Once again, you have confronted me with an issue I haven't really thought about before. You seem to have a knack for that.

Initially, I was inclined to agree, and perhaps I may still when and if I hear more details about the plan, because I don't know those details. However, after thinking about this for a time, I've come up with quite a number of reservations.

First, though, a digression to match yours:

> (How can any politician try to write legislation regarding a subject he personally knows nothing about? But I digress.)

The President of the United States does not have the luxury to legislate only what he has personal experience with. It would be a weak President indeed if he were stunted into inaction on all matters with which he is not directly familiar. In such cases, he should pay heed to his advisers, but ultimately the decision is still his to make, and it must be made.

But I digress.

The first thing that gave me qualms is the use of the word "force." "Encourage" seems to be a better term. Nobody's being forced to marry. Even if the plan amounts to sort of de facto coercion in a few cases where people do not feel they can make it financially without marrying, I don't believe "force" is the correct term at all, and in any case is this morally less reprehensible than past plans under which marriage was penalized? Penalizing married couples even extends *outside* the welfare system and into regular old income tax. That isn't exactly good for promoting family integrity either. Not that I mean to suggest that the wrongness of one extreme justifies the other. It doesn't.

But here's another thing that makes me think "force" is the wrong word. Bush is *spending*, not *saving*, $300 million to "promote marriage." The fact that he is spending this money, rather than conserving it, suggests to me that married couples are receiving additional benefits, rather than single people getting benefits taken away. (I realize it could be both; I don't know the details of the plan.) How can anyone, then, claim that anybody is being "forced" to marry because somebody *else* is getting extra money?

True, some people will marry just to receive those additional benefits. But...

> ...And when the marriage fails, those children Bush is so worried about will be left to deal with the emotional consequences.

...whose responsibility is it if and when that marriage fails? Not Bush's. Not the government's. People are responsible for their own actions. If they marry for extra cash and screw themselves and their children up, it's their fault. The children are the innocents, as always, and it is tragic that they are hurt by broken homes, but the fault for the hurt of these children does not shift from the parents and their own decisions to the government and their welfare plans just because the government institutes a plan that can be taken wrongful advantage of.

The thing about welfare is that people expect to much from it. It is simply not possible for welfare to stop children being hurt by broken homes. It's also not possible to institute a program of welfare that *somebody* can't take advantage of, to the harm of others.

Welfare shouldn't be held responsible for the first, and given that the second is unavoidable unless everybody in the world were completely honest and honorable, that leaves welfare with only one just and proper burden: to see that people who need money to live get it. If that's happening, welfare is working. Ideally, the dispensation of welfare should be in such a way as to enable and encourage more people, rather than less, to get on their own feet again, re-enter the work force, and start providing for themselves and contributing to the economy. If it is thought that paying extra benefits to married couples will help more people than it hurts (and doubly so if the specific people it helps are the honest and honorable ones and the specific people it hurts are the ones taking advantage of the system), then I'm all for it. Sure, some innocent children will be hurt by the change; other innocent children will be saved from hurt by the change, and this is true no matter WHAT change to the welfare system is proposed. The trick is in determining whether more are helped than hurt and balancing that with how much money is being plugged into the system in the first place.

Whether Bush's plan will be an improvement or not, I don't know. I'd have to see more details. Based on what I *do* know -- and making guesses about what I don't that could potentially reverse my conclusion completely if wrong -- I think I'm less concerned about the wrongness of the plan than the usefulness of it. In other words, I don't think it'll hurt more than it helps, but I'm reluctant to say that I see it helping significantly more than it hurts. The tentative tie breaker for me is that it is better for family integrity to encourage marriage rather than to *dis*courage it, which is what various money-related government plans have been doing for a long time.

Ideally, of course, we would have a social and political system set up to encourage marriage only between couples that love each other and intend to stay with each other for life, and not to make it convenient for couples to marry for...well, convenience.

But it's not possible to achieve that ideal, so the fact that some plan or other *doesn't* achieve it shouldn't be cause to denounce it.