Breakdown of Traditional Families

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, tonight I will talk one more time about what I think is the most pressing problem facing America as we try to address the crime rate, the drug problem, and the education problem. It is a problem that was, sadly, not addressed in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

As a matter of fact, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act went, to a certain extent, in the opposite direction. I want to educate the American public on this problem, and that is the breakdown of the traditional family with a man in the household over the last 60 years of America.

As this Congress tries to make America great again, it is hard to imagine America being that great if we continue to punish and penalize any family that has both parents at home.

America has changed dramatically. In the 1960s, about 5 percent of the children in this country were born into families without both a mother and father at home. I want to point out, I know families of all sorts of backgrounds. I know parents who have done a fantastic job of raising children in all backgrounds, and sometimes beyond their fault, there are families who appear to be doing a perfect job of raising their children, but nevertheless have a problem.

I think most Americans, though, with common sense would say it is more difficult for, say, the post-1995 generations, where 40 percent of American children are born without a mother and father at home, compared to the generation of children born in the 1960s, when that number was only 5 percent.

We have to ask ourselves why that happened. Sometimes when I talk to people back home, they mention the decline in religion, and maybe that is why we shot up from 5 percent to 40 percent.

Actually, if you look at programs the government authors, and I am going to reference George Gilder a little bit here, who was a great sociologist, if I can call him that, who wrote ``Wealth and Poverty'' in 1980. He looked at single-parent families to see if he had any observations. The families he looked at were specifically from the poorer parts of Albany, New York. At the time a woman got pregnant, if the family was not a married group, they began to collect benefits, and it was not a panic situation in which, how are we going to support the child? What are we going to do? Are we going to have to live with your parents? What are we going to do? It was kind of gleeful as they went from government office to government office getting their low-income housing, getting their free healthcare, getting their free college education if they wanted to go to college, food stamps, like I said, free apartment, which I think is the most generous giveaway of all.

Now, I don't know that it is good that we have created a situation in which a young person getting pregnant should be happy because of all the government benefits they are eligible for, but if you look at the eligibility requirements for every one of these programs, they are based on what we call percent of poverty. If you have somebody in the household--it could be a woman or it could be a man--if a man is in the household, you could penalize that family by easily $25,000 or $30,000 cash for having both parents at home.

An example of programs which fit the bill, which we penalize people for getting married, would be formerly called food stamps, certainly low-income housing, which by itself can be a benefit of over $12,000 a year; something called the earned income tax credit, which can easily be $6,000 or $7,000 a year, provided you work and keep your income under $17,000 or $16,000 a year.

If you do a little bit of work, unlike, say, if you had a sister who is married to a husband with a salary, you would get free childcare, childcare not available to a couple with two incomes.

There is a TANF program for people who aren't employed, giving free cash away. Again, it is much easier to get if you don't have a working parent in the household.

We have our child credit, which is, again, something that is phased out and appears to be designed to discourage people from getting married.

We have Pell grants--and I will tell you a story about that in a minute--a program that gives free college to a family without a working person.

Not surprising, if you spend some time talking to people who aren't at your country club fundraiser, spend some time talking to people who are not lobbyists, you will be surprised how many young people today are not getting married because they want that $25,000, $30,000 cash benefit that you get if you stay single and frequently don't have a man in the house.

I will also point out that frequently these benefits allow you to get benefits better than people who are working are getting. For example, it is a well-known thing, but if you talk to people, clerks at the local food store will tell you that people on food stamps are frequently buying things that the clerk in the food store cannot afford.

When it comes to low-income housing, particularly because we have a horrible program called the low-income housing tax credit program, the government incentivizes developers to build housing that costs $300,000, $400,000, or, in some cases, over a million dollars per unit, in which some people will be able to live, provided their income is low enough. You will find out what a person working for me once found out.

She got married, and she and her new husband were looking for a new apartment. They found what they felt were the nicest apartments in Madison, Wisconsin, were the low-income apartments. Not only do you get a free apartment, but it is superior to the apartments that other people are paying for.

With regard to childcare, I have heard a childcare provider say that she preferred to get the vouchers--and I don't know if this is always true; I have heard a mixed bag--but get vouchers from somebody from the government because those were always paid.

Childcare is very expensive today. If you agree to take care of a child, maybe sometimes that family will not have enough income to pay for the child. If you are on the government dole, it is more consistent. You will always get the childcare credit.

With regard to college, I will tell you a story. I once gave this speech about 15 years ago in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and I wondered what the people would think of the marriage penalty. Most of the people who were listening to the speech were older people. It was a Tea Party group, and they, of course, all agreed with me that it was scandalous that we were bribing somebody $25,000 a year not to get married.

I asked a gal who was present in the room that night--her job was a bartenderess--what she thought about these programs in which you would get a benefit, not only if you didn't get married, but an even larger benefit if you didn't work too hard. She said she got married before she had a baby, but a lot of her friends preferred not to get married before they had a baby because they got free college. In other words, one more time we had a situation in which this woman--and I found there were other people in the same boat making the same observation.

Young people going to college--kind of hard to believe, but it is true--may decide not to get married because they get the Pell grant, another poorly designed program, and get it to pay for either all or part of their college.

You may say: Is this all on purpose? Did the government design these programs to destroy the American family? Who would do that?

Let's not forget that Karl Marx, a socialist who is looked up to in some universities, said one of his goals was to abolish the family.

More recently, in 1960, a woman who has been described as the mother of women's studies--which is a major we make fun of in college. Nevertheless, it is something that a lot of kids take as an elective. Kate Millett, the mother of these classes, said: The complete destruction of the traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the utopian goal of feminism.

I have a feeling a lot of people don't realize that the utopian goal of feminism was to get rid of the nuclear family. Obviously, Kate Millett's successors are probably thrilled that we penalize married couples $25,000, $30,000 for getting married.

More recently, a Wisconsin Supreme Court judge--this is just what we call dictum. Nevertheless, she was a judge elected statewide. She said the notion that marriage serves as the foundation of the family is at best outdated and at worst misogynistic.

This is a woman who didn't, obviously, put that on her television commercials. It is interesting that a very liberal judge in the State of Wisconsin clearly had contempt for traditional marriage. Apparently, she maybe took some women's studies classes in college.

It seemed from her comments in this court case that she would be thrilled if traditional marriage was no longer the norm.

I talked to an Indian immigrant back home in my district. He made an interesting observation. Congressmen should go out of their way to talk to their immigrants because, frequently, they have observations as to what is going on in America that Americans who have been here their whole lives do not have. What he said is that, in America, the woman marries the government, and that is exactly true.

When we have a country in which the woman is encouraged to marry the government, the woman, the child, and the father pay a price. Children born in a difficult background like this are, by almost every standard, on average--and I realize there are examples of tremendous parents--on average, have a tougher go of it in life. They are going to struggle more in school. They are going to be more likely to use drugs. They are going to be more likely to commit crimes.

It is kind of interesting when I sit in committee hearings around here. We had a committee hearing on crime earlier this week. People look around for the causes, or this or that, of the problems we have, problems related to drug abuse, problems related to crime, maybe problems related to depression. They never talk about what the real problem is, the real problem being the breakdown of the family.

Does anybody doubt that if we still had a rate of fatherlessness in the home of--or a rate of intact families--back to 5 percent as we did in the 1960s, that our crime rate would drop like a stone? Does anybody think or not think that the number of--even though it can happen in the best of families--the number of people dying of drug abuse wouldn't fall? Does anybody think our education would improve if we had kids who are doing a better job of focusing at school?

It is high time, in the second bill that this Congress passes, that we begin to address this problem. We can't address it by giving every married couple $25,000 a year because we don't have that kind of money and would probably only encourage more people not to work very hard.

Mr. Speaker, by the way, I should mention, just as these programs discourage marriage, they all discourage work. I will mention the low- income housing tax credit program.

Mr. Speaker, I ran into somebody a couple of months ago. In order to be eligible for these very nice apartments, they could make only so much money. I will speculate that this person was making, say, $50,000 a year. If they got a second job, they had to be aware that their rent would go up.

In this country, particularly with the low-income housing tax credit, we penalize people who work hard. I think that is horrible public policy, but that is what we do.

Mr. Speaker, in any event, when the next reconciliation package comes through, I strongly hope that the Republican leadership, rather than allowing something like the low-income housing tax credit to go through and be expanded, of all things, Republican leadership recognizes this is a problem.

Even if they don't care if a man is in the house or not, at least they shouldn't penalize him. They shouldn't hate families in which a man and woman are raising their children together. I think that should be the number one priority of Congress.

Mr. Speaker, the second issue that I will take on is that we passed a defense authorization bill last week that I think had a serious problem. I would hope our slumbering press corps would do a little bit more work on the problem.

Elon Musk and DOGE were here. They did a good job pointing out that there were some, particularly in offices, Federal employees in the District of Columbia, or even around the country, that maybe weren't working that hard. Some of this happens in the private sector. More likely, it will happen in the public sector.

Right now, we have about 80,000 employees--I think a little bit under that; it might be 76,000--in the Department of Defense who are non- uniformed. I assume most of these employees are not people who cut the lawn or something. Most of these employees are in an office, and at least Elon Musk seemed to point out that a lot of them might not be working that hard.

Under the defense authorization, they anticipate, over the next year, the number of non-uniformed employees will drop by maybe another 30,000 or 40,000. When DOGE was riding high, I think one would have expected this number to drop more like 200,000 or 300,000.

I then asked the Department of Defense to, as quickly as possible, put together a proposal and say what would happen if they had to make do with only 400,000 or 450,000 non-uniformed employees in the Department of Defense. I will point out that a lot of these employees are making over $100,000 or $150,000 a year, with anecdotal evidence that they do very little.

One of the reasons Congress is so irresponsible is our press corps is asleep. I hope our press corps digs into this situation a little bit and publicizes how many people are working in desk jobs in the Pentagon, desk jobs in which they are not in uniform, and questions whether this is really necessary. We can then see whether there are significant savings here.

Of course, some of the money will not go to reducing our debt. Insofar as we find excess people around here, I think we are not prepared enough in this country for hypersonic missiles. I don't think we have an Iron Dome-type Israel situation in which we are prepared for other sorts of missiles.

I think the reason we are not prepared is that there are way too many people who are not working as hard as they could in the Pentagon. I am going to ask the press corps to wake up and ask people about that.

I will also ask the press corps to wake up and ask Congress whether it is appropriate that we penalize married couples by $25,000 or $35,000 a year because they got married, as opposed to their siblings who may not have gotten married.

Mr. Speaker, there is one other thing I want to comment on tonight. I was listening to a television program on one of the big conservative networks, and I listened to a commentator make fun of socialism. She talked about how much better capitalism was. I don't think she has a good handle on why capitalism is good.

First of all, we ought to require all defenders of capitalism to not call capitalism ``capitalism.'' We ought to call it a free-market economy. The major reason we would rather live in a country with a free-market economy than in a country that is a socialist economy is the government has so much more power in a socialist country than a free-market economy.

In a socialist economy, or as we work toward a more socialist economy, a larger segment of the population works for the government. As an elected official, I have noticed in my time that, frequently, people who work for the government are afraid to speak openly to me about problems in their field.

Mr. Speaker, I am thinking a substitute teacher would be afraid to give me a campaign contribution because they worked for a school district that was hostile to Republicans. They felt they would be discriminated against if they knew they gave money to a Republican politician.

There are people who worked for the Department of Natural Resources in Wisconsin, which is the equivalent of the EPA in Washington, who tell me about problems in their department but caution me that they could never cite them. What they were telling me had to be secret because they worked for the government and because they were afraid the government would discriminate against somebody who backed the party, the less government party, the Republican Party.

In a free-market economy, we can rent from whoever we want. In a socialist state, all the property is owned by the government. Right now, my office is in a place called Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. If I want to live in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, first of all, I pay rent. I am guessing that in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, there are maybe 400 different landlords. The landlords compete for the rental dollar.

I have the ability to buy my own house, paint my house whatever color I want, and maintain my lawn in whatever fashion I want. That is something we do in a free-market economy.

In a socialist economy, the government runs everything. If I want to rent a dwelling, I have to rent from the government. If the government doesn't like me, if I have said the wrong thing, or if I have said something that is politically incorrect, they may say they will not rent to me. They might also give me an inferior place.

The same thing applies to food. In a free-market economy, my guess is, in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a city of only about 35,000 people, I bet there are 150 places where I can go to eat and have something made for me.

In a socialist economy, something that the gentleman who is running for mayor of New York would like--I guess he would like only one type of grocery store. There would only be one sort of restaurant because all the restaurants are run by the government.

First of all, since they are owned by the government, they don't have to compete into a better job because they are never going to go through bankruptcy. Secondly, because they are owned by the government, the government determines what fare is offered. They determine how many restaurants we have that will serve Italian fare or Mexican or what have you. It is much better in a free economy.

Even more importantly, in a socialist economy, we have to work for the government. The more people who have to work for the government, the less freedom they have. If we have to work for the government and the government is all-powerful, as it is in a socialist state, the government determines whether we keep our jobs, whether we are promoted in our jobs, or whether or not we get raises.

Mr. Speaker, it is all determined by a government that may look down on us if we are critical of the central planning authority. That is a big difference between a free-market economy and a socialist economy.

Mr. Speaker, in a socialist economy, you do not have to do well because you are owned by the government, or if you have a restaurant that has crummy food or you have a factory in which the people are not working very hard, because apparently some people are not working very hard for the Department of Defense, you do not get in trouble for that.

Because it is a socialist economy, everybody becomes poorer because there is no incentive to work that much harder. You can't lose your job, Mr. Speaker, because everybody is working for the government. That is another reason why life is so much better in a free market economy.

I think people like being free better. When you talk about testimonials in the old Soviet Union, Mr. Speaker, and probably to this day because the work ethic hasn't changed enough, you run into a lot of very unhappy people because they are stuck in an economic system in which they have to work for the government.

As a matter of fact, I know a friend who went to Cuba. It was an interesting observation. In Cuba, which is an island country, he noticed that there were no, or almost no, boats on the docks as he went around the Gulf of Mexico.

This is a sign of what happens in a socialist state. People are so unhappy there that they won't allow them to get on boats and go into the Gulf of Mexico to somewhere else. They have got to force the people to stay at home.

In any event, I think in the future when we explain to the younger people why we like a free market economy rather than a socialist economy, we should emphasize the freedom that comes with a free market economy, the freedom to pick one of hundreds of employers in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, or if you want to get around the whole country, one of hundreds of thousands of employers. You have the ability to rent or buy a home wherever you want, Mr. Speaker, not where you are restricted by where the government is. You have the ability when you go to a retail outlet to have people competing for your sales dollar so there are a lot of opportunities to buy this item of clothing or these appliances or whatnot, as opposed to in a socialist state where the government determines what the government bureaucrats think you need.

Finally, of course, you are overwhelmingly wealthier because in a free market economy, Mr. Speaker, you are free to work hard, and you are free to open up your own business. By doing that, all of society is wealthier, as opposed to the socialist state in which everybody has to work for the government. There is no guaranteed incentive for working harder. If you think of a better way to do business, Mr. Speaker, you are not allowed to set up business on your own. All you can do is make a suggestion to your boss, and if he doesn't care to take your suggestion on how the business can improve, well, Mr. Speaker, then it just never improves.

This is why the socialist state in old Russia, the old Soviet Union, was so ineffective.

In any event, to summarize tonight, first of all, I really hope Republican leadership and President Trump begin to address the $25,000 penalty this country imposes on any married couple with children.

Secondly, I hope Republicans point out when they talk about the difference between socialism and what they refer to as capitalism, that the major difference is the freedom that comes from a free market economy.

Finally, I hope the press corps pays attention to the huge number of non-uniformed employees in the Department of Defense and what the current administration is doing about it.

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