King Bush III condemns unwed mothers (but gives them cash)

I promised not to pay attention to any Republican Presidential candidate on the grounds that none have any chance of winning. However, friends on Facebook (i.e., not any of my actual friends!) have been linking to “Jeb Bush In 1995: Unwed Mothers Should Be Publicly Shamed” (Huff Post, June 9, 2015). The quoted passage doesn’t support the headline:

One of the reasons more young women are giving birth out of wedlock and more young men are walking away from their paternal obligations is that there is no longer a stigma attached to this behavior, no reason to feel shame. Many of these young women and young men look around and see their friends engaged in the same irresponsible conduct. Their parents and neighbors have become ineffective at attaching some sense of ridicule to this behavior. There was a time when neighbors and communities would frown on out of wedlock births and when public condemnation was enough of a stimulus for one to be careful.

In other words, the would-be King Bush III condemned both young men and women for their respective roles in generating out-of-wedlock children. Presumably the editors behind the headline thought that readers would be more shocked at a verbal attack on “single mothers” or “unwed mothers” or simply “mothers” than on young parents of both sexes.

[Note that Bush was writing in 1995, shortly after implementation of the Federal Family Support Act of 1988, which required states to codify the profit potential of obtaining custody of out-of-wedlock children via child support guideline formulae (see the “History of Divorce” chapter for how this changed Americans’ incentives).]

One reason to throw rocks at Jeb Bush for this idea is that it isn’t clear how it could be put into practice. What if the “unwed mother” is a cash-minded foreigner who reads realworlddivorce.com, comes over here as a tourist, has sex with a dentist, and takes the $2 million baby back with her to Eastern Europe (for example)? How does she become aware that the Americans who are wiring her money every week are also publicly shaming her?

Another strange angle is that Bush was governor of Florida for 8 years. According to the research that we did for http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Florida, the state offers unlimited child support profits ($17,244/year plus 5% of the target’s pre-tax income above $120,000/year). Unless Bush changed his views while in office, he was simultaneously presiding over a system to hand out billions of dollars for Behavior X while believing that people who engage in Behavior X should be publicly shamed. As noted in our chapter, a Floridian who can have children with two different co-parents, each of whom earns at least $120,000/year, can earn more from child support than from going to college and working. As noted in The Redistribution Recession, a Floridian having children with co-parents at the bottom end of the income distribution would be better off collecting welfare than working at a low-wage job. If there were any shame in the Florida single parent lifestyle it would be the kind of shame that one could take all the way to the bank.