Caleb Brown interviews me in this new podcast for Cato about child support collection policies that might be seen as backfiring even if one accepts revenue maximization as their sole purpose (earlier from me at Cato and here). Some other views: NYT “Room for Debate”
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Trying hard to comment on this topic, without getting caught up in the Walter Scott shooting…to me, he is not the best poster child for this cause.
The child support system is not geared to support children. There are no rules or regulations in place to ensure that the money a non-custodial parent pays is actually used for the child, at all. A custodial parent could easily take that money and gamble it away, with no repercussions.
A non-custodial parent is the only person who is required to pay back any welfare payments made to the family. A custodial parent can go on welfare without repercussion; they are not required to pay that money back, nor are standard, nuclear style families required to do so.
If you are a non-custodial parent and share a bank account with your spouse, they can take the money from the bank account, even if that money was earned by the spouse, and the burden to prove that it was earned by the spouse is up to the non-custodial parent and their spouse. Even if it is proven, it is unlikely that all the money will be returned.
A non-custodial parent is given no rights to the child; if the custodial parent, for example, refuses to allow standard visits, the non-custodial parent’s only recourse is to the take the custodial parent to family court, a difficult process, made more difficult if the parents live in different states.
There is no oversight on the Child Support System in any state (that I am aware of) and the courts are severely biased against the non-custodial parent, especially if that parent is male, and irregardless if that person is the actual biological parent of the child.
D., the issue of whether the custodial parent is using the money appropriately is an interesting one, but inappropriate to putting the non-custodial parent in jail for not paying. Clearly, it’s hard to make money to pay child support while in jail.
Bob
[…] friend Walter Olsen (of the CATO Institute and Overlawyered.com) and others from the CATO Institute discuss the rational and effectiveness of jailing parent who cannot afford child support […]