Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (27248)	1/31/2004 4:00:44 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793587

The Marriage Experiment Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A20 THINK BACK TO 1995. Newt Gingrich's troops have won the House, and they're mocking big-government liberals. The liberals, remember, are forever proposing new government programs, undaunted by the fact that the programs don't work, or that voluntary social workers might come forward if only government quit sucking up the oxygen. Now scroll forward to today. Big-government liberals -- or big-government conservatives, if you prefer -- are up to their old tricks: The Bush administration is proposing to spend $1.5 billion over five years on marital training. How do we know that this will work? Isn't this just a sop to the administration's conservative supporters? Then as now, the skepticism is only half justified. The administration is right that children who grow up in families with healthy marriages have a better start in life, for a mixture of economic and emotional reasons. As the government is in the business of promoting child welfare through public schooling and health insurance programs, there is presumably no conceptual objection to promoting child welfare by promoting marriage. However, marriage therapy is a woolly science; since the 1960s the number of marriage therapists in the country has gone up about 25-fold, yet the divorce rate is higher than it used to be. There is, in short, no guarantee that the government can do anything to promote stable marriage. Yet because the potential gains are large, there is a case for experiment and research. Some has been done already: Classes on communication have been shown to reduce marital stress, for example. But these findings are based on studies of middle-class couples who are motivated enough to sign up unprompted. Nobody knows whether similar classes can help couples who are poor: Perhaps other obstacles to stable relationships -- job insecurity, substandard housing and so on -- would drown out well-meaning efforts to teach marital communication. The administration is already sponsoring three studies, at an expected cost of $78 million over nine years, to test what (if anything) might work for low-income groups: Classes directed at pre-marrieds or post-marrieds? Mentoring programs that connect new couples to mature ones? The administration's plan to spend an extra $1.5 billion over five years (a third of which would come from the states) is aimed at funding experimental programs across the country. These would give the evaluators more data, and might make a difference to the couples who participate in them. As research programs go, this is an expensive one. William J. Doherty, a University of Minnesota professor and a believer in government-sponsored marriage maintenance, is planning a demonstration project that will cost $1 million over four years: Do we really need 1,500 such projects? The administration counters that the five-year price of social services delivered by the Department of Health and Human Services comes to $230 billion. The proposed marriage experiment looks modest by comparison. Yet the administration's budget deficit has canceled its right to make such arguments. Research on promoting marriage may be a worthy cause, but it deserves a fraction of the cash that President Bush plans to throw at it.