, Columnist
Do Unmarried Poor Have Bad Values or Bad Jobs?
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A large U.S. government-funded experiment to encourage low-income parents to marry, a legacy of the George W. Bush administration’s Healthy Marriage Initiative, has just fallen flat.
Even if you were a skeptic all along of the wisdom of the government promoting marriage, as I was, this isn’t good news. For the children of these unmarried couples, it is bad news: It portends years of unstable, complicated home lives. The apparent failure of marriage promotion makes the task of finding other ways to help them even more urgent.