Compelled To Say "I Don't"

Since as far back as FDR's New Deal, it seems that the Democrats' modus operandi has been designed to destroy the institution of the family and create a nation entirely dependent on government. It has always been cleverly disguised as "compassion", and anyone who saw it for what it really is and spoke about it was castigated as a conspiracy theorist.

Welfare for unwed mothers has been the perpetual carrot on a stick for many, enticing fathers to abandon their families for the sake of a buck, and encouraging mothers to continue to reproduce for another buck. Children became a sort of inventory for these people.

More recently, the "compassionate" government has taken up the practice of extending unemployment benefits, enabling people to stay home for longer periods of time and removing the urgency to seek gainful employment. And now, according to the Wall Street Journal, Congress is poised to enact their Universal Health Care boondoggle which will compel couples to say "I don't".

Under the government's plan, the average married couple will pay $2,000 or more in annual insurance premiums above what couples who live together out of wedlock will pay. The built-in "marriage penalty" in both House and Senate healthcare bills is designed to prevent "inequities" to single parents. Democrat staffers who helped write the Senate bill, for example, acknowledge the presence of the penalty and say that to favor married couples wouldn't be fair.

Their answer is, therefore, to favor single couples. From the Wall Street Journal article:

For instance, they said making the subsidies neutral towards marriage would lead to a married couple with only one bread-winner getting a more generous subsidy than a single parent at the same income-level.

"The Finance Committee, along with other committees in the Senate, took pains to craft the most equitable overall structure possible, and that's what we have here," said a Democratic Senate Finance Committee aide.

Also from the article:

If the bill passes in its current form, it would be far from the first example of federal and social benefits creating incentives to remain single. Under current law, marriage can have a negative impact on a person's ability to claim the earned income tax credit and welfare benefits including food stamps.

In any progressive system of taxes or benefits, there are trade-offs between how well-targeted a subsidy is and how equitable it is, said Stacy Dickert-Conlin, an economics professor at Michigan State University.

"You might like to have it be progressive, equitable and marriage-neutral. But you have to decide what your goals are, because you can't accomplish all three," she said.

I think they have decided long, long ago what their "goals are", and they have been marching inexorably towards achieving them from the beginning. The only difference between the methods of the '60's and today is that they are less covert in their application.

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