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Notes -
The abortion debate below brought to mind something I've been thinking about for a while. There's been a convergence of sorts between mainstream Republicans/conservatives and the far-right, but there are still many differences, such as on the Single Mother Question. The far-right (which includes most people on this website) views single mothers negatively, while the mainstream conservative view is very different. For instance, here's what Speaker Mike Johnson said about Medicaid:
Mainstream conservatives and the far-right agree that the welfare state serves to subsidize single motherhood, but only the latter thinks it's a bad thing. Mainstream conservatives' embrace of single motherhood is connected with abortion politics. One mainstream conservative pundit put it succinctly: "you can't be pro-life and anti-single mom." Many on the far-right responded to her tweet with "just watch me" and others scratched their heads, wondering what she meant. But there's a certain logic to it. Much of the motivation for abortion comes from women not wanting to be single mothers. You can respond to this in two ways:
The far-right prefers option 1, I've heard it many times on this website. But do you think it will actually be effective in changing behavior? I personally suspect that given the options of not having sex or having sex at the risk you might have to drive out of state and get an abortion and then get shamed by some online anonymous far-rightists, the latter will be the popular option. Just a vague suspicion I have. So it doesn't surprise me that many conservatives choose option 2. It also harmonizes better with the current conservative political coalition, which is increasingly reliant on the votes of low-class and non-white voters who have higher rates of single-motherhood. We wouldn't want to be elitist, looking down our noses at the salt-of-the-earth working class now would we?
Framing things in terms of "pro-single-mother" vs "anti-single-mother" makes about as much sense as being "pro-orphan" or "anti-orphan". You can believe that a situation is bad to be in and therefore want to help people who happen to be in that situation AND try to prevent people from falling into that situation AND not Goodhart the numbers by killing them.
DO: Help kids with no parents with money and support structures (without actively incentivizing the status)
DO: Try to prevent people from becoming orphans.
DON'T: Reduce the number of orphans by killing them
Really, a child of a single parent is just a half-orphan. Therefore
DO: Help single parent families with money and support structures (without actively incentivizing the status)
DO: Try to prevent people from becoming single-parents.
DON'T: Reduce the number of single-parents by killing them (or the children)
All of this follows trivially from the quality of life the child can expect, on average, in each state:
Full family > Single Parent Family > Orphan > Death
Whether you want more or fewer single parent families then depends on which direction you're coming from. Trying to pin people down into "pro" or "anti" single parents only makes sense if these were terminal ends rather than proxies for quality of life.
So much easier said than done. By helping, you incent. Hell: People grift Foster parenting, which is the worst way to get gubment money you can imagine. In comparison SNAP, TANF, and Section 8 seem like goldmines.
On an economic level, I agree. This is a very very hard problem. In the case of orphans, you can resolve it by sending them to foster families or other forms of government housing instead of just handing a check to reward every kid that runs away from home. The state still pays lots of money, but the kids don't directly benefit because they get substitute parents instead of just money. But you can't really do that with single parents. You can't realistically assist single mothers with state-funded foster-fathers who come and act as the missing parent for the kid. Because she's an adult and has rights, there's a lot less coercion and control that you can't use to force compliance in the same way you can with a runaway teen (and if you tried it would turn out horribly dystopian). So we're kind of stuck handing out checks and trying to make them exactly the right size: not too small or the kids suffer poverty and neglect, not too large or the mothers have more kids and avoid marriage.
On a social level, there is so much more we could be doing to incentivize marriage. Stay at home mothers used to get respect and praise for their parenting. Single mothers used to be shamed and looked down on. Now we do the opposite. People respond to economic incentives, but they also respond to social ones too. Even if money incentivizes more single mothers, turning the dial on the social pressures in the opposite direction could help mitigate this.
One obvious move is to just get rid of the marriage penalty on taxes. But... here we are seriously looking at getting rid of taxes on tips.
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