Writing at washingtonexaminer.com, Michael Barone discusses the intersection of tax policy and social values.
As Utah Sen. Mike Lee has noted in speeches at the Heritage Foundation, “The problem of poverty is linked to family breakdown and the erosion of marriage among low-income families and communities.”
Lee is careful not to cast opprobrium on single or divorced parents. But he insists on pointing to the uncomfortable but undeniable fact that economic outcomes for their children have been far worse than those of children raised in two-parent families.
That produces many personal tragedies. And in cold economic terms, it means that society is losing gross domestic product because of less than optimal development of human capital.
Government policy can’t force people to get or stay married. But it may be able to encourage them to do so.
Whether tax policy should incent some actions and discourage others is the subject of much debate.
Separately, but related, there is no real debate about which state- and local-level policies do and don’t create economic growth. Yes, there is much flawed Leftist rhetoric, but there’s no real debate, as JLF’s John Hood outlines here. Hood studied two decades of academic research on economic growth. The results “are extremely unfriendly to the Left’s view of economic growth,” Hood explains.
