(CNN)Getting married costs money. According to new data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. It's worth it, and it extends into the cracks. About 9 times the single. This is a huge leap from her 2010, when married people were still worth four times as much as her single ones.
Part is just mathematics: a household with two adults her Now for more resources. They can split the cost of rent and groceries, qualify for a mortgage more easily, and save a down payment on a home.
and how our workplaces, norms and expectations haven't changed much since the days of the patriarchal nuclear family. America in 2022 is not America in 1952, even if our families and our lives are radically changed. If we want to close the gap between single and married people, if we want to ensure that all people, married or not, can thrive, we need a government. Leap into the 21st century and create policies and spaces that support individual and family diversity.
Marriage tends to shrink one's social world, lowering the cost of living. Dates, drinking parties, dinners with friends, concerts, events, even clothes and makeup. I'm sure. my husband.
Marriage can also be a safety net. Emergency expenses that can lead to large credit card balances on one person are more likely to be split between couples and processed more quickly (and with less interest). ). The Wall Street Journal article summarizing this new data includes a similar anecdote. A woman with a steady income was able to pay off her husband's credit and her card debt from what he jokingly called "her wife's bank." Marriage also doubles her chances of someone from a large family sharing the wealth. This is a dynamic that sometimes pops up in the real estate section of newspapers in articles about couples buying their first home thanks to a gift from her parents. And marriage means higher salaries, at least for men: Married men earn more on average than married women and singles.
Part of the disparity is DemographicPeople are marrying less likely and later than ever before. An analysis of Census Bureau data by the Pew Research Center found that college-educated and wealthy Americans are more likely to marry than working-class or less-than-high-school-educated Americans. more likely to marry than Hispanic Americans. America's wealth also remains distributed along these same racial lines.
All of this creates a large pool of singles, especially among younger generations, many of whom come from families that hold generational wealth disproportionately . Likely Caucasian. Among the same group of singles, the youngest are just starting their careers and the oldest are less likely to complete a college degree, putting this group at a particular disadvantage. Already uneducated and low-income singles aremore likely to have children than college-educated singles, aremore likely to have children, and are more likely to move further down the economic ladder
Married 25- to 34-year-olds are age-biased and therefore more professionally established, higher-paid, white, better-educated, and more likely to be early or single to parent. unlikely to become -- All of this means an economic foothold in addition to the economic benefits of two incomes and pooled resources.
Part of the large disparity between married and unmarried, in other words, is less about marriage itself than about who is most likely to get married now, when and what. Did you contribute to that choice?
Being married has many advantages, from tax cuts to social security benefits to health insurance. A committed partner may provide a safety net, but dedication alone does not automatically automatically file taxes jointly or share a portion of your partner's Social Security benefits or other money or property in the event of your partner's death. Inherit a division, easily get your partner's health insurance, and if they can't, make medical decisions for them (and ask them to make medical decisions for you). receive).
This need not be tied to marriage. Governments can enact a series of mechanisms that allow individuals to designate health representatives and beneficiaries of property and benefits with just a few clicks of a website. The United States could indeed decouple health insurance from employment, making health care a fundamental right rather than a privilege. We can end themarriage penaltyagainst welfare beneficiaries.
We can also offer more generous benefits to singles, especially single parents. Affordable housing is a crisis across the country. The staggering $5,000 a month it costs to rent an average Manhattan apartmentmay be split between a couple, but even the very wealthiest singles can afford that amount. would be difficult to pay for. Even outside of very expensive cities, single mothers in their 20s who work for a paltry US minimum wage of $7.25 an hour now have median rents for available apartments in the US of over $2,000.
Since the Great Depression,many young people do not know why they are living with their parents. The fact that there is often nowhere else affordable to live with your parents if you want to live is certainly part of the story. Another factor: the fact that the federal minimum wage is more than $12 an hourif adjusted for inflation, and $26 an hour if adjusted for productivity.
Single mothers are also the main victims of America's bizarre work culture, one of the few prosperous developed nations on earth where new mothers (and fathers) cannot get paid leave. is one of Unlike our fellow countries, where governments routinely support care centers for young children, childcare in the United States remains largely a self-organization for parents. We have seen how this works when the US policy of Women were forced out of the workforce en masse during Covid, and the loss was disproportionately borne bysingle mothers of color.
Unsurprisingly, single people are far poorer than married people, given these policies and the landscape of employer choice.
This is not a foregone conclusion. Americans are organizing their lives and families in increasingly diverse ways. From long-term celibacy to single parenthood, cohabitation, intergenerational living, polyamory, and intentional community building of adults and children who help each other.
A good, loving marriage is a wonderful thing. It is also a reward for itself. A better policy environment would stop privileging marriage and instead extend support where it is really needed.
