Saving marriages can save tax dollars, advocates argue

If you lived near a river and continually spotted drowning victims floating by, fishing out the bodies would not address the cause of the problem.

Yet that's what society does in dealing with the effects of divorce and unwed childbearing, pro-marriage advocates said Wednesday during a panel discussion in Seattle on the economic and social costs of splintered families.

"We're dealing with a downstream crisis" -- including helping parents and children in poverty -- when the attention should be preventing marriage and relationship problems upstream, said David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute of American Values.

The issue is not liberal versus conservative, Republican versus Democrat or high tax versus low tax, he said during a presentation, but about "economic challenges and philosophical implications."

Blankenhorn, a liberal Democrat from New York, joined conservative Republican Jeff Kemp, president of Redmond-based Families Northwest, in exploring possible ways to strengthen marriages and families.

A recent report sponsored by their respective organizations and two other groups found that "family fragmentation" -- divorce and unwed childbearing -- cost U.S. taxpayers at least $112 billion each year at the federal, state and local level. For Washington, the annual price tag is $711 million.

The figures were drawn from government sources and take into account the cost of welfare, health care and criminal justice for those who come from fragmented families, as well as lost tax revenue because of lower earning potential for many of those growing up in poverty.

Blankenhorn, whose 1995 book "Fatherless America" traced virtually every social ill associated with children to the absence of fathers, said the concerns could be raised on the basis of faith, which he does not emphasize, or human suffering, which he normally does.

He took a third approach -- considering the economics of family breakups -- in co-sponsoring "The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing," the recent report produced by Benjamin Scafidi, an economist at Georgia College & State University.

"Whatever is the proportion of children in homes with a mother and a father, the goal is to make it higher," Blankenhorn said.

In Washington, the percent of births where the mother is not married rose from 27.2 in 1997 to 31.7 in 2006. The rate of divorce per 1,000 residents was 4 percent in 2006, down from 5 percent in 1997.

Blankenhorn said the purpose of the report was not to argue for fewer tax-funded services for the poor but to "start the conversation" for a solution, including government-supported programs to bolster marriage.

Representatives of six local organizations or initiatives to strengthen families followed his remarks by describing their work, including Pamela Jordan, president of the Becoming Parents Program and an associate professor of nursing at the University of Washington.

Research shows how "a healthy marriage has a (positive) physiological and psychological effect on all family members," she said.

In examining why Latino-owned businesses fail, unhealthy family relationships are a factor in virtually all cases, said Mike Soleto, president of the Washington State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. To help owners, "we focus on business but get under the hood," he said.

Although anti-poverty programs usually focus on education or employment, not many look at relationships, Kemp said.

One that does is the Every Marriage Matters initiative in Oregon. More than 170 churches in Clackamas County, part of the Portland metropolitan area, have agreed to meet minimum standards before marrying couples, including providing premarital counseling and mentoring. In the first four years of the agreement, the county's divorce rate dropped 15 percent.

Ruth White, a Seattle University sociologist who did not attend Wednesday's discussion, said marriage provides legal benefits "but by itself does not make for better families and social outcomes."

"I'm an unwed mother with a Ph.D," she said. "It's not being unwed (that leads to poverty); it's who is being unwed. It's not divorce by itself that's ... making the kid bad or go to jail."

Blankenhorn said the report does not purport that all divorced or unwed parents would end up in poverty, but to show the economic effects that result because of those who do.