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by David R. Usher | October 25th, 2006
The average middle class family cannot support two households (and two divorce attorneys) without falling out of the middle class.
In 1992, my first major report titled “Generation One” was provided to then-Missouri Governor Ashcroft for inclusion in the 1993 Report of the National Commission on America’s Urban Families: "Families First."i
“Generation One” provided a deep analysis of the costs of divorce, the structural drivers, and what we can do to painlessly reverse this trend by allowing marriage to replace the myriad of federal programs presently undermining it.
One principal thesis of my report was to demonstrate that divorce is perhaps the principal driver of the “disappearing middle class.” The average middle class family, which in 1991 required 1.4 median incomes to exist, cannot support two households (and two divorce attorneys) without falling out of the middle class.
Now, a new Harvard University study titled "The Middle Class on the Precipice"ii has finally proved my point (and perhaps even adopted my words):
Evidence mounts that post-divorce, both women and men are struggling to make ends meet as they try to support two households on the same combined income.
The study iterates other points I have made many times over the years. Divorce is making retirement impossible. Absent reforms, it will become perhaps the leading predictor of poverty in old age. Divorce also affects the affordability and availability of health care plans, both in the present and future sense. “Hillary Care” was essentially designed to resolve our divorce problem by turning the entire medical industry into yet another welfare state.
These are all problems that Republicans and Democrats have been unable to resolve within the existing beltway mindsets that pretend it is possible to put Humpty Dumpty together again by doing nothing except funding the same old “Great Society” programs that have been destroying families since the early 1960’s.
Voter angst is at an all-time high. A new Opinion Research poll shows that 74% of Americans believe that Congress is out of touch with average Americans. Many commentators say that the two-party system is broken. It is not the parties that are broken: it is that Democrats and Republicans refuse to deal with the issues, while Libertarians are taking them on.
Pollsters have not yet begun asking Americans about their feelings about how Congress has not handled important social reforms that are long overdue, such as child support reforms (to end perverse incentives causing states to encourage divorce), Violence Against Women Act reforms, and elimination of the Parents As Teachers program (which is turning our children into little prescription drug addicts).
Do voters really like the costs of divorce and single-parentedness that so many of them bear, or would they prefer programs that reward and encourage marital responsibility and help spouses work through the normal stages of marriage and aging? How many Americans have an alcoholic or drug-abusing spouse and can’t get them into treatment because Washington adamantly refuses to help them?
Pollsters and party political analysts cannot report what they do not ask. The items listed above are important questions of significant contemporary meaning.
Why is no-one asking them?
After pollsters and political analysts truly get a grip on the American reality, we must have a vigorous national debate on positive social reforms that many Americans want, so we can finally accomplish them.
When Washington does the right thing, it will free large sums of federal budgetary resources we desperately need for immigration control and the War on Terror.
Since everyone from Harvard to Peoria now knows this, there is no excuse for politicians and pollsters not knowing it and doing something about it.
Endnotes
i. Governor John Ashcroft and Honorable Annette Straus, Co-Chairs; National Commission on America’s Urban Families; “Families First” (GPO, January 1993 [ISBN 0-16-041600-0]
ii. The Middle Class On the Precipice: Rising Financial Risks for American Families; Elizabeth Warren, Harvard University [2006: http://www.harvard-magazine.com/on-line/010682.html]
The Republicans are doing a poor job of pointing out to the voters that the Democrats are doing everything they can to keep the so-called marriage penalty on working couples that Wilbur Mills put into the tax code in 1969. The author could also have mentioned whether the biggest cost increase middle income people have suffered since the 1950s has been the cost of government.
Comment by William Woodford | October 26, 2006
Another good essay Mr. Usher! The problem is that Americans are simply not told the costs of divorce and single parenthood. Instead we are baited into thinking that without "divorce on demand" that we are "oppressed." That the result of legalizing "quick fix" solutions to family problems has resulted in the legal system simply taking over families in a way unimagined by 17th century Puritans simply has not occurred to most on the political left (and to a less degree on the right).
For instance, it's unlikely a father paying child support in the state of Massachusetts (esp. one with educational loans–which aren't accounted for in assessing child support) will ever be able to afford to buy a house (not that most folks living in Boston can afford this anyway!), or rent an apartment large enough to house his child. In short, the real cost of divorce in a state such as Massachusetts (where children are involved) generally strips the father of his children and his economic solvency for most of his adult life. Naturally, his ability to remarry will be drastically effected by the fact that he will be unable to support other children! If the father somehow musters the money to fight, he will probably damage the mother (and vicarously his children) financially as well. "No fault divorce" makes this tragedy precisely that–no one's fault! Families can be destroyed and it's no one's fault!
Once upon a time the political left used to pay attention to what it called "class bias" in things such as the law. THe current philosophy of "No fault divorce" would have been opposed by the left because it was a "right" that only the wealthy could afford to exercise. Today a poor spouse can get a "no fault divorce" and destroy his/her spouse and children–and, of course, "it's all legal." That the spouse initiating a divorce might have precipitated the tragedy by outrageous behavior is no longer of interest to the courts. The rational legislators used to justify "no fault divorce" was that it was more costly to pursue who was at fault, than to simply get the divorce out of the courts as soon as possible. –heh-heh, the calculation was wholly false. The cost of "no fault divorce" is that the states now run the lives of most divorced couples with children. And the legal cost of this "simple procedure" is that money that should have gone into the family–now feeds the legal system that, having stripped the individual of responsiblity for the family, now is what really upholds it.
I have to say, current domestic law has created a boogie man so vastly more ferocious than
anything the Puritans could have conjured up that it's hard not to see it as part of the same
tradition. Today we succeed in branding both Hester Pryne and her lover with scarlet letters–
and their children, too!
Comment by Nathan Alexander | October 29, 2006