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THE MYTH OF DEADBEAT DADS
By Stuart Miller © 1998
Wall Street Journal - Page A14 Thursday, March 2, 1995 |
Child-support collection has recently become a big issue in Washington. President Clinton issued an executive order this week requiring all federal agencies to facilitate the payment of father's debts. And Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala testified that if we collect all of the child support owed by Americans, we would reduce the $200 billion welfare cost by 25%. In fact, Republicans and Democrats alike count on increased child support collections as a cornerstone of their welfare reform plans. You don't have to be a member of the world champion U.S. Math Olympiad team to see that there is something wrong with those calculations. Even under the rosiest projections of the government's Annual Child Support Report, in 1992 (the last year for which data is available), there was about $10.9 billion in court-ordered child support owed by all Americans and, of that, a little more than $6 billion was paid. This leaves $4.9 billion in unpaid child support in 1992 -- far short of the $50 billion Ms. Shalala hopes to raise. But it's virtually impossible even to collect the smaller amount of child support obligations. We've tried many times over the past 10 years, yet no effort has increased the percentage of collections for welfare mothers (the biggest target group) by more than 1%. This is due to a number of factors. First, of the 30% of child support payments not collected, a significant number are owed by fathers who are imprisoned. A high percentage of prisoners have child support obligations, and as many as one-third of the inmates in many county jails are there in the first place because of child support noncompliance. Many of the other delinquent fathers are addicts, alcoholics, disabled, mentally incapacitated, unemployed, or otherwise unable to pay pre-set child support amounts. But the largest number of all delinquents are those who simply don't exist. Recently, the Florida Department of Revenue, the agency responsible for child support enforcement in that state, sent out 700,000 notices of allegedly delinquent fathers. The summonses demanded immediate payment or the recipient would be incarcerated. Subsequently, officials acknowledged that probably 600,000 of those notices were sent to individuals who actually did not owe child support. One of those recipients, Daniel Wells, died eight years ago in a traffic accident, but the state still wanted him to cough up $160,000 in past due support! (About the same amount of money Florida wasted on postage for the notices.) Nor is this an isolated case. The General Accounting Office found in 1992 that as many as 14% of fathers who owe child support are dead. The report further stated that 66% of fathers who owe support "cannot afford to pay the amount ordered." The easiest way, then, to increase the figures on child-support collections is simply for the government to make an accurate tally. Until this happens, it's impossible to discuss remedies for the child-support problem. Once a serious discussion gets under way, one of the first items on the agenda should be the inherent unfairness in taking something away from people and then making them paying for it. Most fathers are deeply committed to their children, yet a 1991 Census Bureau study found that about half of fathers receive no court-ordered visitation. When fathers do receive visitation, almost 80% pay all of their child support on time and in full. When fathers receive joint custody, the child support compliance rate jumps to more than 90%. Joint Custody is the cure to the child support problem and is the closest thing to a two-parent family that we can give a child. Unfortunately, more than 90% of litigated divorces result in an award of sole custody to the mother. Even when fathers do receive court-ordered access to their children, their visitation attempts are often met with interference by the mothers. Joan Berlin Kelley and Judith Wallerstein, in "Surviving the Break-Up" (Basic Books, 1990), found that almost half of all mothers see no value in the father's continued contact with his children following separation or divorce. Sanford Braver, a University of Arizona psychologist, confirmed these figures and found that up to 40% of mothers interfere with the dad's relationship with his kids. Given this documented connection between a father's access to his children and the payment of child support,·why does Washington seem intent on punishing the father? ·What about the mother who creates a climate encouraging non-compliance? One way around this problem may be to make child support obligations more equitable. At the moment, child support is almost exclusively the burden of fathers. The federal Office of Income Security Policy found in 1991 that less than 30% of custodial fathers receive a child support award, whereas almost 80% of custodial mothers do. Yet, about 47% of those mothers who are ordered to pay support totally default on their obligation. In the interest of fairness, if nothing else, policy makers should make an effort to collect child support from both delinquent fathers and mothers. But of course the only real long-term answer is to support the two-parent family -- preferably in marriage and, if that doesn't work, through joint custody arrangements. We need to re-engage fathers in their children's lives. Draconian transfer-of-wealth schemes will continue to be as ineffective in the future as they have proved to be in the past, no matter how aggressively they are enforced. Stuart Miller |
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