The M.Guy Tweet, January 12, 2014

1. How to Fight Income Inequality: Get Married, The Wall Street Journal
A better and more compassionate policy to fight income inequality would be helping the poor realize that the most important decision they can make is to stay in school, get married and have children—in that order.

2. Why Marriage Won’t Solve Poverty, The Nation
The right fails to see that what’s changed isn’t just the moral status of marriage, but the institution’s economic underpinnings, particularly the collapse of decent jobs for working-class men. 

3. Wealthy Women Can Afford to Reject Marriage, but Poor Women Can't, The Atlantic 
There's a cognitive dissonance in Ehrenreich's straight-up dismissal of the economic benefits of marriage, because the statistics tell an awkward truth: Financially, married women tend to fare much better than unmarried women.

4. Why the Government Should Promote Relationship Skills, Family Studies
As Ruby Payne outlines in her book A Framework for Understanding Poverty, poverty is not just financial. These days, it often also entails growing up without a father and later lacking stable and satisfying romantic relationships. Surely those problems are worth addressing along with financial deprivation.

5. Can Uncle Sam Sell Americans on Marriage?, The Atlantic
"I don’t know anyone who sees these programs as making a big dent in poverty," he said. "What I hear about is this is another tool that addresses a crucial factor in poverty. It makes a more complete toolbox."

6. To Defeat Poverty, Look to Marriage, The Washington Post
More to the point, we know that being unmarried is one of the highest risk factors for poverty. And no, splitting expenses between unmarried people isn’t the same.

7. W. Bradford Wilcox: Marriage for Single Mothers is Not a Panacea in War on Poverty, The Deseret News
Ironically, the CCF report just confirms wisdom recently articulated in the report Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America: namely, men, women and children are much more likely to enjoy a stable and supportive family life when they sequence marriage before parenthood.

For more, see here.