State Rep. Spencer Swalm probably overstated his case, but the Centennial Republican’s recent remarks on the House floor linking poverty and out-of-wedlock births hardly deserved the storm of indignation that erupted.
“Swalm displays a great deal of ignorance about the causes of poverty,” House Speaker Terrance Carroll, D-Denver, responded. “His comments are an insult to every single person who lives in poverty, who works their butt off every single day just to keep their head above water.”
Yes, Mr. Speaker, poverty’s causes are complex, but it’s hardly bad advice to say “don’t have kids out of wedlock” if you don’t want to be poor, as Swalm did during debate over a bill involving an earned-income tax credit. Nor is it “an insult” to say that “If you’re married, if at all possible, try to stay married. Those are ways to lift families out of poverty” — so long as you’re not advocating that people remain in damaging relationships, which Swalm was not.
If it’s an insult to discuss the statistical perils of unmarried parenthood, then Barack Obama must be the rudest public figure of all.
“If we are honest with ourselves,” Obama said while running for president, “we’ll admit that . . . too many fathers [are] missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men . . . . We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”
An article by The Post’s Jessica Fender noted that more than a third of Colorado kids in single-parent homes lived in poverty in 2008, compared with 8.6 percent of children with a married couple. So while poverty is hardly a stranger in two-parent homes, it’s at least not a frequent visitor.
Unreported in the furor over Swalm’s remarks is the actual reason he was upset. He’s not an enemy of earned-income tax credits for the poor. No, he opposed House Bill 1002 because it upended a tax-refund compromise struck when Referendum C was put on the ballot. Under that deal, the income-tax rate is supposed to be reduced first when the state enjoys a TABOR surplus again. In other words, Swalm was protesting an attempt by his Democratic colleagues to break faith with voters.
The dust-up over Swalm’s remarks reminds us that honest public conversation about poverty is now almost impossible given the manufactured outrage directed at any reference to cultural factors that contribute to it. Such a conversation is also rare because many Americans probably sense that some of those factors are not only ingrained but actually spreading — as well as creating a growing class divide whose root causes are difficult to address.
As Kay Hymowitz explained a few years ago in her book “Marriage and Caste in America,” “While Americans have been squabbling about gay marriage, they have managed to miss the real marriage-and-social-justice issue, one that affects far more people . . . . We are now a nation of separate and unequal families not only living separate and unequal lives but, more worrisome, destined for separate and unequal futures . . . .
“The old-fashioned married-couple- with-children model is doing quite well among college-educated women. It is primarily among lower-income women with only a high school education that it is in poor health.”
She readily admits that “there are millions of poor Americans, living not just in down-on-your-luck hardship but in entrenched, multigenerational poverty. There is growing inequality between the haves and have-nots.” But given how families “socialize children for success — or not,” and because it is far easier for married couples to place child development at center stage, the prospects for reducing poverty’s rolls are actually becoming more bleak.
Nearly 40 percent of all children were born to unwed mothers in 2007, the highest figure ever. For Asians, the percentage was 17; for whites, 28; for blacks, a catastrophic 72.
Unfortunately, the biggest surge is occurring in the fastest-growing segment of the population: Over half of all Latino births are now to unwed moms, too.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
