The Child Support Agenda

July 17, 2002

Yep. This must be an election year. In a July 15 press release Chairman of the House Policy Committee Chairman Christopher Cox (R-CA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) announced yet another bill to encourage divorce and out-of-wedlock births. The California chapter of NOW recently claimed that women get a bad deal in divorce. Elected "representatives" from California are quick to get on the list of those wishing to buy feminist votes and campaign contributions with other people's money.

One might call the new bill outrageous. The tax laws are to be changed in order to pretend that incomes of many middle and upper income single mothers are lower so that they will pay less in taxes than everyone else. In effect, it will give many single mothers a lowered tax table. Many fathers will get a higher one. Those who have watched child support reform over the decades know that this type of legislation during an election year is par for the course.

The bill is being promoted as "relief to over two million families owed child support." But studies show that fathers pay court ordered child support at a very high rate and contribute their time and money directly when not encountering heavy interference from mom. The primary cause of non-payment by fathers is that the they cannot pay. The new child support laws however, react very poorly to actual circumstances. Fathers live with orders to pay even though they do not have the means.

Among the myriad of false and misleading factoids, which I have become too weary of to repeat, comes the new element of faulty logic in support of the legislation. "This would make the tax treatment of unpaid child support consistent with the treatment of other bad debts in the tax code." I wonder what married parents are going to get when their income is not as high as they would like it to be? Where is the consistency there?

But there is more to the story than little bits of blatant lunacy. There is a well established long-term agenda.

Since 1975, Congress has remained steadily on the same course with respect to child support and welfare reform. For all the coverage the child support issue has received since, it is amazing that few people seem to understand any of it. One has to feel some awe that the most extreme leftist agenda that has ever taken hold in the United States has so consistently been treated as mainstream and even as conservative policy. Those of us who have observed more closely know that "personal responsibility" has become a political code phrase for complete capitulation to arbitrary government control.

Lest someone will think I am cooking up a conspiracy "theory" let me repeat some established facts. Irwin Garfinkel, a lead researcher and former head of the Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty, had his fifteen minutes of fame during the 1990s. Professor Garfinkel had imported a suite of social/economic policies from socialist/communist countries and packaged them in academic sounding conservative policy rhetoric. His package became "The Wisconsin Model," which became the national model for welfare reform.

In his landmark book, Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths, Sanford Braver points to Garfinkel as one of the researchers whose ideas, although extremely influential in shaping new policy, were not supported by actual research. The percent-of-income child support guideline used in Wisconsin is a copy of Russian law from the Soviet era; a simple device for maintaining wealth distribution by central authoritarian command.

Even though credible research does not support the exaggerated claims about "deadbeat dads" in the United States, it is rumored that fathers in the Soviet Union were uncooperative. But that has to be said about a lot of things under communism. A great mass of people did whatever necessary to avoid interaction with the overbearing regime. Russia and the Soviet satellite states had a very large share of their economy in the black market.

Simple wealth redistribution under strict central authoritarian control has been the agenda, not a sidebar, not an unfortunate side-effect of misguided policy reform. As millions of non-custodial parents can attest, the price is at least as much in loss of individual rights as in cash.

In the United States, moving child support from ordinary civil law to the IRS is something reformers have worked for since at least the late 1970s. Given that it is unconstitutional to treat child support like a tax [1], they have faced great difficulty doing it. The critical difference is that taxes are primarily a legislative function. That is, a legislative body decides what your tax rate is – period. If you do not like their decision your only recourse is purely political – throw the bums out of office if you can. Individual rulings in child support cases on the other hand are subject to Constitutional rules of substantive fairness – exactly the thing that reforms have struggled to eliminate.

For those of you who have tuned in late, let me repeat something that long-time observers know well. The initial attack in the "deadbeat dad" wars had an explicit goal of relieving courts of the burden of trying individual cases. Presumptively correct child support guidelines were created as partial fulfillment of that purpose. It was and is that blatant.

Let me add another fact. Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, among others have all seen major reforms linked to "deadbeat dad" politics. Fathers in those countries will repeat the same complaints as fathers in the US. You might wonder what countries like Sweden are doing on the list. They were not socialist enough for Clinton advisors who helped the Social Democratic Labor Party back into power in 1998. (But the government in Sweden is currently rethinking the new policies since they have received heavy criticism from too many places.)

We are in fact not really dealing with a local phenomenon. Welfare and child support reforms have been coordinated with international conventions such as the Hague Conference on Private International Law. There have been United Nations conferences on child support and family law with US participation. The American Bar Association hosts special interest groups in international law including private / family law. Some of the most influential policy reformers in the United States belong to groups like The International Society of Family Law.

No matter what I say, I am sure that there will be a few people who think this all looks too much like a conspiracy to be true. But let me finish with an important question – a question that occupied my thoughts for many years.

From the start, a great many people knew that the child support reforms were wrong. I don't mean this as an exaggerated way of describing a difference of opinion – I mean wrong; and they were wrong in many ways. The fundamental factoids that seemed to justify child support reforms have all been proven wrong. The great carrot for the voting public – that reforms would save money for taxpayers was wrong, and now that the experiment has been run it has been proven wrong. Injustice and violations of the Constitution have become so obvious that even the general public is catching on. The criticisms of the policies have expanded in all quarters.

Why does it continue?

Cited:

1.Holmberg v. Holmberg, Carlson v. Carlson, and Kalis-Fuller v. Fuller, Ct. Nos. C7-97-926, C8-97-1132, C9-98-33, C7-97-1512, Slip Op. (Minn. S. Ct. Jan. 28, 1999).

The bill was introduced by Mr. COX, for himself, Mr. FOLEY, Ms. HART, Ms. LOFGREN, Mr. FILNER, Mr. DREIER, Mr. SHADEGG, Mr. SCHAFFER, Mr. TOWNS, Mr. MCKEON, Mr. SENSENBRENNER, Mr. OWENS, Mr. WILSON of South Carolina, Mr. GRAHAM, Mr. CUNNINGHAM, Mr. BALDACCI, Mr. OSE, Mr. SANDERS, Mr. BARR of Georgia, Ms. BROWN of Florida, Mr. BURTON of Indiana, Mr. CALVERT, Mr. ROTHMAN, Mr. HORN, Mr. ISSA, Mr. GARY G. MILLER of California, Mr. KUCINICH, Mr. PENCE, Mr. PITTS, Mr. PASCRELL, Mr. POMBO, Mr. ROHRABACHER, Mr. ROYCE, Mr. TANCREDO, Mr. TIBERI, Mr. WALDEN of Oregon, Mr. GILLMOR, and Mr. DUNCAN.

Copyright © 2002

Roger F. Gay