Heller temporary extension of unemployment benefits, as Greg Sargent has reported.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/01/20/unemployment-extension-will-need-citizen-action/
rikyrah
Healthcare website ‘passed with flying colors’
01/20/14 12:38 PM
By Steve Benen
Congressional Republicans have invested considerable energy of late in raising security fears over healthcare.gov, so it’s a shame this news didn’t generate more attention late last week.
Nearly three months after its launch, HealthCare.gov underwent end-to-end security testing and passed with flying colors, the top cybersecurity official overseeing the website told Congress [Thursday].
Is that so.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/healthcare-site-passed-flying-colors
rikyrah
North Carolina Obamacare Enrollment One of Nation’s Highest
January 20, 2014 by Editor in Featured, Health Reform, Medicaid, State Health Policy with 1 Comment
North Carolina had one of the strongest enrollment numbers for the Affordable Care Act online insurance marketplace. How did that occur?
By Rose Hoban
Additional reporting by Andy Miller, Georgia Health News
North Carolina’s enrollment in the Affordable Care Act federal insurance exchange reached a level in December that was surprising given the state’s prior poor performance in signing people up.
According to federal statistics released last week, North Carolina had 107,778 people signed up by Dec. 28, up from a total of only 8,970 who had signed up by the end of November.
That’s after North Carolina’s exchange became the object of national ridicule when the state had only a handful of signups for all of October.
http://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2014/01/20/north-carolina-obamacare-enrollment-one-of-nations-highest/
rikyrah
Federal judge strikes down NC’s ultrasound abortion law, citing free speech
By Anne Blythe and Craig Jarvis
January 17, 2014
Doctors in North Carolina cannot be forced to show women ultrasound images and describe them in detail before performing an abortion, a federal judge ruled Friday. The decision was lauded by civil rights advocates and criticized by supporters of the law.
U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles ruled Friday that the provision of a 2011 North Carolina law requiring abortion providers to display ultrasound images so women can see them and then describe the dimensions of an embryo or fetus and other particulars is overly broad and a free-speech violation.
Eagles, who was nominated to the court by President Barack Obama, described the clause as a “one-size-fits-all provision” that is “an impermissible attempt to compel these providers to deliver the state’s message in favor of childbirth and against abortion.”
“The Supreme Court has never held that a state has the power to compel a health care provider to speak, in his or her own voice, the state’s ideological message in favor of carrying a pregnancy to term, and this Court declines to do so today,” Eagles wrote in her ruling.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/01/17/3542149/federal-judge-strikes-down-ncs.html#storylink=cpy
sparrow
Sooo, I don’t like this idea actually, if I’m understanding correctly (I may not be).
First of all, marriage provides some protections against being thrown out on the street, which you don’t have in a cohabitating relationship. I know of a case where a young woman had been living for a couple of years with an older man, very happily. Then he got sick and suffered some kind of mental breakdown akin to brain damage. He no longer recognized his girlfriend, and his family (who didn’t like her) kicked her out of their mutual home the next day.
Cohabitation can dissolve in an instant. So I don’t think you can make that akin to marriage.
Richard Mayhew
@dmsilev: fixed :)
SiubhanDuinne
@rikyrah:
That’s a distressing story. Also distressing is the tongue bath then-Mayor Cory Booker gave Cami Anderson a couple of years ago:
ETA link: http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2111975_2111976_2112115,00.html
OzarkHillbilly
@dmsilev: No you’re not. ;-)
Richard Mayhew
@sparrow: Agreed that marriage is far “stickier” than cohabitation with a whole host of entangled legal rights and obligations. But if there is a concern that Obamacare, or any other program that uses federal poverty guidelines as a qualification discourages marriage by creating pervese income incentives, then fixing the guidelines to be marriage agnostic is a viable way forward.
OzarkHillbilly
@rikyrah: I expect Darryl Issa’s calls for Congressional hearings into the coverup to begin next week.
Violet
Thanks, Richard, for a very informative post as usual. There are so many issues tied up with how the healthcare system is working and should work. It’s great to see things like this explained plainly.
rikyrah
Alex Haley: Alex Haley’s 1965 Playboy Interview With Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Haley: As one who grew up in the economically comfortable, socially insulated environment of a middle-income home in Atlanta, can you recall when it was that you yourself first became painfully and personally aware of racial prejudice?
King: Very clearly. When I was 14, I had traveled from Atlanta to Dublin, Georgia, with a dear teacher of mine, Mrs. Bradley; she’s dead now. I had participated there in an oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Elks. It turned out to be a memorable day, for I had succeeded in winning the contest. My subject, I recall, ironically enough, was “The Negro and the Constitution.” Anyway, that night, Mrs. Bradley and I were on a bus returning to Atlanta, and at a small town along the way, some white passengers boarded the bus, and the white driver ordered us to get up and give the whites our seats. We didn’t move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing us, calling us “black sons of bitches.” I intended to stay right in that seat, but Mrs. Bradley finally urged me up, saying we had to obey the law. And so we stood up in the aisle for the 90 miles to Atlanta. That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/19/alex-haley-s-1965-playboy-interview-with-rev-martin-luther-king-jr.html
dmsilev
@OzarkHillbilly: Well no, not really.
rikyrah
LOLGOP @LOLGOP
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The race card? Isn’t that what Republicans are demanding to stop people from voting? http://www.nationalmemo.com/sarah-palin-plays-the-race-card-on-martin-luther-king-day/ …
9:48 PM – 20 Jan 2014
rikyrah
Keith Boykin @keithboykin
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So Olympian Carl Lewis, Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer, Ft. Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich & Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop are all lying about Christie?
4:24 PM – 20 Jan 2014
RaflW
I’m not a social scientist but I do also wonder if the whole marriage-fixes-poverty thing is ass-backwards. OK, the statistics indicate that families with two marrieds do better.
But is that the bias that people who are doing better in aggregate feel more secure and more able to commit, and that people in economic distress are not in as solid a place to take the plunge?
In other words are the stats measuring the influence of marriage on poverty, or the influence of poverty on marriage?
Richard Mayhew
@RaflW: I’m betting a little bit of A, and a whole lot of B.
negative 1
@Richard Mayhew: Plus I’m too lazy to google but isn’t the trend favoring B? As in the demographic composition of married people has been trending older and more wealthy for several years?
Mnemosyne
I remember somebody posted yesterday that her friend’s daughter was a college student making only $8K a year but was told she made too much money for Medicaid. I’m wondering if the actual problem is that the student is going to college in one of the lovely states that refuses Medicaid to able-bodied adults:
Richard Mayhew
@Mnemosyne: Yep, if she is in a non-expansion state and does not have a disability and makes more than a pittance but less than 100% Federal Poverty level, she is SOL as she won’t qualify for legacy Medicaid and the Exchanges were set up with the assumption that every state would take Expanded Medicaid (fuck you very much Chief Justice Roberts et al)
BrianM
If I remember correctly a recent(ish) conversation with a Swede, in Sweden you’re taxed on your income. Single, married, cohabiting, doesn’t matter. Each person pays their own taxes. (Of course, they don’t have the “only one of us has health insurance” issue.)
I’m vaguer on what happens with children, but each parent is financially responsible for them. Again, where a parent lives, with whom, and under what heading doesn’t matter.
An amusing thing: according to him, it’s customary in his crowd (white-collar, under 40) to get married when your children start nagging you about it. Until then, you don’t bother.
jayackroyd
The simplest solution is a simple grant, a quarterly check equal to the poverty level for everyone over 18.
While we’re at it, deposited to an account at the Fed, which everyone also has.
CnNaevius
So it’s undoubtedly true that many people, at least, would be wealthier if they got or stayed married. So why, pray tell, do more people not get or stay married?
A lot of people seem to be assuming that the answer is, “Poor people are just too dumb to understand the economic benefits of marriage.” Like, people have children on their own, or get divorced, thinking, “hey, this won’t affect my lifestyle at all!”
But in my experience, people are actually aware of the possibility of becoming wealthier by getting or staying married, but *do not think it’s worth it*. Being in a crappy marriage is really awful! In some cases, even more awful than poverty! So people sensibly choose to get by with less, rather than deal with, say, an abusive husband.
Of course, there are people who make the opposite decision: “I hate my spouse, but I can just about endure this awful relationship, and I don’t think I could make it without my spouse’s financial support, so I’ll just put up with the crap that comes with it.” The magical benefits of marriage, in action!
Plans to reduce poverty by encouraging marriage may, then, “work”; that is, you could increase the amount of money people are payed for making and enduring crappy marriages, or you could make poverty more awful, so that more people will put up with personal misery to avoid it. But should this be a goal? Conservative arguments along these lines often describe such programs as encouraging “virtue”, which makes sense if you think “virtue” is a synonym for “money.” And of course, poverty is more easily measurable than marital unhappiness, so a shift like this might well make it *seem* like things have improved. But maybe we should recognize that poor people have internal lives that go beyond the desire not to be poor, and take seriously the trade-offs they make, even if those trade-offs make for aesthetically unpleasant statistics.
tl;dr: maybe it would be preferable to get people out of poverty *without* attaching them to long-term romantic partners against their will.
Crouchback
The sociologist James Flynn had an interesting observation (which can be found in his book Where have all the liberals gone?) about marriage and families. If you look at the ratio of marriageable men to women in a population, you can do a pretty good job of predicting the out of wedlock birth rate. Basically, the populations with high percentages of single mothers are the same as those with a shortage of marriageable men. Amazingly, women are well aware that raising children is a lot of work and generally will choose to make sure a father is involved if possible. If not some women will have kids anyway but becoming a single mother is rarely the preferred option. White, college educated women have the best marriage prospects in the United States. Not coincidentally they have the lowest rate of out of wedlock births. In other words Parker and the rest of the conservatives have things backward. The problem is the supply of husbands not the demand. End the war on drugs, jack up the minimum wage and otherwise stop shooting down, laying off or locking up potential husbands for poor and working class women and you’ll see a lot more kids growing up in intact families.