On October 6, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the District of Columbia held a hearing on a new initiative to establish Marriage Development Accounts (MDAs) for low-income District residents. The full committee included the proposal in its version of the FY2006 District of Columbia spending bill (S. 1446) in July (see The Source, 7/22/05). No Democratic Senators attended the hearing, and the minority staff did not offer any witnesses for the panel discussion.
In his opening remarks, Chair Sam Brownback (R-KS) said that 57 percent of all children in the District of Columbia are born to single parents while the national number is closer to 33 percent. Calling this trend a “growing crisis,” he noted that children who are born to married parents are more “financially stable and emotionally secure,” three times less likely to repeat a grade in school, half as likely to become sexually active as teenagers, and half as likely to experience domestic violence. Sen. Brownback explained that under his proposal, a married couple could use their MDA to purchase a home, pay for post-secondary or vocational education, or to start a small business.
Testifying before the subcommittee, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) said that the proposal held “considerable promise,” adding, “I have been concerned about the growth of female-headed families of every race and ethnic group since the early 1970s, when I noticed what seemed to me even then to be particularly intolerable figures showing one-third of African American children born to single mothers, most of them poor or near poor. My main concern since then has been with the frightening growth of never married mothers, which has become the norm with 70% of Black children born to such women who have never been married and have declining prospects for marriage. In Black America, the issue is in an extreme state not family dissolution or divorce, but the failure to form families at all through marriage, often with devastating consequences for Black children.”
Expressing her concern with certain aspects of the Brownback initiative, Del. Norton stated, “The counseling component that the proposal wisely provides is essential to its success, including life skills training, such as how to budget in order to be able to save, and marital and premarital counseling. I welcome participation of the clergy and faith-based organizations, but hope that the proposal does not envision paying ministers to fulfill the ministerial obligation of marriage counseling…Funding the inevitably religious content of marriage counseling by ministers is unwise and unnecessary, and would needlessly implicate First Amendment separation of powers issues and invite litigation.” She also noted that the proposal “pre-selects grantees, at odds with federal government and District competitive requirement practices, and moreover, as far as I can tell, does not allow for any direct participation or oversight by District government officials and experts who have the best and most extensive experience and knowledge about target populations.” Finally, Del. Norton requested that an evaluation of the program be included in any authorizing legislation.
Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia, offered a number of “root causes” for the decline of marriage in the United States. “The introduction of the Pill in the 1960s and readily available abortion in the early 1970s made it much easier for men and women to engage in nonmarital sex without worrying about pregnancy,” he stated. “Thus, these technologies and the larger sexual revolution they helped fuel destabilized norms around sex and childbearing and made premarital sex much more common than it was prior to their introduction; the ironic consequence was that the United States witnessed dramatic increases in nonmarital childbearing in the wake of the Pill and legal abortion.” Mr. Wilcox also noted that “feminism and women’s movement into the labor force between 1960 and 2000 also played important roles in fueling the retreat from marriage. Feminism made women expect more from marriage, and more likely to avoid marriage in the first place or seek a divorce if a marriage did not meet their expectations. Women’s entry into the labor force gave them newfound earning power and a measure of financial independence both of which made it easier for them to avoid marriage or leave a marriage.” He also explained that since the 1970s, it has become more difficult for less-educated men to find good-paying jobs, adding, “As a consequence, these men are less ‘marriageable’ that is, they are less attractive in financial terms as potential spouses to women. So another reason that marriage has declined is that men from minority and lower-income communities are seen as less attractive marriage partners than they were fifty years ago.” Finally, Mr. Wilcox said that welfare policy has discouraged marriage: “First, cash benefits to single mothers rose from 1955 to 1975, reducing the cost of a nonmarital pregnancy for women in this period. Second, most programs designed to serve the poor that have been added since the 1960s from food stamps to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) are means tested, which means that benefits are lowered or eliminated as household income increases. Consequently, these programs often penalize low-income couples who marry, especially when both spouses bring income into their relationship.”
With regard to the MDA proposal, Mr. Wilcox stated, “This bill is a modest but important step in the direction of restoring marital sanity to our nation’s welfare policies. Most federal and state welfare policies designed to help the poor end up effectively penalizing marriage, with devastating consequences for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens. This bill moves the federal government in a different direction by providing [a] financial reward to low-income couples who are married or seek to marry. It is voluntary and non-coercive; it is about carrots, not sticks.”
The subcommittee also heard testimony from Sandra Corley and Winston Graham, a District couple who has decided to get married after participating in a program offered by the East Capitol Center for Change. They have been together for twenty years and have four children. Ms. Corley said that their friends were surprised by their decision and called them “crazy” because there were few married couples in their neighborhood. Sen. Brownback asked her why married couples were so unusual in the District, and she explained that many women would prefer to remain single in order to receive federal assistance, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and food stamps. Ms. Corley and Mr. Graham were very supportive of the MDA proposal, and stated that they hoped to use the account to purchase a home in their neighborhood.
