Social Democratic America (18 page)

Is policy complexity caused by government's size? No. Social Security is one of our biggest government programs, but it also is very simple. Medicare for All would increase government expenditures' share of GDP, but it would be much less complex than the system we have now. The size of government and the complexity of government policy are distinct issues.

Policy complexity in the United States is a result not of government's size but of its structure. Our policy-making process is ridden with veto points that allow legislative opponents and interest groups to insert loopholes and special benefits in exchange for allowing proposed policies to go forward. The fact that we have multiple levels of government—federal, state, local—often adds an additional layer of complexity.

A frequent concern about big government is that it breeds dependency. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney famously quipped that there are

47 percent of Americans … who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it—that that's an entitlement and the government should give it to them.
⁶⁷

Nicholas Eberstadt makes a more detailed case for this sentiment in his book
A Nation of Takers
.
⁶⁸
Eberstadt notes that over the past half century, the share of Americans who receive a government cash transfer and/or public health insurance—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, and so on—has grown steadily. The United States, he concludes, is now “on the verge of a symbolic threshold: the point at which more than half of all American households receive, and accept, transfer benefits from the government.” According to Eberstadt, growing reliance on government for help is undermining Americans' “fierce and principled independence,” our “proud self-reliance.”

Is this really reason for concern? Eberstadt's alarm stems from his deployment of a misleading dichotomy. In his view, people are either givers or takers—taxpayers or benefit recipients. But this is mistaken. Each of us is both a giver and a taker. Every American who doesn't live entirely off the grid pays some taxes. Anyone who is an employee pays payroll taxes, and anyone who purchases things at a store pays sales taxes. Likewise, every American receives benefits from government—if you or your children have attended a public school, if you've driven on a road, if you've had a drink of tap water or taken a shower in your dwelling, if you've deducted mortgage interest payments or a business expense from
your federal income taxes, if you haven't been stricken by polio, if you've never had a band of thugs remove you from your home at gunpoint, if you've visited a park or lounged on a beach or hiked a mountain trail, if you've used the Internet, and on and on.

Eberstadt's emphasis on receipt of cash from government also is puzzling. He thinks receiving a government cash transfer or health insurance somehow renders people less self-reliant than receiving the myriad public goods, services, and tax breaks that government provides. But why?

Once upon a time, individuals and privately organized militias ensured the public safety. Then we shifted to government police forces and armies. At one point humans got their own water and disposed of their own waste. Then we created public water and sewage systems. The education of children was once a family responsibility. Then we created public schools. There's a good reason for these shifts: government provision offers economies of scale and scope, which reduces the cost of a good or service and thereby makes it available to many people who can't or won't get it on their own. Did Americans' character or spirit diminish when these changes occurred? Is there something different about the more recent shift from individual to government responsibility in how we deal with retirement saving, healthcare, unemployment, and other risks? Here Eberstadt is silent.

Government does more now than it used to. All of us, not just some, are dependent on it. And life is better because of it.

In 1950s and 1960s America, many large employers offered their employees health insurance and a generous pension. Most children grew up in a stable family with both of their biological parents. Churches, parent-teacher associations (PTAs), Kiwanis Clubs, sports teams, and other community organizations helped to foster a cooperative spirit, aid struggling adults and children,
and check government abuse of authority. Labor unions helped to ensure rising wages and improvements in working conditions and product safety.
⁶⁹

Some elements of American life during that era, particularly the racism and sexism and other forms of intolerance, have deservedly been relegated to history's dustbin. But what of families and voluntary associations? Could families, community groups, and labor unions achieve economic security, equal opportunity, and shared prosperity as well or better than the government programs I highlighted in
chapter 3
?

Let's begin with families. (The next section looks at communities, and I'll come to unions later in the chapter.) Historically, the family has played a central role in providing economic security, promoting opportunity, and enhancing living standards for its members. But in the past half century marriage has decreased among Americans, and so too has the share of children growing up in intact families.
⁷⁰

Our principal concern should be the children. As
figure 4.18
shows, the share of American kids living with both biological parents decreased by nearly twenty percentage points over the past half century.
⁷¹
We have substantial evidence, first marshaled by Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur in the mid-1990s and steadily buttressed since then, that children who grow up with both biological parents tend to fare better on a range of outcomes, from school completion and performance to crime to earnings and income to maintaining lasting relationships.
⁷²
This advantage holds compared to children whose parents never married, who married and then divorced, or who married, divorced, and remarried.
⁷³

But it's not just the kids who are affected. In the past generation median income has increased only for households and families with two earners. For those with a single earner it has been flat.
⁷⁴
And the risk that unemployment, sickness, or disability will result in significant income decline is much greater among households with only a single adult. As Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam point out, “For the working-class American, who inhabits a more precarious world than the rich or the upper-middle class, family stability is a prerequisite for financial stability.”
⁷⁵

FIGURE
4.18 Children living with both biological parents at age 16

Data source
: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu/archive.htm, series family16.

Three shifts have combined to delay marriage and reduce its prevalence among American women.
⁷⁶
The first is their financial autonomy. Since the 1950s, women have become better educated and more likely to be employed and to earn enough to live independently. Plus, government benefits allow those with limited labor market prospects to survive without depending on a husband. For many women, marriage is no longer a financial necessity. Second, along with this change, and in part because of it, the stigma attached to divorce, nonmarital cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock childbearing has dissipated. Third, women's expectations of partnership and fulfillment have increased. Women are now much less likely to marry, or stay married to, a man who isn't a good partner.

What hasn't changed is women's desire to have children. This helps us understand a key feature of the decline of marriage and of both-biological-parent child rearing in America: it is much more pronounced among those with less education.
⁷⁷
Better-educated adults are now a little less likely to stay together to raise children, while less-educated adults are
much
less likely to do so.
Better-educated women now place considerable emphasis on a career, so they delay not only marriage but also pregnancy and childbearing. This gives them more time to get established and to find the right partner. Among less-educated women, in contrast, age at first pregnancy and first childbirth hasn't changed. Because they take less time to mature personally and to find a partner with whom they are compatible, because their partners' financial prospects tend to be weaker, because their partners more often have a preference for traditional gender roles, and because the presence of a child can heighten financial and interpersonal tensions, women with less education are less likely than their better-educated counterparts to stay with their child's biological father. For these reasons, the decline in marriage, in happiness among those who are married, in sustained cohabitation, and in both-biological-parent child rearing is much sharper among the less educated. This is true across racial and ethnic groups.

In fact, among Americans with a college degree or better the decline in family is minimal. They are less likely to marry or stay married than their counterparts of half a century ago and less likely, whether married or not, to remain together throughout their kids' childhood. But the change has been minor. The collapse of the two-biological-parent family has occurred mainly among those without a college degree, and particularly among those who haven't completed high school.

If marriage were being replaced by long-term cohabitation, we might have little reason for worry. In principle, cohabitation can confer the same advantages as marriage. Look at Sweden. Relatively few Swedish children have parents who are married, yet many live with both biological parents throughout childhood. In effect, cohabitation is a substitute for marriage. The United States is different. More Americans are cohabiting, but most cohabiting partners split up. As of the early 1990s (the most recent data I'm aware of), a Swedish child born to cohabiting parents had about a 60 percent chance that her parents would still be together
fifteen years later. Her American counterpart had about a 20 percent chance.
⁷⁸

Proposals for revitalizing family in America usually aim to increase marriage.
⁷⁹
One recommendation is to restructure government taxes and benefits to more strongly favor marriage, with a special focus on rewarding marriage among couples with low incomes. A second is to mount an advertising and messaging campaign aimed at shifting the culture, perhaps coupled with enhanced dissemination of information. A third is to provide intensive marital counseling sessions and support services for vulnerable couples.

Unfortunately, none of these recommendations is likely to have much success in revitalizing marriage.
⁸⁰
More important, the focus on marriage is misplaced.
⁸¹
Getting more low-income couples in their teens or early twenties who find themselves pregnant to decide to marry is unlikely to produce many lasting relationships. The shotgun wedding approach worked a half century ago because marriage was a financial necessity for many women and because they tended to have limited expectation of emotional fulfillment or shared decision making in a relationship. This has changed.
⁸²
If more couples in that position were to get married these days, many of them might end up divorced.

The key is for more women with limited education to delay childbirth until their mid-to-late twenties, when they are in a better position financially or at least are more likely to have found a genuinely suitable partner.
⁸³
Greater availability of stable jobs along with higher wages probably would help, particularly if supplemented by a more generous EITC for those without children. This would make less-educated men more attractive as long-term partners or husbands.
⁸⁴
And it would heighten the influence of employment in women's calculations about when to have a child. At the moment, many women with little education consider their work prospects to be so dim that they are eager to move quickly to what they perceive as the other key source of fulfillment in life: having a child.
⁸⁵

When a trend is moving in the wrong direction, our first inclination is to try to reverse it. But this isn't always the most useful approach. Sometimes the wisest course of action is to offset the adverse impacts. I believe that's our best bet with respect to family decline. We should look for institutions and policies that can help struggling families, particularly families with a single adult or limited labor-market capability. Denmark and Sweden have effective programs: one-year paid parental leave and high-quality affordable early education. I discussed both in
chapter 3
.

Opponents of these programs come from various camps. Some oppose the expansion of government because they believe it constricts liberty or harms the economy. I suggested earlier in the chapter that these arguments aren't compelling. Others worry that a government early education program will weaken the family as an institution. Of course, some might have had the same fear when public elementary and secondary schools were introduced, but no evidence suggests that universal public K-12 schooling is a key cause of family decline. There is the further awkward fact that fewer American children grow up in homes with both biological parents than do their counterparts in Sweden, a nation with extensive public early education. As I noted above, Swedish parents don't marry as frequently as American parents, but they are more likely to stay together, often as cohabiting couples.