NYT’s Doesn’t Like Welfare Reform
Here is the deal: If you collect welfare, any child support that is collected by the state is subject to garnishment to reimburse the cost of your benefits. The NYT’s has a problem with that:
One startling indicator of how pervasively the poor are affected is highlighted by Daniel L. Hatcher, a legal expert on welfare issues at the University of Baltimore School of Law, in a forthcoming law review article. Of the nation’s total uncollected child-support arrears of $105 billion in 2006, Professor Hatcher writes, fully half was owed to the federal and state governments to recover welfare costs, rather than to families.
When Congress set up the current child support system in the 1970s, recovering welfare costs was an explicit goal, with some experts arguing that it was only fair for fathers to repay the government for sustaining their offspring and that giving families the money was a form of “double dipping.” But experience and research have suggested to most experts and state and federal officials from both parties that the policy is counterproductive ” driving fathers into the underground economy and leaving families more dependent on aid.
Today, said Ron Haskins, a Republican expert at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think anyone thinks it’s double dipping, especially because one of the major goals is to get more money to the mother so she can stay off welfare.”
The major obstacle to change, Mr. Haskins said, “has usually been that it cost both the federal government and the states money.”
Could it be that the fathers are going awol in order to play the system? It would make sense for them to disappear in order to increase the amount of benefits the mother can collect from the state.
What isn’t mentioned is the generations of families that live on welfare. Granholm refused to limit welfare to four years. Unless there is a child with special needs, there is no reason to carry a family for longer than four years.
I agree that it is stupid to jail anyone or take a drivers license from anyone that owes a debt, but could it be that it is the only way to get these people to start paying support?
On Nov. 15, 24 governors from both parties sent a letter to Congress asking it to repeal the cuts, arguing that they would hurt one of the government’s most cost-effective programs, which raises more than $4 in child support for every $1 spent on enforcement.
Raises? As in gets donations? Or is it raises as in collects the money that it is rightfully owed?
December 2, 2007 - 10:05 AM on December 2nd, 2007
Of course this come from the NEW YORK SLIMES the most far left news paper in america