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Promises to Keep by David Popenoe and others
Like third world debts and mass murder in Sierra Leone, child and family policy is too boring for nearly all media, therefore it is considered unimportant, especially in a society more concerned with the alleged scourge of cancer from cellular phones. Not that the media is entirely to blame, almost everyone has a predisposition to find family policy boring. Ideas get pronounced important because they are interesting, popular or constantly repeated or all three.
Many of the arguments in Promises to Keep imply without strong families other institutions and organizations will die. Unfortunately, the results of the Popenoe Commission have little clue how produce stronger families, stronger individuals and a better society. Much of this is a morass of nurture assumptions. Promises includes an overview of family policy by Janet Z. Giele, overview meaning all the usual parties get covered. Moira Eastman attempts to set the marriage facts straight. Exploring marriage laws is Carl E. Schneider. William Galston gives a semi-background on policy. Maggie Gallager generously donates an excerpt from her book, as does Popenoe. Barbara Defoe Whitehead uses lots of paper to say that teenage goals have not changed much, at least the goals they are conscious of and willing to admit to pollsters.
Most of the recommendations here are toothless--for example, encourage psychologists to support marriage--and the remainder are horribly flawed. They recommend "an average age at time of marriage in the late twenties or early thirties... at older ages... the 'biological clock' becomes a growing problem," The early thirties are too late. It is too difficult to stuff marriage and family into a narrow window of opportunity. According to French fertility studies reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, 39 percent of women aged 31 to 35 who attempt to become pregnant are not able to do so after a year of efforts, compared with 26 percent of women under the age of 31, and 46 percent of those over 35. Research by William Master and William Pratt at the Nationak Center for Health Statistics suggests that 13 percent of women 25 to 34 and 21 percent of women 35 to 44 have impaired fecundity, compared with four percent of women under the age of 24. Young adults should be encouraged to grow up when they are supposed to grow up rather than inadvertently encouraging them to spend decades as adolescents. The largest contributors to 26-year-olds acting similar to 16-year-olds are cultural.
They recommend an increase in “the value of the personal income tax exemption [dependent exemption on federal income taxes] by a factor of three or four, restoring the value lost to inflation during the years 1960-1990.” The tax structure has radically changed since 1960. Taxes have shifted since 1960 to payroll, state and local taxes. For 74 percent of families, payroll taxes are the largest tax. Payroll taxes take 15.3 percent of earned income. Earned income means work. Stocks, interest, burglary and all other sources of income that are not work are exempt from payroll taxes. Work gets taxed and income from less socially beneficial activities gets exempted.
If the dependent exemption on federal income taxes is increased to $8,000 dollars, wealthy families get about $3,100 in reduced taxes per child. Many working families below the median would get little or nothing. There is no way to make dependent exemptions just. Most family policy books would probably be recognized as notoriously terrible at recommendations, except that books in other policy areas are even worse. Not recommended.
1996