Today's Blog: Time for the Guv to morph into Chris Christie My husband and I and a couple hundred friends watched in Green Bay as ...(more) Search Archives

Blogs

Time for the Guv to morph into Chris Christie (6/28/2011)

Time for Gov. Walker to talk more about the cake (3/4/2011)

Today, reality hits home (3/1/2011)

FoxPolitics News going on hiatus (1/28/2011)

Brown County Executive candidate forum Feb. 8 (1/28/2011)

Education done right (1/27/2011)

To Obama, the ‘We’ is Government (1/27/2011)

(more)

Petri to crazies: Two bad parents better than one good one
The normally milquetoast Representative from the 6th, Tom Petri, apparently took some hits out of the Kool-Aid bowl at the Future Wisconsin conference this weekend. I'm particularly intrigued by the following, courtesy of WisPolitics: 

Petri and (Glenn) Grothman said there are counterproductive incentives in place with the current welfare system, including a failure to encourage women to get married.

A woman who gets married or takes a better paying job faces the loss of food stamps, housing assistance and tax credits.

Petri explained that if a woman marries a man with a decent income under the current system, she would no longer be eligible for hundreds of dollars in welfare money a month.

“We know that even a troubled marriage with two parents is better for children,” Petri said.

Yes, I'd much rather have kids in a home where they can learn skills like verbal confrontation and domestic violence.

There are single parents who do a terrible job raising their kids. Similarly, there are two-parent families that shock their kids with dog collars, shoot them with pellet guns, and perform cosmetic dentistry with hammers.

I get that perhaps Petri was pandering to his audience a little, but that doesn't excuse the absolutely stupidity of his argument. What matters most is that a child have a functional and loving environment in which to exist, whether that environment is provided by a mom and dad, or one or the other, or two moms or two dads, or even extended family.

Petri and Senator Grothman are right. Grothman has done the math for Wisconsin, and his work demonstrates that a single mother who, for example, has two children, earns $15,000 per year and then marries the father of her children (making $30,000 per year in this example), will lose tax-free government benefits after she marries, totaling over $37,000 per year.

It’s no wonder 41% of births in the U.S. last year were to unwed mothers!

Data clearly show our government incentivizes single-mother households which, on average, are the poorest nurturing environments for children; these government policies continue to create a cycle of welfare/state dependence. 

In his talk, of course Rep. Petri was not talking about “troubled marriages” involving domestic violence, child abuse, substance abuse, etc. Common sense alone tells us those households are not good for children.

What Petri was speaking of is actually a documented, social science fact: Even unhappy marriages, where the parents stay together, are better for children on every measure than divorced or single-parent households.

The Heritage Foundation has an excellent collection of charts graphing how the two-parent family truly is the gold-standard for the health, happiness and future lives of children. Click here for the HTML version and here for the PDF.

Post a Reply

Print this Article

Email Article to a Friend