BILL QUICK: You Get What You Pay For:

Look, it is relatively simple. Graduate from high school, get a job, keep it, get married, and stay married. You won’t live a life of poverty and degradation.

Yet it is the very folks who claim to mean well who wreak the most destruction on the poor. Here’s a truth from the Copybook Headings: You get what you pay for.

Our society chooses to pay for bastards and wonders why the number of bastards increases. Our society refuses to support poor families with married fathers in residence, and wonders why the number of single mothers increases. Our society pays for single motherhood, and wonders why we get it. Our society gives stipends to unemployed and/or homeless males, and wonders why we get more and more of them.

Why on earth would any of the poor pay attention to “cultural signals” when the check that comes to them pays for exactly the opposite?

Incentives work, even when they’re perverse.