[Spooky23]

Poor working class people?

Absolutely.

It's impossible to get many benefits like WIC, rent assistance, heating assistance, etc if you are married, and it's difficult to afford childcare if mom is working and family cannot chip in, especially when you consider that many industries don't provide full-time jobs or sick time. It's cheaper for mom to stop working due to the child and bridge the gap with public assistance until the kids are around age 3, where there are more/cheaper daycare slots.

My wife worked for a utility with alot of blue collar guys -- easily 30% of the guys there had stay-at-home girlfriends with the kids. Not all of them were on public assistance, but people making $30-40k can't afford infant/toddler daycare.

[dragonwriter]

> It's impossible to get many benefits like WIC, rent assistance, heating assistance, etc if you are married

Well, more accurately, it's more difficult if you are married to someone who had income because it affects the means test. Of course, for many of those you can't get them unless you identify and secure a child support order against the parent of your children, and then that child support is also treated as income in the means test for the program, so just staying unmarried (with it without cohabiting) doesn't actually solve the problem.

[logfromblammo]

You hit the bullseye with this one. Parents remain unmarried in a monogamous, cohabiting relationship because the government pays them to not get married. Every benefit that has a household means test attached is an additional incentive to strategically realign the membership of your households.

So you designate one household as the mooch household, and one as the worker household. The latter tends to be ineligible for all manner of otherwise useful benefits, working full-time at minimum wage, and benefits may even be curtailed working part-time. The other can collect the maximum available benefits.

This also leads to some strange behavior in states that have common-law marriages.