MAKING MARRIAGES WORK

Los Angeles Times: President Bush wants Congress to set aside $300 million in the welfare reform law to promote "healthy, stable marriages." To proponents of the fund, that means programs urging marriage and counseling to keep couples together. The money should be spent on something more than promoting marriage; it should be spent on one obvious element that helps encourage a strong marriage: financial stability. That means much of it should go for vocational training and jobs.
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of Labor, documented the breakup of the two-parent black family in a seminal and controversial report, "The Negro Family: A Case for National Action."
Moynihan was able to show "an extraordinarily powerful correlation between male unemployment rates and certain indices of family stability -- single-parent households, husbands absent and so forth." He also could show an extremely strong correlation between the black male unemployment rate in a given month and 80 percent of the new black welfare cases six months later.
Head Start
The problem was exacerbated as factories offering low-skill, well-paying jobs left the cities. Around the same time, Great Society programs like Head Start helped poor children, but some poverty programs, such as welfare, had rules that encouraged fathers not to live with or support the mothers of their children.
From 1963 to 2000, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births increased nearly threefold for blacks and almost tenfold for whites. Single motherhood exploded across racial, ethnic, income and geographic lines. Divorces broke up more families. Welfare rolls multiplied. The Aid to Families With Dependent Children program became a permanent means of support, passing from one generation of fatherless children to the next, until in 1996 the White House and Congress said "enough."
Children born to married parents and who grow up with two parents are more likely to be healthier and do better in school. They are less likely to grow up poor, flunk out, suffer abuse or neglect, have children out of wedlock, go on welfare or go to jail. But a stable family doesn't happen by decree.
The White House and Congress can't and shouldn't force "shotgun" marriages; however, laws can change behavior and reverse trends. As the Senate Finance Committee considers the reauthorization of the federal welfare law as early as next week, it should be guided by the experience of the last few decades, as well as by common sense: Marriage matters, but so does the parental ability to pay the bills.
TRYING TO KEEP THE DEATH TAX BURIED
Scripps Howard News Service: Senate Democrats said phooey on you to millions of Americans last week by making it impossible for them to do any intelligent estate planning or to have confidence that they really, truly own what they own.
The issue was the death tax. It is due to be diminished bit by bit until 2010, when it will disappear entirely. Then in 2011, like Dracula rising from his grave, it will return in full blood-sucking force, taking 55 percent of estates after the first $1 million. The Republicans had wanted to keep the monster buried, but Democrats turned aside the legislative effort to accomplish that end.
Might the death tax's 2011 repeal still be made permanent? Maybe. Maybe not. What we have now is the kind of uncertainty that puts estate planning on a plane with rolling dice. It is a terrible, awful thing for Senate Democrats to do to fellow Americans, but they have an excuse. They don't really believe that inheritance of lots of money is a good idea. They believe they have better ways of spending it.
Private property
You might think it would occur to these senators that the concept of private property is a concept without which very little wealth would ever be produced, and that taking what could be more than half of someone's wealth when the person dies is an assault on that concept. It is a way of saying you cannot dispose of your property as you see fit, that it was not yours, after all.
In the case of the super-super-rich, the death tax might not have huge consequences for the family; the inheritors would still be rich. In the case of families with small businesses or farms, the tax can be devastating. The possibility is that the business will have to be sold to pay the taxes, and meanwhile, thousands of dollars must be expended on fees to accountants and lawyers to try to keep that from happening. The Democrats suggest some compromises, but all of them remain unfair to some.
The fact that people have become wealthier than most does not make it OK to shred their rights.