This document compiles proposals across the political spectrum gleaned from written testimony to the House Committee on Ways and Means' Subcommittee on Human Resources May 22, 2001 hearing on Welfare and Marriage Issues and papers presented at the conference "The New World of Welfare: Shaping a Post-TANF Agenda for Policy."

Rep. Wally Herger, R-CA, Chairman, Subcommittee on Human Resources

1. Remove marriage penalties in the tax code and in public benefit programs.

1. Establish a demonstration project to find out what works and what doesn't work to encourage and sustain marriage.
2. Eliminate disincentives to marriage, including barriers to two-parent families participating in TANF.
3. Pursue encouraging and sustaining marriage without withdrawing support (including financial) from anti-poverty programs or penalizing single-parent families.
4. Help sustain marriages of low-income people by supplementing low wages with a continued, partial welfare benefit.
5. Reduce poverty and thereby minimize the impacts of barriers to family formation and stability such as crime, drug addtion, and hopelessness. Enhance economic opportunities so that members of unmarried couples can see some hope of sustaining a family.

1. Urge states to develop policies and programs that strengthen marriages, such as marriage skills course, with the goal to lower the divorce rate.

1. Allow states to use federal TANF surplus funds to support states' marriage initiatives.

1. Set aside 5 to 10 percent of federal TANF dollars for grants to be made by the Department of Health and Human Services to fund demonstration programs, such as Oklahoma's faith-based initiative, designed to increase the marriage rate in America and slash the divorce rate.
2. Set concrete goals--a 50 percent cut in the divorce rate by 2010, a 20 percent increase in the marriage rate, and a 30 percent cut in illegitimacy.
3. Ask America's churches, synagogues, and mosques to make marriage a priority in every congregation, adopting proven reforms.

1. Substitute all forms of penalty against marriage ever put in place by the federal governemnt with marriage bonuses, particularly for the poor.
2. Appropriate a set proportion of TANF monies or a separate TANF budget for the rebuilding of marriage among the poor or near poor and set guidelines on their expenditure.
3. Create a new Office of Marriage Initiatives within the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families to target TANF, Child Support Enforcement, Family Planning, and other program dollars to pro-marriage initiatives. The specific objective would be to reduce the rate of divorce and out-of-wedlock births each by 30 percent, especially among welfare recipients, within the next decade. Merge the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy and Title V Office (abstinence programs) with this new Office so that their programs contribute to the effort to rebuild the culture of marriage. The new Office would coordinate the Administration's efforts to make all federal social programs more marriage-friendly, bring attention to the positive effects that increasing stable marriages will have on decreasing demand for federal entitlements, and initiate ways to foster marriage and decrease divorce, particularly among welfare recipients. Allocate about 10 percent of the ACF budget for personal and discretionary programs to the new Office, funding the Office by transferring monies from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), Child Support Enforcement, and Family Planning programs.
4. Transfer 20 percent of the Child Support Enforcement budget ($140 million in FY 2000) to the new Office of Marriage Initiatives to fund efforts--including initiatives to reduce divorce and increase stable marriages--that will reduce the future need for child support enforcement.
5. Dedicate a portion of the remaining Child Support Enforcement funds to training mediators in how to obtain more robust joint agreements to ensure that both parents continue supporting their children and to reduce the need to take delinquent parents to court, with special attention to the track record of the Focused Thinking Mediation program now in use in Southern Michigan's family courts.
6. Create an Office of Marriage Initiatives in the other social issue departments (Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Justice).

1. Recognize at the federal level that the benefits to children of having married parents are so great that the institution of marrige should be encouraged by every reasonable means possible.
2. Seek to do no harm in this realm, such as by instituting policies that provide disincentives to marriage or that fail equally to support children who are not in a two-parent family.

1. Exercise caution on specific marriage strengthening proposals since a) there is little information available about what works and about what strategies can responsibly be pursued to achieve these goals, and b) promoting marrige and strengthening families are very new goals for public policy and many in both political parties are unsure about the appropriate role of the government sector in what they regard to be a private matter.
2. Foster research, better statistics, and well-evaluated demonstration program to help guide marriage policy and build public education and support.

1. Consider marriage policy with the understanding that, for many low-income women, marriage may offer more risks--to themselves and their children--than rewards. Research shows that, unless low-skilled men's economic situations improve and they begin to change their behaviors toward women, it is quite likely that large numbers of low-income women will continue to resist marriage.

1. Focus on adopting concrete, comprehensive policies to provide all families in need with the supports they need to make a permanent transition from welfare to economic security. Resist allowing discussion of marriage as a panacea to divert attention from the goal.
2. Design welfare policies with the goal of providing assistance to all eligible families in need, not just one group, such as two-parent families.
3. Avoid coercive policies or financial incentives that promote certain types of families, rather concentrate on developing policies that support and promote strong, healthy families of any type. It is particularly important that policies not make the receipt of critical support and benefits contingent on getting or being married.
4. Ensure that people are not forced or coerced into remaining in unhealthy, abusive relationships because they are otherwise unable to receive TANF assistance and other supports.
5. Support educational programs, primarily targeted at youth, that focus on making responsible choices, entering into healthy relationships, and understanding the family situations that offer the best chance of children's growth and success.
6. Eliminate welfare policies that penalize marriage.
7. Design welfare policies that address the problems of families as they are and not only as we would like them to be.

1. Eliminate marriage penalties through comprehensive reconsideration of the entire range of explicit and implicit taxes that are currently imposed on income by, a) reducing combined marginal tax rates on low- and moderate-income individuals so that they do not rise much above the rate that applies to middle- and higher-income individuals; b) using the direct tax rate schedule as the primary means to establish overall progressivity and abandon the complicated effort to put "progressivity" into everything government does, i.e., stop adding phaseout after phaseout of benefits and subsidies; c) moving toward individually-based rather than family-based wage sibusides for low-income workers; d) at least for low- and some middle-income ranges, applying income splitting rules.
2. Make adjustments desired because of the costs of raising children through child credits and dependent exemptions, rather than by giving additional bonuses to all married couples.

1. Restore the importance of reducing illegitimacy to the central position during welfare reform Reauthorization that it held during deliberations that led to the passage of the original legislation.
2. Ensure that a test case occurs to measure the effects of eliminating welfare altogether for unmarried mothers under age 18--not just the TANF cash payment, but the entire package of benefits.

1. Question calls by conservative Congresspersons and their advisors to do more to deter unwed pregnancy and other family problems and, instead, await a clearer public mandate and the development of more effective programs.

1. Provide resources to nonprofit and faith-based organizations committed to reducing teen out-of-wedlock pregnancies, engaging fathers, and promoting marriage.
2. Take steps to reduce the financial disincentives for marriage in federal law, such at in the Earned Income Tax Credit and TANF.
3. Earmark funds to provide explicit financial incentives for low-income couples to marry or at least to avoid bearing children out-of-wedlock. For example, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation proposes that women at high-risk for having a child out-of-wedlock be given a $5,000 bonus if they have their first child within marriage. The payment would be made in $1,000 annual installments over a five-year period, dependent upon the woman remaining married. Another proposal is for states to suspend the collection of child support arrearages in cases where the biological parents get--and stay--married to each other.
4. Require states to provide the same employment services to low-income men as they currently do to low-income women.
5. Appropriate funds, as part of TANF Reauthorization, specifically targeted for programs that enhance the marital and parenting skills of high-risk families.
6. Earmark TANF funds for broad-based media campaigns designed to publicize the importance of delaying childbearing until marriage and making lifelong commitments to any children that are born.