Government-Funded Marriage Counseling
The best things in life are free -- when you manage to stick other taxpayers with bill.

Allison Benedikt writes at Slate about a "$150-million-a-year program launched (hilariously as part of the Deficit Reduction Act) during the Bush administration to help low-income couples work on their marriages and encourage poor, unmarried parents to get hitched":

After seven years, Health and Human Services is finally reporting some results and they are not good. Mother Jones notes that the program for unmarried couples "produced precisely zero impact on the quality of the couples' relationships, rates of domestic violence, or the involvement of fathers with their children."

Outcomes are pretty depressing across the board, and it's tempting to frame this as religiously-motivated wasteful spending by the party whose entire thing is supposed to be about not spending wastefully. And that it is! But there is also a positive result:Iin the initiative's other program, the one aimed at already-marrieds, couples actually did see a small bump up in relationship happiness after taking the government-funded course. That course costs the taxpayer $7,000 to $11,500 per couple, a number Jezebel calls "astronomical" and prompts Mother Jones to ask: "Imagine how much happier the couples would have been if they'd just been handed cash?"

I'm all for this sort of program -- but as the job of pastors and others who volunteer their time (as I do -- with my WIT: What It Takes program that, in part, puts out a message for inner city kids to develop themselves and a career and have a solid family situation before they make babies).