Another reason not to marry

A long term stable relationship is one of the best ways of encouraging happiness, Labour's extending official recognition of it for gay people was one of the (few) good things of their reign, but still the number of people deciding to form these kind of relationships continue to decrease overall. Chris Dillow outlines some of the incentives that are driving people away from long term, stable relationships but there is another one. The something for nothing Welfare State is firmly against marriage and two parent families, as has been show from research in, amoungst other places, the USA

There have been 13 major studies of the relationship between the availability of welfare benefits and out-of-wedlock birth. Of these, 11 found a statistically significant correlation. Among the best of these studies is the work done by June O'Neill for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Holding constant a wide range of variables, including income, education, and urban vs. suburban setting, the study found that a 50 percent increase in the value of AFDC and foodstamp payments led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births.(7) Likewise, research by Shelley Lundberg and Robert Plotnick of the University of Washington showed that an increase in welfare benefits of $200 per month per family increased the rate of out-of-wedlock births among teenagers by 150 percent.

It has been for sometime, and continues to be with the Tax Credits system (that is if anybody can actually get through all the forms needed to claim tax credits, and then don't get them miscalculated so they can actually spend the money rather than just look at it then give it back). This isn't a problem with the system, this is the system working exactly as it should.

Single parent families are by their very nature harder on that parent than if there was somebody to share the load with. The Welfare State is predicated to giving based on what the political classes decide is need, and even they can see that a one parent family is a harder life than a two parent one, so the Welfare State gives more of its largess towards subsidising one parent families and creating another incentive against two parent families so, perversly, leading to more people in this situation that everybody recognises as worse than the alternative.