Marriage, non-Marriage, and Economics

An interesting article in the NY Times today discusses the implications that now a minority of US households consist of married couples with or without children. A quote: “we have an anachronistic view as to what extent you can use marriage to organize the distribution and redistribution of benefits” expresses how I feel about the way taxation, benefit, and other systems are set up in the US. In my opinion the state should only play a role in helping (or not) raising children who are not able to fend for themselves and are society's future members. I don't see why the state should be at all involved per se in partnerships with or without children involved. The reason they are involved is because historically women had very limited economic opportunities so it was natural to provide benefits to women who were married and not working through their husbands (for example by inheriting social security payments). Rather than extend such an anachronistic system to further people through gay marriage (though the numbers are small as this article points out and so practically don't make a big difference) I would favor making the system more gender neutral and individual based and allow people to develop partnerships as they see fit without worrying about the financial implications. Many countries have systems that are much closer to my ideal. Australia, one of the two countries I am a citizen of (and the other one is not the United States) is closer to this ideal in many ways. Changing a small country, populationwise, is probably easier than changing institutions in a country as large as the US.