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How the Failure of Welfare Reform Created Our Lawless Courts
By Terri Lynn Tersak (about the author) Page 2 of 5 page(s)
But worse yet, the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) shows that currently the average income of an obligator with high child support arrearages is less than ten thousand dollars a year. So the fact is that the average "dead beat" parent meets the financial qualifications to apply for public assistance themselves. While less than 4% of all arrearages in the United States are owed by obligators earning more than twenty thousand dollars a year.
At first glance one might think the states are run by total financial idiots; they aren't at all though. They realized early on that the federal incentives pay them for both child support moneys collected and for the enforcement effort on moneys they need to collect (arrearages). The states also know that as you go down through the income classes you will reach a point where the federal incentives for arrearage enforcement exceed the incentives they would get for collecting these cases.
Since 2000 many states have made large cuts to their child support enforcement systems, some as high as 36%. Why? Because they more than meet the federal collection requirements under CSPIA via the collection of the cases of higher wage earners through automatic wage attachments.
Spending money for efforts to collect lower income cases costs more money then they can recover from incentives. So why should they bother? As with so many of our domestic policies, CSPIA serves those that need service the least, or not at all and abandons those with the greatest real need.
So here is where the states' court committees on rules and procedures come in. Among the battery of "laws" they create, child support guidelines are their big cash cow. Also, beyond its own funding, domestic violence claims are proven to open the door to even more child support and many other funding sources unrelated to domestic violence.
Not only are the states paid for collecting or not collecting child support, those performance figures also play a major role in how much TANF grant money they receive. As an aside; read through TANF sometime, you may be shocked to learn that a large portion of those law's dialog are covering when and where the states can spend their welfare incentives on highway projects.
However, it isn't called highway funding in this case. That spending is classified within a category called "improving access to facilities," which is a perfectly legal and legitimate application of TANF incentives. This spending is then applied toward the state's percentage of welfare incentives spent on "assistance related programs."
The important point here is that if the state needs more highway funding, all they need to do is raise the state's level of child support and they can spend their resulting welfare incentive increases on highway projects and remain in perfect compliance with the relevant programs funding requirements.
In view of the fact that the states child support and welfare incentives are largely based on the child support money on their books, they need to figure out how to get the most money per case out of people. A quick overview of the construct of child support guidelines shows us that in every state child support awards are predominately based on three considerations:
The parents' income is not something the state can control (or legally change), neither are the care costs the parents have, they are pretty much what they are. So the only thing the state can control and manipulate is the time the parents have with the child. We call this "custody and visitation."
If you poke around the web you can find online child support calculators for every state. If you get bored one day, play around with some example cases for yourself. What you will find is that the time the parents have with the child has the single greatest impact on a child support obligation of the three main considerations.
In many income classes the difference between 50/50 parenting time and 70/30 results in twice the child support awarded to the custodial parent and can double again if the time with the children becomes around 85/15 or less for the non-custodial parent in some states. I assure you that this is no accident.
The abuses by the states of CSPIA funding are well documented. One example is the report prepared for the US Congress by True Equality Network, which you can download from their web site.
If at this point you have any doubts that family law is based on dollars and not on justice, equal protection under the law, or the best interest of the child. Ask North Dakota's Governor, John Hoeven.
Among the usual and customary items on the ballet in 2006, North Dakota had ballet item for "Presumptive Equal Parenting." Governor Hoeven himself spoke out against this ballet initiative. Not for the welfare or well-being of his state's children.
Rather than defending the wellbeing of his state's children, Governor Hoeven's stated reason for opposing this initiative was due to the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grant money such a law would cost his state. That, by the way is a significant portion of the states expected annual revenue and revenue that is considered greatly in the state's budget requests.
Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Stop the Feds from paying the States to Destroy Our Families
Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers
http://www.True-Equality.org
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