Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 Charles Murray Crown Forum, 2012; 407 pages, $27 Members of the notorious Baby Boom generation, including many like this reviewer who were born in the 1950s and reached adolescence in the 1960s, know from personal experience that the America they are passing on to their twenty-something children […]
Read MoreHow Republicans and Democrats Send Mixed Messages about Marriage and Family Twenty-first century scholars often turn to economics to explain the dramatic changes in American family life since 1970—changes evident in markedly higher rates of divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing, and non-marital cohabitation and markedly lower rates of marriage and marital childbearing. Legal scholars Naomi Cahn and […]
Read MoreChecking the New Pressure Points on the Middle Class When President Obama delivered an address at Osawatomie, Kansas, in December 2011, he credited the values of hard work and responsibility with helping America overcome the Great Depression at home in the 1930s and fascism abroad in the 1940s. After those triumphs, he contended the same […]
Read MoreAs Goes the Middle-Class Family, So Goes the Nation The middle-class family—as both a cultural ideal and a social reality—has contributed significantly to American prosperity. From the yeoman farmers of Jefferson’s republic to the white-collar workers of today, the middle-class family has passed the torch of liberty to the rising generation. The heterogeneity of America’s […]
Read MoreThe Great-Society Welfare State and the Fiscal Crisis Ever since Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, released his daring deficit-reduction plan in April, policymakers and policy experts have been touting “entitlement reform” as the key to controlling run-away federal spending. Even before the Republicans took control of the House of […]
Read MoreWhy Medicaid Reform Requires a Revival of Marriage That Medicaid is in crisis, few will dispute. Total Medicaid expenditures reached $373.9 billion in 2009 (15 percent of all national health expenditures), up dramatically from $200.5 billion in 2000, from $73.7 billion in 1990, and from just $26.0 billion in 1980.[1] Even appropriate adjustments for inflation […]
Read MoreRestoring the Family-Friendly Roots of Social Security When Rick Perry called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, the Republican presidential hopeful did himself few favors if he becomes the GOP nominee to challenge President Obama in 2012. At the same time, the Texas Governor may believe that his characterization of the relatively successful and popular social-insurance […]
Read MoreBecause of the negligence of many states in submitting vital statistics to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), national reports of the number of marriages and divorces since the late 1990s have been based on incomplete state records. In an effort to obtain a more accurate accounting, the Census Bureau recently began including marital […]
Read MoreWhen American parents take on the burden of bearing and rearing a child, they deliver a huge dividend to society. So concludes a team of economists from Berkeley and Syracuse universities intent on assessing “the net fiscal externality to being a parent.” Through careful economic accounting, the researchers assess, on the one hand, the costs […]
Read MoreEvidence continues to mount that misguided public policy has played a key role in reducing American birthrates from their robust levels of the Baby Boom era. John D. Mueller makes the case in Redeeming Economics (2010) that Roe v. Wade triggered a dramatic drop in the Total Fertility Rate. Likewise, a study by University of […]
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