This is the cause of poverty

[Jaw]

Single parent households. But how do you fix it, or even get agreement on that, in the current social environment? Preferably without bashing anything out there now, what steps can be taken to address what is obviously the biggest predictor of poverty?

[thethe]

Remove all federal income tax for any family unit 4 or more where the mother/father are in the same home.

[mqt]

Mathematically it should be obvious that single parent households are more likely to be in poverty. I’d disagree with you on the root cause, though. I believe there are a few primary drivers of our current situation:

1) While there is a constant push to have more children and maintain a family, we don’t do enough to support lower income families to make that financially viable. Having a child is insanely expensive from the start, which means that any working class family has to either plan for years to handle the financial burden or put themselves under a ton of stress to afford the birth itself. Then after the birth comes childcare, which is also too expensive. The days of one person being able to support a family on a basic full time job are over, but there doesn’t seem to be much motivation out there to address that reality.

2) The basic paths to middle class prosperity are no longer affordable. The answer 30 years ago was as simple as going to college and getting a decent job. By doing those two things, you could easily carve out a solid life. Now, college is too expensive, jobs don’t pay enough to afford the bills and that strain helps lead to poverty by itself and to single parent households as a consequence of the added strain on marriages.

3) Ineffective execution of programs like sex ed and access to birth control, along with generational poverty have led to a series of poor decisions by those already in poverty. For this reason, I don’t see how you can effectively incentivize keeping a family together like thethe suggests. I can see why that would be a proposal, as it would support these families in the way I’m supportive of, but many of the people that are most likely to find themselves in poverty aren’t making logical decisions in the first place.