Yes, really.
Via TIME:
Left-leaning poverty experts are all in a tizzy this week about conservative arguments that the answer to poverty is marriage — to “stay in school, get married and have children—in that order,” as Ari Fleischer, a former press secretary for President George W. Bush, most recently put it.
They’re arguing that the best ways to combat the multi-generational cycle of poverty and near-poverty that now traps one in three American women, and 28 million children are education, decently-paid jobs with benefits, high quality childcare and work supports like paid family leave.
These ideas aren’t new. They’re not sexy or exciting. And they’re certainly not likely to get any meaningful traction in our current Congress.
That’s why I’ve come up with a hot new idea. It’ll boost the marriage rate, combat child poverty, and, very likely, promote no-cost family planning among the poor – all without any new burden on taxpayers. It’s polyandry – think “Sister Wives” turned “Brother Husbands” — and it was inspired by Barbara Ehrenreich, the acerbic author best known for her 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
At a launch event on Wednesday for the new Shriver Report, A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink, Ehrenreich, who took jobs as a waitress, nursing-home aide, hotel housekeeper, Wal-Mart associate and maid for a house-cleaning service to learn first-hand about poverty, shared a fresh new perspective on the just-say-yes-to-the-dress solution.
“When you say to women, to get out of poverty you should get married, my question to them is how many men you have to marry,” she said. “Marrying a 10-dollar-an-hour man gets you nowhere, so you’d really have to marry three or four.”
HT: Jay