With Wisconsin lawmakers still stalled trying to repair a budget shortfall of more than $650 million, one group proposed a new solution Tuesday — encouraging people to get and stay married.
Citing a new report that said divorce and unwed childbearing costs the state $737 million annually, the Wisconsin Family Council urged local lawmakers and communities to “take immediate steps to strengthen and preserve marriage.”
The Institute for American Values, the Georgia Family Council, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy and Families Northwest produced the report, examining the costs of family fragmentation in all 50 states.
According to the researchers, a 1 percent reduction in family fragmentation would save taxpayers across the nation $1.1 billion a year.
In Wisconsin, the report said, 61.4 percent of the households in poverty are female-headed households. It said if all of those households were headed by married couples, 60 percent would be lifted out of poverty, reducing total poverty in the state by more than 35 percent.
“Prior research shows that marriage lifts single mothers out of poverty and therefore reduces the need for costly social benefits,” principal investigator Ben Scafidi, economics professor at Georgia College & State University, said in a statement.
Carrie Lynch, spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker, D-Weston, was skeptical there was anything state government could do to encourage good marriages.
“The Legislature can’t mandate good marriages; there’s just no book that you can write to get people to make good marriages,” she said.
While Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch, R-West Salem, “supports pro-family policies,” according to spokesperson John Murray, his office would need to see detailed policy plans to consider them viable solutions to the budget shortfall.
Julaine Appling, CEO of the Wisconsin Family Council, said reforming Wisconsin’s divorce law, which she called a “worst-case scenario,” would be the first change her group supports.
“Wisconsin has no-fault and no-contest divorce law, which means that if I’m the person filing for the divorce, I don’t have to have any reason for the divorce,” Appling said. “The no-contest means the other person cannot contest the divorce. … It leaves the person who is having the divorce filed against them no recourse whatsoever.”
Appling said the state should allow recourse especially when children are involved, but said there should be exceptions for certain cases involving adultery, abuse and abandonment.
“We also think we should require some premarital counseling,” Appling added. “It is a known way to improve the likelihood marriage will last.”
Appling also suggested communities begin actively promoting marriage and “encourage people to do everything on the front side of their marriage to bolster it and make sure it can last, not just to patch it up at the end.”
According to the Wisconsin Council on Families, the “breakdown of the family” has a price tag of $737 million, which Appling said represents 12.3 percent of the tax burden.
She said there are only seven states with a greater share of the tax burden being given to family fragmentation.
“It’s a little bit distressing to me to see us so high up in that ranking,” Appling said.
