"Stable families should be the central goal of American welfare policy. Building and preserving families are not always possible -- I recognize that -- but they should always be our goal." G.W. Bush.
I really try to not to respond to G.W. Bush's actions and proposals. When I hear him speak or hear of his proposals, I try to remind myself that the man is intellectually impaired, perhaps due to faulty genetic stock, and that he simply can't help the fact that he is a moron. But compassion isn't working anymore, and my emotional circuits are about to blow a fuse. His welfare reform proposal almost makes me apoplectic. Going against facts provided by decades of social science research as well as logic, G.W.'s welfare reform plan touts marriage for unwed mothers and stiffens work requirements for recipients, but does not offer any assistance to help welfare recipients get and keep work.
Get this: G.W. wants the federal government to spend $300 million a year on marriage counseling, education, and technical assistance to help unmarried mothers get married. According to a Bush administration source for the New York Daily News, the proposal could even pay single mothers to get married. What is G.W. thinking? Single moms don't get married because they don't have time to date? Single moms don't get married because they would rather live below the poverty line on paltry welfare subsidies than marry the man of their dreams? Single moms don't get married because they don't know that it's a valid option? Perhaps single moms are single because they, like other single women, have not found "Mr. Right" (or "Mr. Right" turned out to be "Mr. Wrong," or "Mr. Right" turned out to be "Ms. Right," and the marriage-happy Bush administration doesn't sanction "those" sorts of marriages).
The flaws in this plan are obvious. First and foremost, data simply don't support G.W.'s "brave new world." Sociological research indicates that poverty, rather than the lack of a male in the household, accounts for the fact that children growing up in single-parent homes are more likely to end up in poverty, drop out of school, use illicit drugs and/or commit violent crimes. Moreover, a recently published report by Johns Hopkins University concludes that "a number of studies now suggest that the well-being of children in mother-stepfather families is no greater on average than in single-parent families."
G.W.'s proposal doesn't stack up logically, either. Who are these impoverished single mothers going to marry? The proposal seems to assume that we are living in the 1950's when jobs were plentiful and men's salaries could support a family. But in case G.W. hasn't noticed (perhaps his blood lust to kill Sadam Hussain... I mean Osama bin Laden... has clouded his vision on the domestic front), the United States has been in a recession since he took office. People (including many eligible bachelors) have been laid off in droves. The manufacturing sector has been hit particularly hard. Many people who have been "downsized" have had a difficult time finding work, and often end up in lower-paying jobs than the ones that they lost when they do find work. The chances are good that mothers still would need to work to pay the bills, and yet women in service and other low-income jobs barely make enough to pay for childcare with their wages. Ironically, though he speaks at great length about how he wants to help welfare moms, G.W. does not support a Democrat proposal to add one billion dollars to increase the availability of child-care to welfare moms, even though child-care is a prerequisite to landing and keeping a job for many mothers, single or married.
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