The breakdown of marriage and family structure is one of the main causes of bloated state and federal government spending, Center for Christian Virtue (CCV) President Aaron Baer said during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily.
“The bottom line is that when family fails, the government has to grow, right? The government makes for a really poor replacement for mom and dad,” Baer said.
CCV is a Christian public policy organization that primarily works to “restore freedom, restore families, and protect faith,” with an emphasis on public policy in Ohio, where the organization is headquartered. Baer argued that rampant government spending on education, health care, and prisons is directly correlated with the breakdown of the family, and he contended that incentivizing traditional marriage and family formation would help reduce poverty, and ultimately alleviate long-term reliance on expansive government programs.
“The bottom line on this is, you look at where we spend most of our money in America today, we spend it in three places…In terms of our tax dollars: we educate, we medicate, and we incarcerate. That’s what most state budgets are based on,” he said.
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Baer said schools should “teach the success sequence,” which is “if you graduate high school, get a job, get married before having kids, there is only a 3 percent chance that you will end up in poverty. And that cuts across — no matter what situation you are coming from, no matter your race … 97 percent of kids will avoid poverty if they do this, even if you came from a non-intact home.”
Baer specifically referred to CCV’s 2025 Family Structure Index report which measures family structure trends in the U.S. and focuses on each state’s share of adult residents who are married, have children, and raise those children together through their high school years.
“Ohio is a good bellwether state — it’s got a good mix of rural, urban and suburban … You look at the cities with the highest percentage of kids born into a single parent home, and you’ll see the highest child poverty rates,” he said, referring to the report. “And again, when a kid’s in poverty, they’re going to be more dependent on welfare benefits like food benefits. They’re definitely going to be on Medicaid. They’re going to be having housing subsidies.”
“These are the things that bloat government, and by the way, once you’re on these programs, these kids then learn to think that this is the norm,” he added. “Until we fix marriage, we’re never going to be able to shrink both the state government … [and especially] our federal government.”
For the time being, Baer proposed trimming back “a number of these programs” and restructuring welfare and other programs “to be focused on getting folks off of them.”
“But this is as much as anything a church problem, right? We don’t celebrate and encourage marriage, even in our church. Our churches have bought the lie of the culture that life is about making as much money as you can and being self-actualized,” he said.
Baer said that an embrace of self-sacrifice in the United States would go a long way toward improving society and culture at large.
“When we start thinking of ourselves less and start thinking of others more, that’s actually what brings the most joy in America,” he said. “Brad Wilcox from University of Virginia has the best studies that show the happiest people in the world, despite what the media say, are married moms with kids. The second happiest are married dads with kids.”
“Because when we get out of our own heads and we stop thinking of ourselves so much, we’re actually happier. It’s how God made us,” he said.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
