"Data on welfare spending indicates that if single parents were married, welfare spending would drop by 19.3%, saving the UK £23 billion pA." Britain’s ballooning welfare budget is causing controversy. Philip Pilkington thinks he has the answer: Restore the Family. 🧵(1/4)

(2/4) As part of a new series of ARC Research Twitter Exclusives, @philippilk explains to @benedictrogers the thinking behind his ARC paper: Family Matters: Why Our Choices Determine Our Economic Prosperity Read the full paper 👇

(3/4) Philip’s paper centres around this claim: Economists are not talking about the biggest blockage to growth in the West: family breakdown. What our economies lack is not technology or productivity, but people. Economic growth rests on the number of reliable people in the workforce, and in the West this is in decline. The causes of this trend - mental health, substance abuse, criminality - find their roots in family breakdown, as does the rising cost of the care burden on the state. Philip Pilkington wants to wake up the West to the fact that the number of people participating in our workforces is the crucial factor inhibiting our economic growth. Take the US and Britain as an example - Britain has averaged 1.5% lower growth than the United States because of demographic and labour force trends, not a productivity growth gap. This alone should be sufficient to demonstrate that economists must take the family seriously. And family breakdown is costing us hugely, the more we shift the care burden from the family to the state. Health and social care costs are escalating for all ages across the West at an exponential rate: - In Australia, the Government spent $7 billion more on social care for the elderly in 2022-2023 than it did in 2018-2019. - In the UK, the number of children in the state care system has grown by 28% since 2011. - And if single parents in the UK were married, it would save the government £23 billion annually - in other words, half the United Kingdom’s defence budget. If we want to kickstart our economies, technocratic tinkering at the margins will no longer cut it. We must go right to the core and restore our families.

(4/4) Why does this matter right now? Because we can no longer afford another round of governments struggling to eke some growth out of our economies - especially when the root cause is so clear. If what we lack is participants, then we must look at what is keeping people out of the workplace. And the story reads the same over and over again: our social fabric is fraying, families breaking down, and individuals no longer having the resilience to stay in work. And state support is proving to be an ineffective and extortionate substitute.

Independence Day is a reminder that America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ America is owned by no one. It belongs to all citizens. And at this moment in history—when core democratic principles seem to be continuously under attack, when too many people around the world have become cynical and disengaged—now is precisely the time to ask ourselves tough questions about how we can build our democracies and make them work in meaningful and practical ways for ordinary people.

🇺🇸 Enjoy your big day! Honestly...

We cancelled our holiday to the US. One, for safety reasons, & two, I don't want to finance a hateful & intolerant America. We'll sit this one out until commonsense & decency are back in the US. Multiple Countries Just Issued Travel Warnings for the U.S.

BREAKING: In a shocking moment, Trump declares that he is unable to be a President to ALL Americans, as he hates Democrats. "They hate Trump, but I hate them too. I really do, I hate them. I can’t stand them." What a small, hateful man.