Cashing in

Jenny Tyree

Dating couples that want to prosper should spend their rebate check on a pair of wedding rings.

The check is in the mail — and this time it’s true. The U.S. government began releasing rebate funds to most 2007 taxpayers in May, with the final checks to be mailed by early July. The purpose of the rebate is to stimulate the American economy, and while the checks will put fuel in many a thirsty gas tank, they are not a long-term economic strategy for the families cashing them, nor the government signing them.

At best, the rebate checks represent a short-term response to a long-term problem. But if government and community leaders want to adopt an economic strategy that produces unending benefits for the citizenry and the nation, they could do no better than to invest in marriage.

Studies repeatedly conclude that married couples enjoy greater physical and emotional health, as well as longer life and better health in old age, than their single counterparts. But a substantial and well-documented benefit to marriage is the economic success married couples enjoy over similarly-educated singles.

The National Marriage Project of Rutgers University reports that married men earn from 10 to 40 percent more than single men who have similar education and job experience. It is not simply the marital status of the man, but the productive behavior as a result of marriage that makes the difference. What’s more, married couples save and invest in anticipation of their shared future, and contribute their best individual skills toward household management.

The advantages of marriage carry through to a couple’s sunset years. Included in the Rutgers report is a reference to a 1992 study of retirement data that concluded that “individuals who are not continuously married have significantly lower wealth than those who remain married throughout their lives.”

The Rutgers study reports that the divorce rate for college-educated women is declining. If the trend continues, the children of these couples have a bright economic future, indeed. Marriage benefits children across virtually all racial and ethnic groups, according to scholars from Princeton University and The Brookings Institution.

Unique contribution
Beyond the benefits to individuals and their families, marriage makes a unique economic contribution to society. Cities that invest in families also thrive economically, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal. The author, Joel Kotkin, an internationally recognized authority on economic and social trends, wrote that married people with children are successful and motivated — key ingredients for economic success, and that the income levels for this group rises considerably faster than the national average. The secret to retaining these workers, he says, is providing affordable housing, family-friendly communities, short commutes and  ample economic opportunities.

Cities that appeal to families — such as Houston, Dallas, Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham — are gaining in population and in economic growth. In comparison, cities like Cincinnati, Baltimore, Detroit and Memphis, which have staked their financial future on the young, single professional, eventually lose when a married couple leaves town with a toddler in tow.

Kotkin also reported that the largest cities in the United States, such as Chicago, Boston, New York and San Francisco, which have long appealed to young singles, have experienced below-average job and population growth since 2000. The loss of young families from New York City is due to the exponential rise in the cost of living, according to Tom Acitelli writing for The New York Observer.

But the loss of families in these cities will eventually affect more than the city’s population, he wrote, for a city depends on young families to “animate a city’s culture and economy,” and “ensure its long-term vitality … soul and brainpower.” Kotkin concluded his article along a similar vein by noting that what has been true for  illennia, is still true: “families provide the most reliable foundation for successful economies.”

The cost of fragmentation
If marriage prospers a nation, divorce and unwed child-bearing is costly — $112 billion dollars per year — according to a study released April 15. “

This study documents for the first time that divorce and unwed childbearing — besides being bad for children — are also costing taxpayers a ton of money,” according to David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, one of the organizations associated with the study. A 1 percent reduction in rates of family fragmentation would save taxpayers $1.1 billion.

The national, state and local costs to taxpayers include expenditures for anti-poverty, criminal justice and education programs, as well as the lower levels of taxes paid by individuals whose productivity has been negatively affected by family fragmentation, according to Ben Scafidi, Ph.D., principal investigator for the study and an economics professor at Georgia College and State University.

The study, "The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing: First-Ever Estimates for the Nation and All 50 States," calls for strengthening marriage.

“Both economic and human costs make family fragmentation a legitimate public concern,” said Randy Hicks, president of the Georgia Family Council, another sponsoring organization. “We fight problems like racism, poverty and domestic violence  because we understand that the stakes are high. And while we’ll never eliminate divorce and unwed childbearing entirely, we can certainly be doing more to help marriages and families succeed.”

Cohabitation hurts
Cohabitation derails young singles from the path to marriage, depriving them of the economic benefits that married couples enjoy, and putting children in the household at risk — especially if the man in the house isn’t the child’s biological father.

A study of poverty rates in 1996 found that just 6 percent of children living in married households lived in poverty, against 31 percent for children in cohabiting households and 45 percent for children living with their single mothers. Poor and racial minorities — those least able to bear the burden when marriage breaks down — tend to suffer the most. The number of African- American women marrying fell by 20 percentage points between 1960 and 2006, while the unwed childbearing rate among blacks grew from less than 25 percent to more than 70 percent. A 2001 study from the Brookings Institute found that if family structure had remained the same between 1960 and 1998, the black child poverty rate in 1998 would have been 28.4 percent rather than 45.6 percent, and the white child poverty rate would have been 11.4 percent rather than 15.4 percent.

The total benefit of marriage for individuals — women, men and children — is so strong that marriage scholars David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, authors of the Rutgers University publication, recommend that the benefits of marriage become a “regular part of educational programs and public discourse.”

Americans will spend their tax rebate checks all kinds of ways this summer, but the best investment they could make is to get married rather than shack up. And for the good of their country, married folks might put off buying that new flatscreen TV and spend their checks on a romantic night out.

Jenny Tyree is an associate analyst for marriage for Focus on the Family Action.

This article originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Citizen magazine.

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