Wall street, but all of a sudden we had the worst selloff in three months. We are going to take a look at what drove stocks down and by the way, i happen to like this minor correction. I happen to think people should stay the course for long run wealth creation. All those stories, much more, coming up on the kudlow report beginning right now. Good evening, everyone. Im larry kudlow. This is the kudlow report. Were live at 7 00 p. M. Eastern, 4 00 p. M. Pacific. Lets get right down to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for more on todays big 179 point dow drop. Bob pisani joins us with the news. Good evening, robert. Stocks started mixed but moved lower midday and closed essentially on the lows for the day, larry. Goldman sachs issued a report saying valuations were lofty by almost any measure. Then midday, atlanta fed president Dennis Lockhart said he would continue to support the feds tapering program. Although lockhart reiterated his support depended on the economy improving, traders interpreted this to mean theres a lot of momentum to continue tapering at about 10 billion a month despite the weakness in the jobs report. Another issue for the market is the strength in bonds. Many are speculating that Pension Funds have taken profits on their big stock gains in 2013, and are now using that money to buy longer dated bonds which offer more attractive yields that are a bit closer to matching their obligations. Despite the issues, larry, there is little sense of panic in the markets. The volatility index dropped befo below 12 today, the lowest level since august, although it did go up late in the day. Volume was a bit above average. Back to you. Many thanks. Appreciate the rundown. Well get to the stock market later in the show. The number of americans living below the poverty line has hit a record high during the Obama Presidency and shockingly, according to a new report, one in three women are now either living in poverty or teetering on the brink. Thats 42 million women, plus 28 million children who depend on them. But just why are so many people on the economic brink and is female poverty caused by the marriage problem, family breakup or misguided Government Policies . Here now to discuss, nbc news special anchor Maria Shriver, who is out with the new eyeopening report which details the financial struggles faced by women. Maria, welcome. Im reading the shriver report. I think your numbers are spoton. Everything i found out, all spoton. The people that did the report did work. Whats your solution . Lets begin right there. This is your game. Whats your solution . Well, theres no one solution, larry. What were talking about in here is that government plays a role, business plays a role and women themselves play a role. As you said, one out of three working women in this country are on the financial brink. Minimum wage workers, twothirds of them are women. 70 of those dont even have one sick day. So we are calling on government to play its part, businesses, we talk about what makes a business place so that workers can thrive, so they can retain women, because women are good in business, theyre half the work force. We are also saying to women themselves look, if you want to stay above the brink, youve got to pursue your education, youve got to stay in college, get a college degree. Youve got to be able to provide for yourself. Dont wait for someone else to provide for you. Delay Family Planning as long as possible. Be smart about money, understand that every decision has an economic consequence. So there are things that women can do, men can do, faithbased organizations can do, government and business, and bring them all together. Fair enough. Let me give you the kudlow plan which by the way, overlaps with the shriver plan. Oh, good. Were not far apart. I have this four point plan. Finish your education. You mentioned that. Number one. Number one. Then go out and get a job. Thats point number two. You have to get a job with a living wage. Yeah, look, if you finish your education, you are going to get eventually a very good wage. Then get married, after you have some stability, and then after you have been married awhile, have the kids. Thats the kudlow plan. It is not a very original plan. Other people have talked about this. In other words, i think the teens are jumping in too fast. I think the family breakdown is a huge part of this problem. Maria, if we dont fix the family breakdown, these numbers are just horrible. 40 in poverty. You can almost predict it. If theres a one parent family, 40 land in poverty. Well, its certainly easier to raise a child than stay above the brink when you have two incomes supporting that family. But in our poll which is about 3500 people and sampled all across the country, people said that they felt the government should play a role in supporting the families the way they are today. Yes, it can play a role in encouraging people to stay in marriage but more people felt that the government shouldnt look in the rear view mirror, but should deal with families the way they are now. So many of the women that i spoke to, larry, ended up on the brink not because they planned to be there. They might have been in abusive relationships, they might have been left, theres a whole host of reasons women end up on the brink. I read this carefully. Im a follower. You read the whole thing . Im a follower and a fan of yours. You went to the trouble to do this and thats a leadership thing that we need. I read a lot of this stuff. You have repeated quotes by women who were interviewed who said they wished they had completed their education. Correct. You just see that again and again and again and i think thats so important. Look, this may surprise you, but heres the thought i have. Okay. Youre going to see the president tomorrow from what ive gathered. Is that true . Yes, thats true. You know what i think . Im not a supporter of president obama, most of his policies, but, but, but, but, but, it seems to me this fellows a good family man. It seems to me he follows the model we have been talking about. It seems to me he takes care of his two girls and has a great marriage, and so forth and so on. Why doesnt he take a leadership position and make what im going to call bill cosby type speeches, okay, and go out and talk about the culture of marriage and stability and education and have the kids later . He is uniquely qualified as president , because of his own example, maria. This is an area where i wish he would do it and a guy like me, i would support him to the hilt. Well, i think that he is talking about economic mobility. He is talking about family structure. And i think, larry, as you have said, there is all different kinds of families and i dont believe that we get anywhere by shaming people in the situations theyre in today. The fact is, half of the babies born to women under 30 are born to single mothers. Now, we can talk all we want about marriage and im a proponent of it. I think its important to strengthen it but its also important to support women where theyre at, support families where they are. And i think education, as you said, is a very important thing to stress. I think also Financial Literacy is a very important thing to stress. Healthy relationships, what do they look like, what do they feel like. Thats the key. Thats the key. Healthy relationships and marriage. Marriage, marriage, marriage, marriage. Its not necessarily marriage. I respectfully disagree. I think marriage is important, but as you said, a healthy relationship is really important. Ill concede that point. Many people dont know what a healthy relationship looks or feels like. What happened to the men . Heres a question the men are critical to this. Where are the fathers, okay . Out of wedlock marriages have fathers. What happened to them . Its amazing, if you look at the labor Market Participation rate, the men are leaving the labor force. Im not sure i know why, maria. Maybe theyre taking government benefits, maybe theyre doing god knows what. All i know is they have an obligation even if theyre not married, it seems to me, to help out. It takes two to have a child. I dont know where the fathers are in this game. Well, the fathers are all different places and we have to encourage fathers to get involved in their childrens lives, in their daughters lives and in their sons lives. We really try to address that in the shriver report. How do we bring men into the equation. We have some really good reporting in there, saying men want to be involved, they have to be invited in because they very often feel shamed, they feel like they havent kept up their part of the bargain. They often feel that women want them only for providing. What the women said to us is that we want them for the time, we want them to spend time. I think men dont really realize how important particularly in young girls lives that they are. That can make a huge difference to a daughters selfesteem, to how she feels about men in particular. Right. You need examples and responsibility and character and all that stuff that we all know about. I tell you, maria, look, you tell obama, tell president obama he is a role model. I really mean this. Im dead serious. He sets an example. He should talk more about this. Not social mobility. Social mobility, tax the rich, im not into that, as you probably know. But this, he could really make a great contribution. Thats all ill say. Anyway, thank you for your work. Thank you for your leadership. Good luck tomorrow with the president. I appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you, larry. Many, many thanks to Maria Shriver. Now, the obama administrations Big Government poverty solution seems to be to raise the minimum wage and extend unemployment insurance. In other words, more government dependence. That i think is not the answer. However, in a wall street journal oped today, former White House Press secretary Ari Fleischer suggested theres a better approach. Address the breakdown of the family or the socalled marriage inequality. I was talking to Maria Shriver about that. Lets get some more input of the terribly important subject. Here is kathy rouss, senior fellow at the Family Research counsel and former spokesperson for the u. S. Catholic bishops and p. J. Orourke, author of the new book baby boom, how it got that way and it wasnt my fault and ill never do it again. It wasnt my fault, i will never do it again, p. J. , we are all wiser, supposedly, as maturing baby boomers. What do you think about that . What do you think about the conversation with Maria Shriver . Where should we be going to deal with this female poverty problem . Well, im with the kudlow plan. Its got there is some backup there. The great sociologist Charles Murray did a lot of studies on this and basically what he found was that people who went as far in school as they were capable of going, you know, which is certainly these days a high school education, and who got married and stayed married, and who got employed and to the best of their ability to do so, stayed employed. I mean, may have gone through brief periods of unemployment but took a job, kept a job for as long as possible. When you examine that group of people, as much education as you can stand, married and stay married and work as much as you can, you dont find any poverty. Thats it. Youre right. You may not be rich. They may not be rich. They may be scraping along but you dont find any poverty. Families headed by two married parents, kathy, 7. 5 poverty rate. Thats it. Families headed by a single mother, 33. 9 . When you get into the specifics demographics, whites, hispanics, africanamericans, those numbers are huge. You know, 40 years ago, before the war on poverty started, this poverty rate was down around 6 or 7 for the married family. This is all new. The breakup of the family and the rise of poverty. What should we do about it . It is all new. But when you look at the societal indicators, marriage improves everything. My colleague pat fagan has a paper, 165 reasons to marry. Reducing poverty and improving your Financial Health is only one. Its a very important part of the equation. But improved happiness, longevity, improved health, a decline or decrease in the negative social indicators like drug addiction and dropout rate and so forth. Everything improves with marriage. Heres the thing. Heres kind of a fun fact for you. We were talking about education, too. The National Marriage project at uva discovered that when you raise a child in an intact twoparent married household, you increase the chances that that child wont be in poverty by two and a half times what you would do if you gave the mother four more years of education. So theres an outbalance. Marriage gives you so much more benefits in terms of raising that child. P. J. Kathy, you know, my wife says exactly the same thing. About all those benefits of marriage. 165. Let me ask you, p. J. Maria shriver makes what i think is an important point. She doesnt disagree with the culture of marriage and so forth, but shes saying look, i read it in her report, all right, we would prefer this solution, what you and i, what were all talking about. Ill just call it the cultural solution. But if you dont, if you dont, you got to deal with the world as it is, not as you want it to be. So if you have these single mothers and you have these dependent children and you have this grim outlook of poverty, which is what the statistics show, what do you do, p. J. , from here Going Forward . What would you recommend . Its painful. Its totally painful because true, we have to deal with the situation that we have, but if were going to keep paying people to misbehave and thats what a lot of government benefits are is paying people to make bad life choices, were not paying them much, mind you. Im not talking about welfare queens here or anybody cheating on welfare. Im just saying that the government benefit pays you to make bad choices. And the incentive is maybe tiny, but the effect is huge. We have to get rid of that government incentive for people to make bad choices. Paul ryan, kathy, paul ryan today apparently, i just have the news clip, he walks through this poverty trap issue and he says look, if youre making 10,000 a year and youre lucky enough to get it up to 40,000 a year, you are going to pay much higher tax rates and you lose government benefits so that your new marginal tax rate may be as high as 80 and you only take home 20 cents on the dollar. That is a disincentive to go back to work. Obamacare i think favors singles over marrieds. It does. The child credit, you know, the child tax credit, you dont have to be married to get the child tax credit. All these things, the marriage deduction, there are Economic Policy changes that we could use that would help this story. Yeah. We have to get government out of the way in terms of getting rid of all the disincentives, all the penalties. That has to be wiped out at every level. It seems like its cropping up ever more. Obamacare is a really good example. Theres a terrible penalty for married people under obamacare and its got to be cane out of there. Its awful. Government cant do everything. You cant turn to government for love and marriage. Its a cultural decline of marriage and the culture has to come and help marriage if i do the right thing, if theres a father who has been a deadbeat dad, i dont know where the men have gone. The statistics here are just awful. But if they were to do the right thing and they wanted to come back to work, whether they get together with the family or not, at least they can have relations as Maria Shriver said, they could help shoulder some of the burden. We need to provide economic incentive, not disincentive. We need to say we will make it easier for you on benefits and on taxes. Anyway, thats the subject of a much longer segment. Thanks very much, kathy, p. J. Good luck on the book. Always glad to be here. The new book, the baby boom is available right now. You can see it on the screen. Everybody go out and buy it. Lets shift gears. The fracing boom is boosting the u. S. Economy, creating thousands of jobs in a whole bunch of states. But new york, not one of them. Governor cuomo still wont make a decision about allowing fracing in his state. We will hear from the National Petroleum institute about why it decided to go after cuomo and blast him. Later, we have been waiting to find out who exactly is signing up for obamacare plans and how old they are. Just a few hours ago, team obama released that information and it wasnt good. Not near enough enrollment overall and way too few young and healthy signees. This means we are getting closer t to a federal bailout for Insurance Companies. Even the New York Times and a. P. And reuters are not being fooled by the white house happy talk. We will take a closer look. As always, dont forget, free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity. I think cultural issue we raised about marriage and responsibility and character and by the way, its never too late to reform. Im kudlow. Well be right back. That its given me time toabout reflect on some of lifeseen biggest questions. Like, if you could save hundreds on Car Insurance by making one simple call, why wouldnt you make that call . See, the only thing i can think of is that you cant get any. Bars. Ah, thats better. Its a beautiful view. I just knew from the getgo that i was. Flat out getting a good deal. When youre ready to buy a car, save time, save money, and never overpay. Visit truecar. Com welcome back to the kudlow report. So new York Governor Andrew Cuomo is being blasted for keeping the red light on fracing in his own state. American Petroleum Institute president jack gerard told the New York Post his refusal to permit the drilling, i quote, shortsighted and damaging to new yorks economic development. Whats holding it up . Here is karen moreau from the new york state petroleum council. That could be a very lonely job, new york state petroleum council. Let me ask you, we are all waiting for andrew cuomo to