What If Taxes Could Make Divorce Even More Painful?

Conservatives have spent years trying to save marriage -- from redefinition, from collapse. Gay marriage is the biggest headline issue, but social conservatives are uniformly aghast at the prevalence of divorce and the rising levels of extramarital childbearing.

Various remedies have been proposed to reverse these trends, to little effect. Divorce rates have been falling, but that’s likely attributable, at least in part, to the number of people who don’t marry in the first place. And so far, no one has any very good proposals to persuade people to return en masse to the stable, lifelong unions that characterized earlier eras. The government programs that have been tried -- like a major Bush-era initiative -- produced little in the way of results.