There's a movement afoot in the US Congress to provide a marriage benefit to certain inner city families of $9,000 that can be applied to starting a business or home ownership, among a few otrher limited uses. I tried to find a link, but couldn't find a link to the news article I saw 2-3 days ago on CBS News. The internet's kind of wonky today, so you'll have to excuse my citations beyond CBS news...but I digress.

There are a multitude of problems with this whole movement that any reasonably minded American could drive a Mack Truck through. First and foremost is the fact that GETTING married doesn't ensure they'll STAY married. The purpose behind this whole legislation was to balance out the welfare benefits many of these families lose by marrying (I will resist this other chance to digress, but I'm counting on Sabrina to pick up the slack in the responses). But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out THIS formula: get married, collect the check, get divorced and get the welfare bnenefits back. Even putting a time limit on marriage wouldn't help as there are ways to manipulate THOSE laws as well.

Another issue with this proposed legislation is that it is discriminatory. A white, middle class family is more likely to bring in a financial return on the $9,000 investment, and, frankly, marriage is becoming just as endangered among middle class whites as it is among inner city blacks, albeit for different reasons.

But the thing that galls me most about this idea is that it is a VERY thinly veiled attempt at reparations. While there are whites in inner city housing projects, they are very distinctly in the minority, and are more likely to be married. We couldn't get reparations through openly, now we'll try to sneak them in under the guise of "preserving family values" because out of touch Congresspersons see that as being the pressing desire of many Americans and think their constituents are too stupid to see through the veil.

I'm guessing that this idea didn't go over too big among the public. That would explain why MSM quickly aired the concept, and just as quickly buried it.