Marriage Will Not Fix Poverty
More than half (55 percent) of the nearly 28 million people in low-income families with children are in households headed by a married couple.
.. If today’s families looked as they did in 1979 (meaning fewer single parents), the poverty rate would be 1.6 percentage points lower, she finds. If the distribution of income today looked as it did in 1979, the poverty rate would be 7.1 percentage points lower.
.. However, there is one thing about being married that very much does tend to lift families out of poverty: having two incomes. There’s no demographic in America doing better income-wise than dual-earner households, who on average earn more than $100,000 annually. It’s simple math: Most of the time, two incomes combined is going to result in a sum greater than $40,000.
.. And that’s a big part of the reason that, overall, married couples are doing better than single-parent households—just 7 percent of married couples with two incomes are making less than $40,000, according to data from the Census Bureau.