Jeb pushes marriage as 'effective anti-poverty program' for uprising in Baltimore and other cities [View all]

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Propane Jane ‏@docrocktex26 3h3 hours ago
Jeb Bush Proposes More Marriage To Fix Baltimore http://thkpr.gs/3655538 via @thinkprogress ::eye roll::


Jeb Bush, the former Republican governor of Florida who is expected to run for president, has weighed in on the upheaval in Baltimore and the economic condition of American cities generally. “We have spent trillions of dollars in the War on Poverty, and poverty not only persists, it is as intractable as ever,” he writes. “This represents a broken promise. And it feeds the anger of Baltimore.”

Bush is right that poverty hasn’t been eradicated and that it is particularly pronounced in Baltimore, a city where the rate is 24 percent. But the money spent on the programs that were part of the War on Poverty have significantly lowered the poverty rate, and it would be much worse without them. The poverty rate has dropped from 19 percent in 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson first declared his effort to fight poverty, to 14.5 percent today...

Still, more can clearly be done to help the country’s poor, both in cities like Baltimore and elsewhere. Bush’s prescription for reducing the rate further, however, begins with a call for poor people to get married. “If our government leaders want to attack poverty, they should first acknowledge that an effective anti-poverty program is a strong family, led by two parents,” he writes. “The evidence on this is incontrovertible.”

Certainly the children of married couples on the whole experience a lower poverty rate than those of cohabiting or single parents. But more than 9.3 million married people still live in poverty. Meanwhile, researchers have found that it’s not marriage per se that helps the children of married couples or even parenting necessarily, but rather differences in income, given that married couples tend to be better off. Lower incomes for unmarried parents explains about a third of the differences for their outcomes as compared to those of married parents. And single parents’ lower incomes are the result of deliberate policy choices.

Meanwhile, pushing low-income people to wed isn’t likely to do much. More than two-thirds of single mothers who marry end up divorced later on, which actually leaves them worse off financially than just staying single. Even if it did help, the government has a terrible track record of successfully prodding them into it. It has spent millions on marriage promotion programs that have had no impact on whether the couples get married or even stay together and no impact on the divorce rate, while one even made couples less likely to remain together.


read more: thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/05/06/3655538/jeb-bush-baltimore-poverty/

related:

How Are White Wingnuts Fixing The Blacks Of Baltimore This Week?
http://wonkette.com/584825/how-are-white-wingnuts-fixing-the-blacks-of-baltimore-this-week

Jeb Bush stands by his opposition to same-sex marriage
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/27/jeb-bush-gay-marriage-_n_6771442.html