$737 million! It’s a staggering number. It’s also the amount of the US Department of Health and Human Services’ entire budget for the fiscal year 2009; it’s the balance of Minnesota’s 2008-09 budget; it’s $87 million more than Wisconsin’s current budget gap. It’s also the estimated cost of family fragmentation to state and local taxpayers in the state of Wisconsin.

A first-of-its-kind study, The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing, released this week by the Institute for American Values reveals that the estimated cost of family fragmentation to US taxpayers is at least $112 billion every year. $737 million is our Wisconsin portion of that number. And these are very cautious, low estimates.

At Wisconsin Family Council we believe strongly in the moral, social, civic and economic import of marriage and family. God has given us a model for family, the gold standard—a married mother and father and their biological or adopted children. As history and the social sciences have repeatedly proven, that model is the optimal situation on every count for both children and adults.

I’ve said this many times before, the state of the nation and the state depend on the state of the family. The economic issues facing our nation, and our state, should not come as a surprise. We’ve been chipping away at the family—the foundation of society—for over a century now. It’s just in the last few decades that we’ve finally had the social science data to show conclusively the disastrous consequences.

Not everyone is convinced, however, by all of the overwhelming social evidence in favor of the traditional family. The purpose of this new study is to show those people that the breakdown of the family affects everyone—in a way that speaks to their pocketbook.

The breakdown of annual federal, state and local costs of family fragmentation speaks volumes. On the national level: $9.6 billion for food stamps, $9.2 billion for child welfare, $27.9 billion for Medicaid, $19.3 billion for the justice system—for juvenile delinquency. In Wisconsin: $284 million for the justice system alone, $198 million for Medicaid and $93 million for child welfare. Those are heartbreaking statistics!

The study indicates that of the 199,000 children living in poverty in Wisconsin, almost 70% live in unmarried households—about 139,000 children! We’re patching up the child poverty problem with child welfare but ignoring the root issue and that is just not acceptable.

Friends, we are doing our children, the next generation, a huge disservice by promoting and encouraging nontraditional families when we flaunt promiscuity and tolerate teenage pregnancy, cohabitation, unilateral divorce and so-called homosexual marriage. The taxpayer costs in this study are daunting, but they are merely surface issues indicative of a much deeper, more pervasive and troubling problem—the breakdown of the family in America, in Wisconsin, in our communities, our churches and our homes.

That’s the real message of this stud. The real costs to Americans for the breakdown of the family is evident everywhere we look: in school violence, in declining high school graduation rates, in rising domestic violence rates, in the increase of unilateral divorce, in the number of children who are not experiencing the historically and scientifically-proven benefits of being raised in a household with a married mom and dad.

We owe it to our children to start taking steps now to reverse this generational trend regarding marriage and family. Churches are in an excellent position to promote and strengthen marriage and family. In fact, we’re hosting five marriage strengthening conferences for pastors and ministry leaders this spring for that very purpose. For details on these conferences, call us toll free at 888-378-7395.

Yes, $737 million is a staggering number; but more staggering is the broken lives and shattered hopes and dreams of real people that number represents. May God give us compassion for those affected and the determination to do something to solve the problem in our own sphere of influence.

For Wisconsin Family Council, I’m Julaine Appling, reminding you the Prophet Hosea said, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”

http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2008pres/02/20080204a.html, accessed 04/14/08.

http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/fiscal/files/ibgf1006.pdf, accessed 04/14/08.