Prior experience with U.S. tax cuts confirms that government can’t make people create good and healthy families—but it can stop doing harm.

In an excellent article on National Review Online, Howard Center research fellow Robert W. Patterson shows how federal tax policies have affected family formation, composition,a nd durability in the United States since the end of World War II. Patterson notes the effect of the Revenue Act of 1948:

Enacted 60 years ago today, when an allegedly ‘do-nothing’ Republican Congress overrode President Harry Truman’s veto, the legislation helped usher in the Fabulous Fifties, an era when both the economy and the American family flourished.

Even though it was not a large tax cut in terms of overall numbers when compared with the JFK, Reagan, and Bush the Younger reforms, the Republicans’ postwar cut spurred the great economic growth of the 1950s without contributing to social or family breakdowns:

[T]he measure nursed near-record levels of industrial growth and economic expansion without sacrificing family size, moving nearly half of all married mothers into the full-time labor market, or reducing the relative earnings of married men. Nor did the good times coincide with the unraveling of the family, another plus that puts the economic performance of the past generation in perspective

On the contrary, he notes, social indicators improved during the 1950s:

In fact, the 1948 Revenue Act contributed to a turnaround—between 1945 and 1963—of social indicators that some sociologists claim today are irreversible. Not only did marriage rates rise, but the proportion of adults reaping the joys of marital bliss hit a record: 95 percent of Americans coming of age then would tie the knot. Marital fertility rates doubled between 1944 and 1957, raising average family size from two to nearly four children, securing baby boomers a wealth of siblings and cousins and their progeny a wealth of aunts and uncles. Also good for the younger set, the divorce rate declined for the first time in history, reaching a low of about 9 divorces per 1,000 married women in 1958.

Moreover, there is another factor that Patterson fails to note. As I have observed in my writings about the origins of the U.S. omniculture in the second half of the twentieth century, political and cultural trends in the 1950s were working strongly against the social trends Patterson notes, suggesting that the tax cuts were successfully resisting cultural trends that would eventually overpower all resistance as the effect of the 1948 reforms was swiftly eroded because they were not indexed to inflation.

In addition to that problem, Patterson notes that subsequent tax legislation undid the 1948 reforms:

Beginning with the Kennedy cuts of 1964, most subsequent tax legislation served to undo the 1948 achievement, in effect raising taxes on marriage and children. Not only has this contributed to the angst the public vents even when the GDP and stock market rise—it may also help explain why “tax cuts” seem to have less electoral traction than they once did.

Of course it’s silly to think that there’s a direct, immutable relationship between tax cuts and certain details of social trends, but the two are certainly connected, as tax policy affects the choices of tens of millions of people making decisions about their lives, given that financial security strongly affects decisions about when or whether to marry and to have children. A growing economy combined with goverment policies that refrain from punishing people for marrying and having children certainly makes it much easier for people to do these things.

Patterson does a good job of outlining precisely how the 1948 reforms helped to encourage marriage and family formation, and he recommends that Sen. McCain incorporate these ideas into his tax policy recommendations. He’s right.