Broken marriages draining tax coffers

Programs offer to fix couples before they see problems
Saturday, April 30, 2011
By Lois M. Collins, Deseret News

Excerpt:
The cost of divorce and out-of-wedlock births to taxpayers nationally exceeds $112 billion a year, including the cost of federal, state and local government programs and forgone tax revenues, according to "The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing: First-ever Estimates for the Nation and All 50 States," a report by a coalition of organizations that includes the Institute for American Values, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, the Georgia Family Council and Families Northwest.

The group said children are particularly impacted by marriage failure, with "potential risks" that include poverty, mental illness, physical illness, infant mortality, lower educational attainment, juvenile delinquency, behavior problems, criminal activity as adults and early unwed parenthood. Reese notes that research shows children who live with both biological parents do better socially than peers in other family structures.

"The idea that family fragmentation contributes to child poverty has been studied extensively and is widely accepted," the coalition said, noting that marriage "can help to reduce poverty" because there are two potential wage earners in a home, economies of scale and "possibly also because of changes in habits, values and mores that occur" when people marry. the rest