President Obama has pledged that his administration will work to remove financial barriers to marriage for low 
income couples.
In his State of the Union address he said that strong families have always been “the source of our progress at home” and “the foundation of our power and influence throughout the world”.
He said that his government would “work to strengthen families by removing the financial deterrents to marriage for low-income couples”.
And he added that they would do more to encourage fatherhood “because what makes you a man isn’t the ability to conceive a child; it’s having the courage to raise one”.
Family policy experts have noted that the US tax and welfare codes place a number of disincentives in the way of lower income couples getting married.
In 2006, the Institute for American Values published a paper pointing out that government assistance programmes drastically reduced welfare payments once couples got married.
The paper, The Other Marriage Penalty- A New Proposal to Eliminate the Marriage Penalty for Low-Income Americans, says that under the US welfare code “almost any income brought into the household by a new spouse will lead to a loss of benefits for the family”.
“Thus, in the same way marriage might move a couple into a higher tax bracket or cause their standard deduction to be reduced, marriage can quite suddenly transfer a low-income family to a significantly reduced level of benefits,” it says.
The system means that many low-income parents cohabit without reporting it to the government so that their benefits won’t be cut, the paper says.
“Other parents might live near each other, perhaps with the father staying at his parents’ house. In both cases the calculus is the same: Avoid marriage because marriage would result in a substantial loss of income for the family,” it adds.
The President’s words come after he made a number of comments during his first Presidential campaign about the importance of fatherhood.
Before his election in 2008, he said it was time to acknowledge that fatherlessness was a major problem in African American communities.
He said: “But if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing – missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”
Society needed, he said “to help all the mothers out there who are raising these kids by themselves; the mothers who drop them off at school, go to work, pick up them up in the afternoon, work another shift, get dinner, make lunches, pay the bills, fix the house, and all the other things it takes both parents to do,” he said.
“So many of these women are doing a heroic job, but they need support. They need another parent. Their children need another parent. That’s what keeps their foundation strong. It’s what keeps the foundation of our country strong”.