We have noted before that much of the “War on Women” rhetoric employed in the 2012 presidential campaign was aimed at getting not just women but single women to vote for President Obama.

Single women are a key Democratic demographic, as all who remember Julia from the famous “Life of Julia” will agree. Julia, who seemed encumbered by no friends or family, lived her entire life at the public’s expense. If single women have children, they are likely to become even more dependent on the government.

Nearly six in ten of the women who have children in their twenties are not married. Joe Soucheray, a Midwestern columnist,  addresses the implications of this in a piece headlined “Single Moms Are Making Us Broke:”

If that isn't an astonishing statistic, it should be. Why, to any logical person's way of thinking, it explains everything in terms of government at all levels bloating out of control.

Supposing that even angels might fear to tread here, it being liberal dogma that I shouldn't be telling women what to do, or men, either, for that matter, I would submit that marriage would solve virtually every economic issue facing this country.

The census demographers said that single motherhood, on the increase since the 1940s, has accelerated mindblowingly. The birth rate for unmarried women in 2007 was up 80 percent in the almost three decades since 1980. Just between 2002 and 2007, it was up 20 percent.

The census people didn't use the word mindblowingly. I have chosen it because these numbers are chilling and so telling of the true nature of the government's insatiable spending. Just think of entitlement spending the next time the hypocrites in Washington want to take a snowplow off the road in Yellowstone or take a few flight controllers out of a tower because of this so-called sequestration. Who do they think they are fooling?  

 Soucheray is not the first to notice that we are spending billions to do for the children of single mothers what intact families once did. But Soucheray is the first columnist I’ve read who ties this to President Obama’s suddenly-urgent call for universal pre-K education:

We hear a hue and cry for all-day kindergarten, which I suppose makes sense because the children have no place else to be if their single mom is fortunate enough to have a job. Whole bureaucracies have been created to cut general assistance checks and food payments and housing vouchers and health care provisions. All because there is no conventional family in place to take care of these obligations.

Wouldn't we do better to promote married families, even if it meant bringing back some of the stigma of illegitimacy?

Oh, wait–I forgot single mothers are the latest voting block.