Every time the president announces another program that takes billions of taxpayer dollars and serves no essential purpose, the despair among homeless people reaches new peaks. The plan to explore the moon and mars bears a price tag well into the billions of dollars, and seems to the homeless far less essential than getting people off the streets.
But the latest is even worse: a $1.5 billion program to teach poor people interpersonal skills—so they can marry and get off welfare! The announcement surely had people looking around to find the hidden camera and an announcer telling them they were the butt of a joke. The only problem is that nobody is laughing, and most homeless people are too burned out to cry.
The very suggestion of spending money to encourage marriage is downright obscene. First of all, the government has no business meddling in the private lives of its citizens with regard to marriage plans. Secondly marriage’s counterpart, divorce, is a prime reason for homelessness in the United States. Check among the homeless population; the number of persons who ended up on the streets in the wake of a vicious divorce is staggering. Laws do not prevent such cases from occurring, so how can promoting marriage take people off welfare, when the final result might be to put more people on welfare?
While women have numerous organizations that can offer them assistance that divorce does not leave them homeless, men have no parallel organizations, and government programs do not assist them. Divorced men are often required to leave their homes—many times for no valid reason—only to find themselves unable to obtain or maintain housing along with child and spousal support expenses (costs most divorced women are never asked to pay) bearing down.
And when a man ends up on the street, ultimately the woman pays as well, as her source of support vanishes. She must now fend for herself or go on welfare, defeating the purpose of the ill-advised programs designed to promote the institution of marriage. Worse yet, children are often involved, and aside from the welfare funds spent on these children of divorced parents, the long-term damage done to these children has already proven itself to be a major social problem.
Were the president to redirect the money from this program, to programs that rehabilitate the needy, surely the amount of welfare spending would be reduced greatly. It only makes sense that money should be spent here on earth before taking it to outer space. And it only follows that promoting an institution that fails in as many as 50% of the cases is little short of sheer madness, even before calculating the projected price tag for all the social welfare programs needed to remedy the problems caused by marriage and divorce.
