Big daddy - federal government and child support

Reason, June, 1996 by Brian Doherty

He also has a lament shared by many fathers, as well as some economists, that many states' child support guidelines dictate payments that are unnecessarily large, representing far more than just the marginal cost of the child to the mother's household, and in fact are more like alimony than pure child support.

Despite all the money the federal government is spending and the state governments are making, the child support bureaucracy still isn't running efficiently even on its own terms. A recent GAO report goes on for dozens of pages about the child support bureaucracies' administrative problems, and the insistence that a larger, more intrusive bureaucracy is needed indicates that they aren't bringing the problem under control. Government can almost never admit that some problems are simply intractable in a free society. As long as people continue to choose to have children out of wedlock - the result of social and moral changes the government is powerless to halt, except on the margins through changes in welfare policy - we will continue to have men who father children but do not feel like, or are made not to feel like, fathers.

So long as they don't feel responsible, tinkering with changes in government programs won't make them so. "I could imagine a society in which [current crackdown efforts] would work," says Blankenhorn. "But it would need to be an authoritarian state."

Brian Doherty (BMDoherty@aol.com) is assistant editor of REASON.