מומחים בארה"ב מנסים לפעול לחיזוק מוסד הנישואין

People just aren't starting families as much as they used to, and the ones that do have a rockier time than before. Where does that leave our hearts, our minds, and our nation? A new Heritage Foundation report delves into all that and offers some interesting ways to fix it. With us now is Dr. Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation. Good to have you with us, Dr. Roberts. Thanks so much. I'm so proud of my colleagues for issuing this landmark study. We hope that it revitalizes marriage and, for that matter, revitalizes the spirit of people welcoming children into their homes. Certainly, it touches on a lot of things that are very meaningful to a lot of people. And to that point, there's, you know, there's this loneliness epidemic, according to the previous U.S. Surgeon General. People aren't having babies as much as they used to, as I just said. And even the prospect of a simple, straightforward path to old age surrounded by the people we love of all generations kind of seems to be slipping away from so many of us. So to start with, and this does come up in the report, how do you think we got here? Well, there are certainly a lot of factors that have contributed to this problem. Some of them are cultural, some of them are social, and no doubt many of them are economic. To say nothing of individual decisions that people make, and we will always respect those individual decisions. But the real gist of the report, as you know, is that we claim that federal policy has exacerbated some of those factors by creating disincentives to marriage and, by extension, to having more children. We see that, for example, in our tax code. We see it in some safety net or welfare programs. And so the first step that we call for in the report is to eliminate all of those disincentives toward marriage. And then the second thing we call for, which is the real innovation in this study, is to flip on their head all of those programs within federal policy that have anything to do with marriage and make sure that through innovations in the childcare tax credit and innovations in the usage of the adoption tax credit that we can incentivize marriage and also childbirth. And you also speak about the role of cultural institutions in reviving family life. If you'd like to touch on that. It's a really important part of it. In fact, we would say that as important as it is to get federal policy right, that those cultural factors, those institutions, as you put it so well, are upstream, if you will, of the politics and policy of this. And so the most important of those cultural institutions, obviously, is the family. But our nuclear families are served by institutions like schools and universities and rotary clubs and bowling leagues and so on, very longstanding argument in the United States about the importance of those. And so we call for a role in federal policy there as well. For example, there has been a longstanding program of the federal government to fund what is called a marriage boot camp. It sounds sort of involuntary, but in fact, it's totally voluntary for couples that are not married but living together. We argue that one of the enhancements that federal policy could make is to turn that into a grant program, a block grant program, in which the people's tax money would be given to local nonprofit providers who would develop programs at the behest, at the request of these couples to learn how to be better couples. These are very simple innovations that the United States has overlooked in the realm of policy that could aid these cultural institutions. Yeah, your report delves into so many aspects of how we got here. And some of the things that really stood out to me, for example, were that people are often choosing to have a standard family, but say without initially getting married. And the research that shows that that doesn't really put them in the best stead for the longevity of their life together and their family. So if you could speak to that. Yeah. It's such an important point. Thank you for asking the question and for delving into that detail in the paper, because the best, least politicized social science research shows that there is a certain sequence which almost guarantees success in life. Graduating from high school, going to college, getting married, being open to life, having children. And the great part about our paper is that it rests upon this unpoliticized social science research. The second aspect of this is what people want. It is clear to us in analyzing this research and looking at public opinion surveys that while, of course, this is the United States and we respect people's decisions as individuals, the majority of American men and women do want to be married. They do want to be married and to have children. And so what we're saying is that it's high time that federal policy and state policy reflect these desires of the American people. In fact, that policy, as I have mentioned, not only doesn't reflect the desires of our people to be married and to have families, it's actually undermined those desires. So we have a lot of work to do in Washington to update this policy to reflect the mood of the American people. And I think what we will see is that when federal policymakers and state policymakers start making these decisions, that the cultural institutions will follow.