This article describes existing child support practice in the United States, giving attention to the establishment and enforcement of parental child support obligations as well as to publicly provided child support benefits. Effects of the current system on alleviating poverty are assessed. The article addresses several questions. Should low-income absent parents be excused from the obligation to support their children? Can child support provide more generous benefits to single-parent families while minimizing incentives for the formation of single-parent families? Should children in single-parent families be aided by a welfare program? What are the problems with the current child support system? Finally, a proposal for a new child support insurance system is described, along with estimates of the costs of the system and its effects on poverty and welfare dependence. The relationship of estimated benefits to costs is promising enough to warrant trying out the new system in selected jurisdictions.
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References
1.
1. For an explanation of how this estimate was derived, see Irwin Garfinkel and Marygold Melli, Child Support: Weaknesses of the Old and Features of a Proposed New System (Madison, WI: Institute for Research on Poverty, 1982), vol. 1, fn. 1.
2.
2. See the statistical appendix in Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Welfare Reform's 1971-72 Defeat: A Historic Loss,”Journal of the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies, 6:1-20 (Spring 1981). His estimate applies to children living in singleparent families. Since some of these families result from widowhood, the percentage eligible for child support will be smaller.
3.
3. In Wisconsin, 16 percent of children eligible for support live with their fathers, 24 percent live with their mothers and stepfathers, and 60 percent live in female-headed households.
4.
4. See U.S., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Characteristics of the Population below the Poverty Level: 1980, Current Population Reports, ser. P-60, no. 133 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1982), tab. 11.
5.
5. Harry O. Krause, Child Support in America: The Legal Prospective (Charlottesville, VA: Michie, 1981).
6.
6. David L. Chambers, Making Fathers Pay: The Enforcement of Child Support (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
7.
7. Ibid., p. 248.
8.
8. Ibid., pp. 90-104.
9.
and Chambers, Making Fathers Pay.
10.
10. U.S., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Child Support and Alimony: 1978, Current Population Reports, ser. P-23, no. 112 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981).
11.
11. Child Support Enforcement (Washington, DC: Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Child Support Enforcement, 1983), tabs. 10 and 19, pp. 18 and 28.
12.
12. Irwin Garfinkel, ed., Income-Tested Transfer Programs: The Case For and Against (New York: Academic Press, 1982), p. 12.
13.
13. Child Support Enforcement, pp. 2, 4, 18, and 19.
14.
14. The biggest omitted group live with their remarried mothers. Only 5 percent of those mothers live in households with incomes below the poverty line. See Bureau of the Census, Child Support and Alimony: 1978, tab. 1.
15.
15. These and other figures in the same paragraph in the text are taken from cross-tabulations I produced from the 1979 Current Population Survey (CPS) Mar.-Apr. match tape. A special child support supplement was conducted in the Apr. CPS and matched to the Mar. CPS. See Bureau of the Census, Child Support and Alimony: 1978 for a description of the data.
16.
16. See Timothy Smeeding, Alternative Methods for Valuing Selected In-Kind Transfer Benefits and Measuring Their Effects on Poverty, Technical Paper no. 50 (Washington, DC: Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1982), p. 89.
17.
17. See Thomas McDonald, James Moran, and Irwin Garfinkel, Wisconsin Study of Absent Fathers' Ability to Pay Child Support, Institute for Research on Poverty Special Report no. 34 (Madison, WI: Institute for Research on Poverty, 1983).
18.
18. See Guide for Determining the Ability of an Absent Parent to Pay Child Support (New York: Community Council of Greater New York, 1981).
19.
19. See Donald T. Oellerich, The Effects of Potential Child Support Transfers on Wisconsin AFDC Costs, Caseloads and Recipient Well-Being, Institute for Research on Poverty Special Report no. 35 (Madison, WI: Institute for Research on Poverty, 1984), p. 140.
20.
20. Child Support Enforcement, p. 83.
21.
and Alton Linford, “Public Assistance Categories: Yes or No?”Social Service Review, 22:199-210 (June 1948).
22.
22. Irwin Garfinkel and Robert Haveman, Earnings Capacity, Poverty, and Inequality (New York: Academic Press, 1977), chap. 4.
23.
and Robert Hutchens, “Welfare, Remarriage, and Marital Search,”American Economic Review, 69:369-379 (June 1979).
24.
24. For an excellent review of the literature and the best study to date, see Sara McLanahan, “Family Structure and the Reproduction of Poverty,”American Journal of Sociology (in press).
25.
25. For example, it is possible that bad family life leads both to divorce and to long-term harm to the children. In this case the children of single-parents would be expected to do less well than children in two-parent families even if being in a single-parent family had no effect.
26.
26. See, for example, C.L. Schultzeet al., Setting National Priorities: The 1973 Budget (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1972), p. 200.
27.
and David Betson, David Greenberg, and Richard Kasten, “A Simulation Analysis of the Economic Efficiency and Distributional Effects of Alternative Program Structures,” in ibid., chap. 6.
28.
28. Garfinkel and Melli, Child Support.
29.
29. Actually, the welfare case-load reductions are too high because they are based on annual data whereas eligibility is based on monthly income. On the other hand, they are too low because they do not take account of the increases in work that would result from the improved incentives of a child support insurance program.
