In her latest column for the American Thinker, Concerned Women for America’s Janice Shaw Crouse repeats the claim of “newly conservative lesbian” blogger Cynthia Yockley that the Affordable Care Act will “destroy marriage for the middle class the same way that the Great Society welfare state destroyed the black family.”
Crouse bases this accusation on a bogus GOP talking point about the health care law’s supposed “marriage penalty” (if you care to read a full debunking, Igor Volsky has one here). This is all, Crouse alleges, a nefarious plot for “promoting single motherhood and discouraging marriage” in order to increase the number of single women, who tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.
But it’s not only the health care law: Crouse repeats her frequent allegations that anti-poverty programs such as food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit are also deliberate attempts to “encourage individuals to reject marriage.”
Worse, we are discovering that ObamaCare really will “destroy marriage for the middle class the same way that the Great Society welfare state destroyed the black family — with financial incentives for staying single.” ObamaCare’s marriage penalty could possibly cost couples over $10,000 a year. This intentional disparity means that U.S. government policy will encourage singleness and create increased disincentives for marriage. Single individuals will have an advantage with the earned income tax credit as well as welfare benefits, including food stamps. This comes as no surprise, of course, because “making the subsidies neutral towards marriage would lead to a married couple with only one bread-winner getting a more generous subsidy than a single parent at the same income-level.”
With ObamaCare ramping up subsidies promoting single motherhood and discouraging marriage, an increase in poverty is inevitable — along with dramatic increases in entitlements and dramatic tax hikes to pay for the increased entitlements. These increases are just one more of the numerous financial incentives in current government policy that increasingly encourage individuals to reject marriage — the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), housing subsidies, food stamps, child support payments, and the welfare dependency programs that created and sustained the inner city matriarchal culture. These perks are costing American taxpayers trillions of dollars a year. Current welfare programs total close to $1 trillion a year (twice as much as national defense and nearly the size of the federal deficit); ObamaCare is projected to add another $2.5 trillion after all its provisions take effect. There’s no end in sight to the increasing costs of these entitlements.
Politically, the “marriage penalty” is also a Democratic vote-getting initiative — 70 percent of unmarried women voted for President Obama in the 2008 election. Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a liberal firm that consults for clients such as Bill Clinton and John Kerry, said: “Unmarried women represent one of the most reliable Democratic cohorts in the electorate … leading the charge for fundamental change in health care.”
