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Why Not Abolish the Welfare State?

Paying People Not to Marry

A third of all entrants into AFDC are single women and their children; in urban black ghettos the rate is two-thirds. 38 The culture of poverty that has developed in the inner cities has removed the stigma from illegitimacy, which suggests that environment ("the neighbor effect") is a major factor in behavioral pathologies. As liberal political philosophy reshaped social policy from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, the combined purchasing power of AFDC and food stamps increased 40 percent. During these same years, court decisions and the dismantling of administrative barriers caused the number of single mothers receiving AFDC to jump from 29 percent to 63 percent. 39 As Figure V shows, the rate of births to single women grew most rapidly during the same period, doubling in both the white and black communities. Moreover, these trends have continued: 40

  • The out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks soared from 28 percent in 1965 to 68 percent in 1991.
  • Although the rate for whites was only 4 percent in 1965, the rate among white high school dropouts today is 48 percent.
  • In 10 major U.S. cities in 1991, more than half of all births were to single women.

Recent research has documented the direct connection between these phenomena and generous welfare benefits. 41

  • Professor C.R. Winegarden at the University of Toledo found that half the increase in the black out-of-wedlock birth rate in recent decades was caused directly by the perverse incentives created by welfare. 42
  • Professors Shelly Lundberg and Robert Plotnick of the University of Washington found that increasing welfare benefits by roughly $200 per month per family causes a state's teenage out-of-wedlock birth rate to increase by 150 percent. 43
  • Professor June O'Neill of Baruch College in New York City found that a 50 percent increase in the value of monthly AFDC and food stamp payments results in a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births in a state. 44
  • Professor Robert Hutchens of Cornell University found that a 10 percent increase in a state's AFDC benefits causes the marriage rate of single mothers to decrease by 8 percent. 45
  • Mikhail Bernstam of the Hoover Institution found that in cities with high concentrations of blacks, the birth rate among single teenage women increases 10 percent for each 10 percent increase in welfare benefits. 46

Yet not everyone agrees with the results of these studies. Welfare critic Charles Murray was unable to find a statistically significant correlation between births to black single mothers and the value of welfare benefits, although he did find a relationship for white women. Murray concluded that it is not the variation in welfare benefits that is most important but the culture of poverty that the welfare system supports and maintains. 47

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