Should Uncle Sam subsidize the nuclear family?

Published 1:30 am Saturday, November 24, 2018

Nora Ephron wrote many great lines for Hollywood movies and there is one in “You’ve Got Mail.” Meg Ryan’s character is a bookstore owner and at the cash register where Tom Hanks’ character has just explained to her that the 4-year-old girl with him is not his daughter but his aunt — his grandfather’s daughter — and that the little boy with him is his father’s son and therefore his brother. He wraps it up with, “We are … an American family.”

Lines like that are classics because they tell the truth in a way that allows us to laugh at ourselves. American families today sometimes require diagrams to understand the internal relationships. The “nuclear family” of father, mother and their children once accounted for 87 percent of American households. Today, the same group constitutes less than half.

The Census Bureau within the U.S. Department of Commerce keeps track of this kind of change in its annual “America’s Families and Living Arrangements” report. It released its latest findings with the headline, “For Young Adults, Cohabitation is Up, Marriage is Down.”

Even in the whoopee 1960s, 81.5 percent of young adults aged 25-34 lived with their spouses. By the most recent Current Population Survey, though, that proportion had been cut to 40.3 percent. And for the 18-24 group, living together has become more common than marriage.

The trend lines are pretty clear. The nuclear family, for whatever reasons, is no longer the unchallenged social structure affecting our society. And young people living together instead of getting married no longer carries the stigma it once did.

The “household” as a spending unit is a key element of our concept and understanding of how our economy works. Marriage, for example, brings with it a merger of the couple’s finances. Cohabitation leaves finances as an open question that is settled by the two parties. From an economic standpoint that is likely to produce different household spending patterns from nuclear family households.

Economic forces probably do play a causal role in the cohabitation decision. The sharp rise in housing costs, for example, make cohabitation more attractive than living alone, especially for young people. The uncertainties of jobs, careers, and locations also make cohabitation seem attractive in comparison to the lifetime commitments of marriage.

A statistical trend by itself is neither good nor bad. But it can raise our awareness enough to ask the question of whether the rise of cohabitation and decline of marriage is a good thing for American values, our economy and our society, And, if it isn’t good, what should we do about it?

The history of government meddling in socio-economic issues is neither attractive nor encouraging. In the mid-1960s, for example, welfare programs were expanded. Unfortunately, though, the efforts to ensure that the recipients were genuinely in need came to mean that the presence of a father, or any man, in a household would result in denial of benefits. Whether this established the fatherless family as the dominant household structure in poverty-stricken areas or just accelerated an existing tendency is still a matter of debate, but it surely didn’t help matters. We are still paying the cost of subsidizing the destruction of low-income family structures — in dollars and in human tragedy.

Children, especially males, raised in fatherless families are more likely, statistically, to pursue criminal activity. Female children raised in fatherless families tend to raise their own children without a father present. Besides the social problems that these behavior patterns cause, they cost the taxpayers a lot of money.

Should we ask our government to reverse this sad situation by subsidizing nuclear families? Would that actually work? It might, if we abandon the idea of another “program” and confined the policy to the tax code. There would be no coercion involved, just an opportunity to cut our costs by repairing the damage done.

James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant.