On Mon, 18 Feb 2013, Petros <Petros.Listig@fdrive.com.au> wrote:
http://www.alternet.org/marriage-dying
Interesting article about the support for marriage being a way of attacking poor people, interracial couples, and other couples who aren't liked by the people in power.
http://www.acoss.org.au/uploads/ACOSS%20Poverty%20Report%202012_Final.pdf
Table 4: Risk of poverty - proportion of people from different groups living below poverty lines in 2009-10 (%) 50% of median - At risk group 60% of median
Single, no children: 25.3 41.5 Lone parent: 25.0 36.4 Couple, no children: 8.4 18.5 Couple, children: 9.0 14.0
Obviously living as a couple decreases your risk of being poor.
Living in shared accommodation decreases per-person living expenses, this is why so many university students live in houses with 4+ people. That doesn't require being married or even being a couple. There are further cost savings to having multiple people per bedroom but that doesn't require being married.
It starts with basic income safety: With two people at work you do not loose all earned income if one is out of work.
You are assuming that most married couples involve both people working. When people have children it's typical to have one parent cease full-time work to look after them (the school day ends at 15:30 while the work day ends at 17:00). Losing a full-time income is going to hurt even if the other parent has a part time job.
Of course, couple does not equal marriage. AFAIK (and from experience) Australia treats married couple and de facto relationships equally in most aspects (e.g. taxation).
As we should.
In Germany it is different. There are quite high incentives to marry for financial reasons.
Whether it covers a $27k wedding and a potential divorce is debatable;-)
The 27K wedding is a bogus issue. The small number of people who can afford multi-million dollar weddings and the larger number who spend $50K push the average up. The minimum cost for a traditional middle-class wedding would probably be around $7K, that's based on a rough guestimate of $1500 for the wedding dress, $1000 for the church and car hire, and a bit less than 100 people having a $50 meal. Wedding prices go way lower than $7K. If you want to just go to a registry office and then have drinks with friends afterwards then I'm sure it would be well below $1000. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/