The Truth and Consequences of Welfare Reform , is a discussion of DeParle's book American Dream. the book looks at the lives of three single mothers who had to deal with changes from the 1996 welfare reform.
In the discussion, Ron Haskins says,
As Mickey and I seem to agree, the most immediate help (for "working, low-income parents") would come from marriage. A recent study at Brookings by my colleagues Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas showed that if the marriage rate today were the same as it was in 1970, the poverty rate would be nearly 30 percent lower. Thus, if you pick unmarried males and females at random from the population and match them on age, race, and education, and assume that they are married, the poverty rate would plummet without any government involvement. It is not ordained by nature that a third of American children and nearly 70 percent of black children be born outside of marriage, that marriage rates (which began to decline precipitously around the 1960s) for black Americans remain under 40 percent, or that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. One consequence of these huge problems with the nation's families is stubbornly high poverty rates. But the toll in human waste goes far beyond mere poverty rates. As shown unequivocally by volumes of research studies, the earnings, wealth, health, and happiness of the adults, and the school performance, chances of teen pregnancy, arrest rates, mental health problems, and even suicide rates of the children are higher because of the dismal status of the American family.
I wonder if discussions like this aren't subconsciously a part of the "values" voters we heard about this year.
The National Center For Policy Analysis has a brief called How Not To Be Poor. Their secrets? Stay in school. Get a job. Get married. And don't have children out of wedlock.
I'm not as sold as the NCPA on the advantages of legal marriage as I am on the advantages of effective marriage, two people living together in a long term committed relationship. But the other suggestions seem like strong ones.
Every one of these choices is driven by the values of the person involved. If many people are making poor choices, and ending up living in poverty, the best solution seems to be to help people get more effective values and not to make the consequences of poor choices less onerous.
And if more people make questionable choices now than they did four decades ago, it is rational for many voters to decide that "values" is an important part of their voting decisions.