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Former Maine Governor Paul LePage is tending bar at a restaurant in Boothbay Harbor, Maine this summer.
The two-term Republican, widely considered the most conservative governor in the country, left office this past January after term limits prevented him from running again.
For several years now, I've spent early June researching, thinking, and writing about the effect of fatherlessness in Massachusetts. Father's Day is typically the one time of year when the national conversation turns its attention for a brief moment to dads, so I seize that opportunity to call out the extraordinary importance of fathers in the lives of children.
Last year, I wrote about income inequality and its link to fatherlessness. Specifically: Children who grow up with a married mother and father in Massachusetts have an average of four times the annual household income of their neighbors who grow up without a father. In 2015, that meant a difference of $121,532 to $29,957, respectively. As dramatic of a disparity as that is, however, the latest data shows that this income inequality has only accelerated. In recent years, households with married fathers increased their income on average by 4.5 percent, with the median figure up nearly $6,000, to $127,000. This outpaced inflation over the same time period (3.4%) and represents a real increase in wealth. Meanwhile, children in homes with no father saw their mother's income increase on average by less than 1 percent, which means they were actually getting poorer after factoring in the cost of inflation. Even in today's economic upswing, kids without dads are getting left further and further behind.