Single-parent families receive ten times the aid of two-parent families

According to data from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, roughly ten times as many single-parent and no-parent families receive government assistance compared to two-parent families per month on average across the United States.

The issue of dependence upon government and domestic tax policy has come sharply into focus in the aftermath of the release of a surreptitiously recorded video at a fundraiser for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney last May in Boca Raton, Fla. Many feel Romney inaccurately portrayed, and is indifferent to the segment of society that doesn’t pay taxes, in addition to the segment of society that receives government welfare.

According to a blog post in the New York Times, the three largest government safety net programs serving the nonelderly are Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps) and unemployment insurance. The programs exist to aid American families in time of poor health, hunger and joblessness.

None of these programs track the familial or marital status of those receiving benefits on a national level. Medicaid, funded in large part by the federal government, is administered largely at the state level, as is SNAP. The U.S. Department of Labor also either does not carefully track or does not make public the family type or marital status of those receiving unemployment benefits.

However, the TANF program does.

In the calendar year 2011, nearly 97,500 two-parent families received aid through TANF state programs nationwide per month on average, and no aid was administered to two-parent families in 23 different states for the entire year. California, the most populous state, administered aid to just more than 60,000 two-parent families per month on average, and Texas, the second-most populous state, administered aid to none.

This picture is drastically different when looking at single-parent families who received TANF aid. In 2011, 950,000 single-parent families nationwide got help per month on average. Every U.S. state gave TANF dollars to single-parent or no-parent families in 2011, the most aid again being given out in California.

In California alone, 272,000 single-parent households got TANF aid per month on average in 2011, nearly three times what the TANF program gave to two-parent families nationwide in the same year.

This data suggests that a two-parent family is much less likely to seek aid from the TANF program than a single-parent family. This coincides with data that shows single-parent families earn roughly a quarter of what two-parent families earn on average while at the same time facing higher out-of-pocket costs for services like childcare during the workday.

Whether these single-parent families are part of the now-infamous 47 percent to whom Romney refers is completely unknown. However, a Quinnipiac University poll released in July found that Romney, at that time, led with married voters 51 percent to 38. By contrast, unmarried voters at that time backed Obama 54 percent to 34, and among single women, Obama led Romney 61 percent to 30.

In the video circulating around the web, Romney was in the midst of a question and answer period at his fundraising event. He responded to questions about foreign policy, the national debt, the deficit and campaign strategy.

Near the end of the first video, one of the donors attending the event asked Romney, “For the last three years, all everyone’s been told is, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.’ How are you going to do it in the two months before the elections to convince everyone that you’ve got to take care of yourself?”

Romney said in response, “Well, there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the President no matter what. There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it, but it’s an entitlement and that the government should give it to them.

“And they will vote for this president no matter what. The President starts off with 48, 49 percent; he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax, so our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. He’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every, every four years.

“And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the five to 10 percent that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other, that are dependent upon, in some cases, emotion – whether they like the guy or not, or what he looks like. We’ve asked those people – we do all these polls. I find it amazing that we do all these polls. Forty-five percent of the people are voting Republican, and 48 or 49 …”

And at that point, the video ends. When the video resumes in part two, Romney is answering questions about China and other issues in foreign policy.

How do you think Mitt Romney’s comments affect the American family? Do you think spending government money on behalf of single-parent families is a good idea?

Landon Hemsley is the project lead for FamilyNews.com and a web producer for Deseret Digital Media. He is a graduate of Utah State University, is married to a wonderful woman, and has lived in the Intermountain West for the last 5 years.