Want to Help the U.S. Economy? Stay Married
The United States economy's well-being is deeply enrooted to marriage, even more than what is perceived, such that sound and stable marriages keep the economy healthy while divorce helps the economy regress, suggests a report released by the Family Research Council's Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI).
The findings show how intact married-couple families outperform the other family types including remarried families, divorced families, singe-parent families, and cohabiting families in all of the following economic segments: employment, income, net value, net worth, poverty, receipt of welfare and child economic well-being. Basically the stats show that the more intact the family remains, the less the difficulties and the inefficiencies the family ecounters.
Married-couple families generate the most income with 'the median household income twice that of divorced households and four times that of separated households,' reads the report.
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Divorced families on the other hand experience a sharp decrease in income after the separation affecting divorced women the most who are 2.83 times more prone to live in poverty than women who remain married.
Of the paper, MARRI Director Pat Fagan, Ph.D, said that couples that remain stably married can provide a sound environment where children can be securely fostered while divorce triggers society's reliance on government welfare programs, programs that currently cost tax payers around $112 billion per year.
She said, "this research clearly documents why marriage is an important and fundamental part of society."
The research also documents that children who grow up in divorced families are less likely to earn incomes that fall in the top three income distribution and that children who grow up under a single parent are more likely to be poor than children in married-couple families.
"Divorce has torn our nation apart, and led to the bloated government systems we can no longer afford," Fagan wrote. "We cannot solve our nation's fiscal woes until we address the breakdown of the family. If the government pledged to reduce family breakdown by just one percent, taxpayers would save around $1.1 billion dollars each year," she commented emphasizing the importance of the family's role in stabilizing country's current financial problems.
For the complete report, click here.
