$112 Billion

That is a really big big number. That is almost as much as the combined fortunes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. That would pay for nearly half the cost of the return to the moon through 2025 at current funding levels. That number is the conservative estimate of how much divorce and unwed parenting costs taxpayers PER YEAR according to the Institute for American Values. This study does not include the costs of abortion, which in 2006, the US government paid out over $305 million dollars to Planned Parenthood alone. Nor does it include the costs of cervical cancer treatment, STD treatment, condoms, birth control pills, and IUD giveaways, and all the other hidden costs of the sexual revolution. Our society has forgotten what society exists to do. Society exists, in all it's forms, to promote the one common thread of human existence. The family. The family is the one common feature of every human society from time immemorial. It took three and a half million years to get to where we are and to build up human society, it has taken less than 50 years to damned near destroy it. How did we manage to do that? Liberalism in it's many guises. Birth control freed people to have sex without consequence (usually). But since birth control was imperfect, accidents happened. Some of those women having sex without consequence did so outside of their marriage, or with men who were married to others. Men and women felt more comfortable exploring "alternative lifestyles" and "non-traditional families". People started thinking that "if it felt good, DO IT!" was the order of the day. They no longer felt any need to think about the consequences of their actions, either on a personal level or on a societal level. And then LBJ's "great society" programs took away all of the personal economic consequences and put them onto the back of the taxpayer.

As a result we have an entire generation of kids that grew up in single parent households, or worse, in the households of their grandparents. In many instances those grandparents raising grandkids are second or third generation single parent households. We have entire generations of black men in prison because they grew up without a parent in the home. We have entire generations of women who had their babies out of wedlock, before they finished high school, and in some cases, junior high school, and whose children will never know their father, and whose ability to support their kids is destroyed by their choice to have sex at such an early age and the resulting inability to finish school or get a decent paying job.

It all boils down to the liberal sexual revolution and the "great society" welfare state that took away all reason to think about the long term costs and consequences of bad choices. Those were the one-two punches that left society reeling for 50 years. Will we ever be able to get back up off the mat?