Frank Sinatra once sang that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. That is not the case anymore, if it ever was in the first place. The median age of marriage has been on the rise for decades while marriage rates are on the decline. Fewer than 50 percent of households are married couples, which is a shift from the 66 percent in the 1970s.These marriage trends are precipitating a debate among policymakers and think tanks about how or whether the government should respond.
Government as Cupid
One recent proposal came from the Right-leaning Heritage Foundation in its new report Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. Among the ideas presented in this report was creating a Newlywed Early Starters Trust (NEST) account. This federal program would give couples a $2,500 incentive payment upon marrying by a target age, paid into a special long-term investment account designed to grow over time. While the NEST accounts are justified as a means of encouraging marriage and asset accumulation, they reflect an underlying confidence in social engineering in which the government can steer private choices using financial incentives.
The Price of Love: Ethics in Subsidized Marriage
Framed this way, Heritage's proposal raises a deep concern. Marriage is not like purchasing a car, selecting a vacation destination, or opting into a retirement account. By tying marriage to a NEST account, it risks reducing an intimate human relationship to a transaction for government benefits. Even if marriage had transactional components in the past (e.g., dowries, uniting families or territories), those were not centralized state efforts to steer personal behavior through financial incentives. The fact that marriage has evolved into a voluntary and personal commitment is exactly what makes the NEST account an ethically fraught idea. It treats relationships as policy levers rather than autonomous human choices while it commodifies intimacy and undermines the intrinsic value that gives marriage its social, emotional, and moral significance.
Why Cash Can't Buy Commitment
It is not simply the ethics that are problematic. While Heritage proposes a $2,500 policy lever to encourage marriage, research suggests that financial incentives of this level are unlikely to produce lasting change. For example, a change in tax incentives has been shown to influence the timing of when someone got married, but it did not affect whether someone got married in the first place. Welfare evidence has also shown that altering benefit structures can encourage married couples to stay, but does little to help the decision of whether single parents decide to marry.
When Prices Rise, Vows Wait
Meanwhile, structural economic barriers play a much larger role in delaying or discouraging marriage. A 2025 study from South Korea shows that rising house prices reduce marriage rates and delays marriage (La, 2025). Another study of 35 Chinese cities shows how economic restraints delay marriage (Song et al., 2024). Evidence from Obamacare Medicaid expansion (Chatterjee, 2021) shows that when a real economic benefit to marriage (in this case, health insurance) was available outside of marriage, low-educated, non-elderly adults were 6.9 percent less likely to marry. This decline was 11.9 percent for women. This is meant to show that a $2,500 NEST account will not meaningfully alter the deep tradeoffs that couples face with respect to marriage. It might nudge some couples to tie the knot sooner, but financial stability, long-term compatibility, and relationship readiness will play much larger roles in a couple's decision to marry.
Marriage Cannot Be Bought, Only Chosen
We live in a more individualistic society that prioritizes career or personal development. There is greater acceptance of cohabitation without marriage, not to mention changing norms about gender equality or household roles. Combined with the financial barriers young couples face, a $2,500 NEST account becomes a dubious way to spur marriage rates. None of this means a hostility toward marriage itself. I would like to be married one day. I can believe marriage is valuable while still rejecting the idea that it should be subsidized, engineered, or optimized by government policy. Marriage simply cannot be bought off. Modest financial incentives like the NEST account do not address the core issues behind lower marriage rates while risking the trivialization of what ought to remain a freely chosen and deeply meaningful institution.
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