Throwing Kids a Lifeline
How to fix child support
THERE’S a warrant out for the arrest of Juelz Santana. The New Jersey-based rapper, who owes almost $30,000 in child support to the mother of his 13year-old son, thinks he’s being judged unfairly. In a tweet last week, he told his followers: “It 2 Sides 2 Every Story.”
Deadbeat dads like Santana are often the ones who make the headlines — they can pay and everyone knows it. But the real problem with our child-support system isn’t wealthy people who are delinquent in their assigned payments, though there are certainly enough of them. It’s lower-income parents who were never enrolled to begin with.
To some extent, this is an unintended consequence of welfare reform. When families (usually mothers) signed up for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, they were also required to register for child support. But since welfare reform, many families who don’t receive TANF have started receiving Medicaid or food stamps. Those programs don’t require a mother to register for child support.
According to a paper released recently by Daniel Schroeder of UT Austin and Dartmouth, “the percentage of child support–eligible households in the population who have agreements with the nonresident parent for childsupport payment peaked at 60 percent in 2004 and has declined steadily ever since to 49 percent as of 2014.” Schroeder found that “if the share of custodial parents with legal agreements had held steady instead of declining over the past decade, then there would be about 1.6 million additional custodial parent families with agreements in 2014.”
That’s a lot of missing child support. In addition to the decline in TANF, Schroeder points to other reasons why states haven’t been opening up as many new cases as they should have. For one thing, states are rewarded by the federal government for successful enforcement. They’ll look better and get more federal assistance if they have fewer cases but ensure collection on a higher percentage of them.
Schroeder also notes that in about half of the states, noncusto- dial parents have to reimburse the government for public assistance their families receive. And none of the support is going directly to the families. “When the state keeps it all, that absent parent is saying ‘Why should I bother?’ It makes people more likely to work underground where they can’t have wages garnished.”
Studies have shown that when noncustodial parents see at least some of their money is going directly to their kids, they’re more likely to make good on child support. And when they do pay child support, they’re more likely to be involved in the lives of their children in other ways.
Many of these men would fulfill their financial obligations if they could. Indeed, Robert Doar, who studies poverty at the American Enterprise Institute, and Schroeder emphasize that the best way to improve the program would be to tie child support to workforce training and have the feds reimburse states for those programs.
In recent years, critics of the child-support program have suggested it’s unduly punishing poor parents, particularly by incarcerating them for missed payments. Having served as a welfare commissioner both of New York City and state, Doar says jailing so-called deadbeat dads was extremely rare. And he’d be surprised if there were more than 10,000 people nationwide who had been imprisoned for failure to pay child support, less than 0.1 percent of cases.
The exceptions, he says, are mostly not destitute parents but those who were well-off and in flagrant violation of support orders.
The child-support system really is supposed to serve the needs of children; generally speaking, imprisoning noncustodial parents doesn’t help. Even a night or two in jail can cause someone to lose their job.
In the past 10 years, Doar says, there has been a “good faith successful effort to make the program more responsive to difficulties of poor noncustodial parents.” Not only are people rarely jailed for failure to pay, but the amounts that these (mostly) fathers are charged have dropped significantly. Doar says payments are supposed to be approximately 17 percent of aftertax income. In many cases, they’re much smaller. In Los Angeles, for instance, he says that half of new child-support orders are for less than $50 a month.
As Doar notes, “people on the political left have never really liked child support because it is a program that focuses on personal responsibility and not just government-provided assistance.” Still, there’s much to be said for it; and given that we’re unlikely to return to a time of children growing up with two married parents, it’s probably the best we can hope for.