Marriage?? Young Americans Aren't Even Shacking Up
You’ve probably heard that marriage among young adults has been on the decline, but a new Gallup poll finds that the percentage of 18-to-29-year-olds living with a partner has flatlined in recent years.
“This means that not only are fewer young adults married, but also that fewer are in committed relationships,” Gallup’s Lydia Saad wrote Monday. “As a result, the percentage of young adults who report being single and not living with someone has risen dramatically in the past decade.”
Related: The Bad News About All the Singles in America
That percentage has risen from 52 percent in 2004 to 64 percent last year, Gallup says. The data doesn’t necessarily mean young adults are avoiding relationships entirely. Young people are just less likely to make a serious commitment associated with moving in together.
The trend hasn’t carried through to Americans in their 30s, who are only a bit more likely to be single than they were a decade ago. Marriage among people in this age group has also declined in popularity, but the percentage of 30-somethings living with a partner has jumped from 7 percent to 13 percent.
The new data suggests that, if young people don’t feel ready for marriage, they may not feel up for long-term commitment yet, either. (In some cases, that may be because they’re still living with their parents.) “This doesn't necessarily mean young adults are staying out of relationships, just that they are less likely to be making the more serious commitment associated with moving in together — whether in marriage or not,” Saad wrote.
The societal question, she said, is whether those single 20-somethings stay that way into their 30s. A Gallup poll from 2013 suggests that young adults may not be avoiding marriage altogether, but are just pushing it back. In that survey, 56 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 said they were unmarried but did want to tie the knot at some point. Only 9 percent in the same age group said they were unmarried and wanted to stay that way. The most common reasons people listed for not being married yet included having not found the right person, being too young or not ready to get married and money concerns.
In other words, they might someday say “I do,” but for now they definitely don’t.
Chart of the Day: A Buying Binge Driven by Tax Cuts
The Wall Street Journal reports that the tax cuts and economic environment are prompting U.S. companies to go on a buying binge: “Mergers and acquisitions announced by U.S. acquirers so far in 2018 are running at the highest dollar volume since the first two months of 2000, according to Dealogic. Thomson Reuters, which publishes slightly different numbers, puts it at the highest since the start of 2007.”
Number of the Day: 5.5 Percent
Health care spending in the U.S. will grow at an average annual rate of 5.5 percent from 2017 through 2026, according to new estimates published in Health Affairs by the Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
The projections mean that health care spending would rise as a share of the economy from 17.9 percent in 2016 to 19.7 percent in 2026.
Trump Clearly Has No Problem with Debt and Deficits
A self-proclaimed “king of debt,” President Trump has produced a budget that promises red ink as far as the eye can see. With last year's $1.5 trillion tax cut reducing revenues, the White House gave up even trying to pretend that its budget would balance anytime soon, and even the rosy economic projections contained in the budget couldn’t produce enough revenues, however fanciful, to cover the shortfall.
The Trump budget spends as much over 10 years as any budget produced by President Barack Obama, according to Jim Tankersley of The New York Times. And it projects total deficits of more than $7 trillion over the next decade — "a number that could double if the administration turns out to be overestimating economic growth and if the $3 trillion in spending cuts the White House has floated do not materialize in Congress,” Tankersley says.
Trump — who once promised to both balance the budget and pay down the national debt — isn’t the only one throwing off the shackles of fiscal restraint. Republicans as a whole appear to be embracing a new set of economic preferences defined by lower taxes and higher spending, in what Bloomberg describes as a “striking turnabout” in attitudes toward deficits and the national debt.
But some conservatives tell Tankersley that the GOP's core beliefs on spending and debt remain intact — and that spending on Social Security and Medicare, the primary drivers of the national debt, are all that matters when it comes to implementing fiscal restraint.
“They know that right now, a fundamental reform of entitlements won’t happen," John H. Cochrane, an economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, tells Tankersley. "So, they have avoided weekly chaos and gotten needed military spending through by opening the spending bill, and they got an important reduction in growth-distorting marginal corporate rates through by accepting a bit more deficits. They know that can’t be the end of the story.”
Democrats, of course, have warned that the next chapter in the tale will involve big cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Even before we get there, though, Tankersley questions whether the GOP approach stands up to scrutiny: "This is a bit like saying, only regular exercise will keep America from having a fatal heart attack, so, you know, it's ok to eat a few more hamburgers now."
Part of the Shutdown-Ending Deal: $31 Billion More in Tax Cuts
Margot Sanger-Katz and Jim Tankersley in The New York Times: “The deal struck by Democrats and Republicans on Monday to end a brief government shutdown contains $31 billion in tax cuts, including a temporary delay in implementing three health care-related taxes.”
“Those delays, which enjoy varying degrees of bipartisan support, are not offset by any spending cuts or tax increases, and thus will add to a federal budget deficit that is already projected to increase rapidly as last year’s mammoth new tax law takes effect.”
IRS Paid $20 Million to Collect $6.7 Million in Tax Debts
Congress passed a law in 2015 requiring the IRS to use private debt collection agencies to pursue “inactive tax receivables,” but the financial results are not encouraging so far, according to a new taxpayer advocate report out Wednesday.
In fiscal year 2017, the IRS received $6.7 million from taxpayers whose debts were assigned to private collection agencies, but the agencies were paid $20 million – “three times the amount collected,” the report helpfully points out.
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