The Key to Insuring Children

In awarding “performance bonuses” last December to twenty-three states that signed up 1.2 million children for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the Obama administration claimed that the expansion of the welfare state advances the well-being of children. Yet if the interests of children are really a priority, why is the current administration […]

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Retreat from Marriage Gives America the Blues

If Americans with higher incomes report higher levels of happiness, why have reported levels of happiness declined during the past fifty years when living standards and incomes have increased? Among economists, prevailing theories to explain the paradox rest on one of two claims: 1) that happiness depends more on whether one’s income matches that of […]

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The Unmet Political Challenge of Family Breakdown

From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation Mitch Pearlstein Rowman & Littlefield, 2011; 165 pages, $50.00 On January 12, 2012, CNN News ran a headline, “Forced To Wear Sign: Dynesha Lax ‘I Lie, I Steal, I Sell Drugs.’”The story leads off: The mother of a troubled 14-year-old […]

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The Generals Who Started the War on the Family

Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought Scott Yenor Baylor University Press, 2011; 430 pages, $39.95 Scott Yenor wastes no time in getting to the point. The political science professor at Boise State University writes in the opening chapter of this book: “Modern individuals see themselves as persons independent of unchosen duties […]

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A Libertarian Who Sounds Like a Social Conservative

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 […]

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Hypocrites and Inverted Hypocrites:

How 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 […]

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The Meanings of Mobility:

Checking 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 […]

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Marital Parenthood and American Prosperity:

As 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 […]

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