There Is No Spoon
Review of the 'Deadbeat Dad' Propaganda Movement

June 3, 2003

The story of Jayson Blair, who made up stories for the New York Times, caused me to reflect on the "deadbeat dad" propaganda campaign that was especially intense during the early 1990s. The motives and intentional lies in that campaign were much more sinister and led to much greater damage than anything that was likely contemplated by Mr. Blair. Unlike Mr. Blair, the "deadbeat dad" propagandists have not yet been exposed by the mainstream media. Their legacy lives on.


The Perceived World

The early 1990s experience included an overwhelming media campaign aimed at demonizing fathers in support of radical reform of the nation's divorce laws; particularly the laws pertaining to the setting of child support award amounts and the process of payment. For years on end a very high percentage of the nations newspapers, news magazines, and television networks regularly attacked "deadbeat dads."

Congress had injected the federal government into child support enforcement in 1975 by creating the U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement. At the time it was an unpopular (and generally regarded as unconstitutional) political step supported by the National Organization for Women. From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, a growing group of researchers supported an increased federal role in dictating the way in which child support amounts are determined as well as tougher enforcement. In the mid 1980s, entrepreneurs began stressing the potential profits for collection businesses if proposed reforms were enacted.

The head of the National Governors Association appeared before Congress and threatened opposition to all welfare reform by every governor if it did not include child support enforcement funding. With extreme bipartisan support, Congress passed major reforms in the 1980s that included billions of dollars in additional funding. The 1990s became a decade in which child support reform was on the lips of virtually every politician, took up a plank of both Republican and Democratic party platforms, and was a subject of every presidential campaign. The politics and media campaigns were so intense that in a televised debate, George Bush (the father) commented that it seemed like the "deadbeat dad thing" might be the most important issue to voters; to which Bill Clinton replied, "It's the economy, stupid."

By the mid 1990s, the U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement consistently reported dramatic increases in child support "collections," seemingly proving that the new enforcement regime worked. The amount reported "collected" through the new system far exceeded the billions of dollars in annual investment required to keep the program going. Republicans and Democrats all seemed impressed and battled to take credit for reforms.

Republicans targeted "activist judges who legislate from the bench," and judges hoping for political advancement seemed to respond. We are now more a country dependent on the partisan politics of democracy, like socialist European countries, than we are the "free country" devoted to individual rights as prescribed by the Constitution. Partisan politics, and media coverage of partisan politics, has divided the country into two opposing groups, neither of which includes noncustodial parents.

So that seems to be it then. Social conservatives and progressives agree. Republicans and Democrats agree. State and federal politicians agree. A grand collection or reporters for major media organizations agreed. They're all backed by researchers, bureaucrats, technical analysts, and political consultants who agree. And the courts will do nothing to get in the way. The world is stacked against noncustodial parents, and there is apparently nothing that can be done about it.


There Is No Spoon

As early as the 1970s, major news organizations were trimming their costs by eliminating investigative reporters and support staff. By the 1990s, it didn't take a huge conspiracy for the vast majority of reporters to get a major news story completely wrong in the same way. It was cheeper for retail news outlets to buy news from a wholesale provider. Organizations like API, covered major issues like child support with a single and very busy reporter. Everyone else just copied.

Too busy to do any serious investigative reporting, wholesale news writers quickly transformed limited source opinion into articles that appeared to have been investigated. Child support stories were often backed by press releases from Congressional offices, collection agencies, or feminist groups. A single press package could contain statements from several individuals and organizations supporting the same view. Arguments in favor of one position would be presented as fact by wholesale writers, who used quotes from the same press package to bolster the story.

The vast majority of reporters were simply repeating what was handed to them. At times, wholesale articles were simply published as is. Many articles were produced by superficial modification of the wholesale article, just enough to change the by-line.

No one was seriously trying to understand what was really meant by the words they received. A good example is the evidence provided by the U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement that "collections" had increased as a result of the enforcement program. The percent of what is ordered that is paid never increased. In fact, it has decreased in recent years. The government had been busy enrolling more people in their program, many of whom were good regular payers. But they labeled all payments made through their program the same way – as "collections." What was universally characterized as a policy success was actually nothing more than the fruitless expansion of a worthless and expensive big government program.

Something similar happened in the research community. There are no great academic institutions of child support or universities competing on fundamental child support research. Single source opinion traveled through a small fraction of the research community and beyond like a virus. For quite some time, virtually no one else had sufficient interest or funding to argue.

One of the best known examples is a conclusion presented by Lenore Weitzman. Dr. Weitzman is famous for asserting that following divorce the standard of living of men increases by about 24 percent, while that of women and children drops by a whopping 76 percent. These "facts" were repeated in hundreds of articles, both popular and academic, and even appeared in a budget proposal to justify increased government expenditure on child support enforcement. But they weren't true.

Even follow up research, while producing different numbers (closer to even), repeated an inadequate analysis that delivered inaccurate results. For about a decade, every published article on comparative standard of living showed that as a group, women came out worse following divorce than men. The analyses only considered the working income of men and women. Not until the late 1990s, when Arizona State University professor Sanford Braver reviewed the research, did anyone include child support and alimony payments when making the comparison. Braver showed that including child support and alimony, custodial mother households (accounting for children as well) were actually better off than the paying fathers they left behind.

At least for a short time, conclusions by Elaine Sorensen at the Urban Institute seemed destined to replace Lenore Weitzman's misinformation. Elaine Sorensen took fathers as a group – literally; as though the income of all fathers is put together somehow in a big pot for child support payments. She underestimated actual payments at the time, and overestimated group father income, concluding that since fathers (as a group) still have money left over after paying already arbitrarily high child support awards, additional across the board increases in awards would be appropriate. Even though the flaws in Sorensen's analysis have been pointed out, the – awh what the heck, he can afford it philosophy – is still with us. The Georgia Supreme Court recently decided that arbitrarily high child support awards are not unconstitutional, interpreting and applying the concept of "ability to pay" the same way Sorensen did. "If he's got money – take it. That ain't so arbitrary. And it don't make no never mind if he don't. Throw him in jail and that'll teach 'em (as a group). Deadbeats don't got no rights." [paraphrased]

Another popular misconception had its origin in a summary of child support statistics gathered by the Census Bureau. One might still recall that only half of the child support owed is paid in full, another twenty-five percent pay some of what is due, and twenty-five percent pay nothing at all. That wasn't really true either. On the basis of census statistics themselves, "some" of the twenty-five percent paid was actually most of what was due. And a more detailed investigation of the method behind the statistics (asking custodial mothers how much of what they were due was paid by fathers) revealed that fathers actually pay significantly more than what was reported.

The Census Bureau conclusion, regardless of its flaws, gave evidence that fathers who owed child support were paying much more than the public had been given to believe; around seventy percent of what was due. This put the record of payment in the United States, prior to federal enforcement reforms, on par with nation's that had been operating very sophisticated collection programs for decades. In fact, actual payments by fathers with child support orders were probably running closer to eighty percent, with fully employed fathers reportedly paying all that they owed. The primary cause of nonpayment was not that the "deadbeat dad" refused, but that a father who would be paying had insufficient income to pay the amount he had been ordered to pay. Among the reasons for inability to pay; the father is dead but he's still a statistic.

Work on design of child support guidelines, once conducted independently by lawyers and judges and by local bar associations, has experienced an unusual downsizing. Post reform, the source of technical philosophy regarding how guidelines should be designed has been reduced to a very small number of people – really down to one. An assistant psychology professor in North Carolina, with no background in child support research, but with flaming political ambitions, wrote a report with funding from the U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement. Ronald Haskins' "research" was not scientifically peer reviewed, and it made no sense when exposed to scrutiny, but his opinions were repeated far and wide as though scientifically established fact.

Haskins went on to become a high ranking Republican congressional staff member, specializing in welfare reform. I think that move was based on what is known as the Peter Principle; one moves up to their level of incompetence. But his background in psychology apparently made him useful as a manipulative propagandist. One of the "growing number of researchers" who repeated Haskins' results without review became an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for Bill Clinton's first term. This was politics, not science. Serious research does not support the reforms.

The U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement hired child support collection entrepreneur Robert Williams to provide technical assistance to states on developing their child support guidelines. Williams suggested the possibility of using one of either of two models. One assigns an arbitrary percent of income as child support, and the other, based on Haskins' views, uses statistical information on the intact family "cost or raising children" as the basis for a post-divorce child support determination.

Williams recommendations were not scientific either. The only scientific conclusion that can be drawn is that the statistical approach to design of child support guidelines does not work. It was business. Arbitrarily high awards mean greater child support debt and higher profits for collection agencies. Since additional federal funding is doled out in proportion to the amount of child support paid, state politicians are rabid fans of arbitrarily high awards; so are the bureaucrats who depend on federal funding for their jobs.

But it's happened again; this time with the push of federal funding. States adopted child support guidelines based on the views expressed by Haskins and Williams. There is a working assumption that this is the only view on development of guidelines that is needed. The effect has been profound. The Haskins / Williams approach is not objective. It is arbitrary. The basis of his model is an arbitrarily chosen set of numbers. The method is indeterminate. No matter how many times one employs the same statistical approach, there is absolutely no possibility of proving the results either right or wrong.

Based on this one approach however, courts have determined that there is no way to avoid the subjective nature of child support decisions. Therefore, the amount of child support awarded must necessarily be a political rather than a rational decision. This too is up for challenge. Prior to reforms, lawyers, judges, and local bar associations worked independently on development of guidelines. Many of them worked from existing statutes and case law (pre-reform) to formulate mathematical models that are objectively related to the purpose of child support and actual family circumstances. That work has continued, and has been extended by the Project for Improvement of Child Support Litigation Technology.

Republicans, Democrats, state and federal politicians, bureaucrats, political analysts, and child support collection entrepreneurs are after one thing – money. It's not for the children. It's primarily for a share the billions of dollars in pork-barrel spending. We are currently spending tons of dough on defense and security. Does anyone really want or need to throw billions of dollars in the toilet on an old and useless pork-barrel program after all the assumptions upon which it was based have been proven untrue? Somebody put a press package together and send it to API!

Roger F. Gay