Cost of unwed parenthood is high

By BENJAMIN SCAFIDI - Guest Columnist

As the principal investigator of the study on the taxpayer costs of divorce and unwed childbearing, I feel compelled to respond to Elizabeth Ananat’s opinion piece, “The real cost of divorce (Hint: It’s not welfare),” from April 26.

In our report, we estimate that family fragmentation costs U.S. taxpayers about $112 billion every year. Elizabeth Ananat incorrectly believes that our estimate is too high based on her own study of a related, but very different, issue.

Comparing our study to Ananat’s research is comparing apples to oranges. Quoting from our study, we sought to answer the following question: “If all currently unmarried adult women were instead married (which would also mean all children now living with a single mother were instead living with two married parents), how much would taxpayers save?”

Ananat studies a subset of this issue — divorced, white women — and asks the question: “In the future, after a divorce, what happens to the incomes of white women?” She finds that virtually all divorced white women in her study would have been lifted out of poverty if they were married. We agree on that point. But here’s where we differ: Ananat chose to look at financial impact on the divorced women themselves, many of whom remarry over time, while we look at impact to taxpayers when couples of any race divorce or don’t marry before having children.

We chose a cautious approach to the effect of marriage on taxpayer costs, basing our approach not on Ananat’s study but on a study by two Brookings Institution scholars, one of whom was an economic advisor to President Clinton. This latter study estimates that 65.4 percent of female-headed households would be lifted out of poverty via marriage — the lowest estimate in the literature. To be even more cautious, we assumed that only 60 percent of female-headed households would be lifted out of poverty via marriage.

We estimate that about $70 billion of “welfare” spending — out of a total of more than $456 billion — is attributable to family fragmentation. Thus, we estimate that about 15.4 percent of these costs for welfare programs would disappear if all female-headed households were instead married-couple households. Ananat suggests that this figure is actually about $0. It’s hard to believe that if many single-adult households in poverty were instead married households that none of them would be lifted out of eligibility for welfare and other programs.

Does our estimate pass the smell test? Virtually all recipients of housing assistance live in single-adult households. This pattern is similar for TANF, Head Start and other welfare programs. About 70 percent of Americans in poverty live in single-mother or single-father households. But we exclude single-father households from our analysis because researchers unfortunately have not studied them in a way that provides us with needed information. We suspect that single-dad costs are more than $0, but we’ve chosen an estimate of $0 for them to remain cautious in our estimate.

We exclude other expensive programs from our analysis because we did not feel comfortable making an estimate of the costs given available evidence.

We also cautiously estimate taxpayer costs to the $222 billion U.S. justice system. We estimate that 8.7 percent of these costs can be attributed to family fragmentation, even though more than 56 percent of jail inmates grew up in fragmented families for most of their childhood. Perhaps readers should judge for themselves whether our estimate is cautious and read our study available at www.georgiafamily.org.

One point upon which we do agree with Ananat and many others in the literature, however, is that marriage lifts lots of female-headed households out of poverty.

Mr. Scafidi is an associate professor of economics at Georgia College & State University