Marriage, Poverty, and Public Policy
In December 2001, more than fifty state legislators asked Congress to divert funds from existing programs into marriage education and incentive policies, earmarking dollars to encourage welfare recipients to marry and giving bonus money to states that increase marriage rates. On February 26, 2002, President Bush called for spending up to $300 million a year to promote marriage among poor people.2

Such proposals reflect the widespread assumption that failure to marry, rather than unemployment, poor education, and lack of affordable child care, is the primary cause of child poverty. Voices from both sides of the political spectrum urge us to get more women to the altar. Journalist Jonathan Rauch argues that “marriage is displacing both income and race as the great class divide of the new century.”3 Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation claims that “the sole reason that welfare exists is the collapse of marriage.”4 In this briefing paper, we question both this explanation of poverty and the policy prescriptions that derive from it.
http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/briefing.html