People for Equal Parenting in Texas see through the Title IV-D Smokescreen. Jim Loose authored FEDERAL TITLE IV-D: A CASE STUDY ON A MIGRATORY PATTERN OF Incentivus federalis perversus. The original URL is located at http://www.pepintexas.org/titleIV-D.htm. Jim Loose demonstrates what has been said for years about the Title IV-D program, that it has moved from its original beneficiaries to include middle and upper-class families and that the perverse incentives that affected poor families in the 1960s have migrated into the middle and upper classes beginning in 1996.
Other Resources:
- Overview of Title IV-D Services: Click Here
- How Federal Funding Drives Judicial Discretion... Click Here
- Requesting Change: It's a Matter of Administration and Legislation: Click Here
- The Weekly Standard Indicts CSE Title IV-D Welfare Program: Click Here
- Will Democrats Actually Reduce Our Deficit? Click Here
FEDERAL TITLE IV-D:
A CASE STUDY ON A MIGRATORY PATTERN OF
Incentivus federalis perversus
By Jim Loose *
The one great principle of [the] law is to make business for itself.
– Charles Dickens, Bleak House
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Historical Background
Shortly after President Johnson introduced his Great Society programs, careful observers began pointing out that they contained perverse incentives. Tragically, lawmakers didn’t listen. Result? In thirty years a target demographic (largely inner city poor) moved from 20-30% non-traditional family formation to 80-90% non-traditional family formation – condemning the poor to remain in ghettoes, which now became lawless and violent to boot.
The Great Society set off alarms for another reason. It cost over $8 trillion.[1] By the mid-1970s demographers foresaw a bankrupt U.S. Treasury. The political process heated up in response: Pundits pundited; Congress established the Office of Child Support Enforcement;[2] Ronald Reagan built part of his anti-big-government career around the disturbing but rare scene of so-called welfare queens driving Cadillacs. All to no avail: Entrenched interests trumped the common sense critique of governments re-engineering inner city families. After Newt Gingrich enjoyed no more success than Reagan, many in both parties waited hopefully when Bill Clinton announced that he had a plan to “reinvent welfare as we know it”. Perhaps exactly as “only Nixon [could] open China” only Clinton could fix welfare. His credibility with the relevant constituencies and bureaucracies might give him a success that had eluded everyone else. It did … but only because, using Title IV-D, he took a welfare system desperately in need of a haircut and figured out how to radically expand it. He converted welfare into a program mainly for middle and upper income beneficiaries. Not since FDR has an American politician pulled off such a domestic policy coup.
What Is Title IV-D?
Title IV-D is a federal program to assist in child support collections and paternity establishment. Through continuing statutory modifications, it has slowly shifted focus from its carefully targeted original beneficiaries: Welfare recipients.
A Migratory Pattern Discovered
The initial idea was that when applying for welfare an applicant would simultaneously apply for legal services under IV-D to try to locate an absent[3] parent (who usually had abandoned the child) and obtain a child support order. Admirable. But mission creep set in. Congress soon authorized expenditures under IV-D for former welfare recipients (mostly those who’d gone off welfare during a pending effort to locate an absent parent; it seemed penny wise and pound foolish to end legal services just when they might be about to pay off).
By the time Clinton launched his reinvention of welfare, the American public had been exposed to years of studies and dramatic speechmaking about the nation’s moral failure to collect staggering amounts of unpaid child support.[4] The stage was set. The welfare mess was the fault of all those terrible deadbeat parents. At last, we knew how to fix welfare.
But we didn’t. What actually had been achieved was the stage had been set for massive IV-D mission creep – a classic migration of Incentivus federalis perversus. The 1984 revision had already authorized expending IV-D sums on behalf of all children,[5] but without significant federal incentives the revision was toothless. Teeth came with the 1996 revision. It pared old programs for reimbursing state welfare expenditures,[6] and it financially incentivized state and county judiciaries and bureaucracies[7] to collect and distribute as much child support as possible under IV-D. It also made a crucial change in nomenclature. Whereas IV-D previously had sought to deal with problems brought on by absent parents, the program now exploded by changing the key word from the (relatively rare) absent parent to the commonplace noncustodial parent. Because there was never any likelihood of much child support being collected for welfare beneficiaries[8] this meant that the IV-D mission would expand dramatically within middle and upper classes as newly created state and county child support bureaucracies aggressively sought funds from the only places funds could be found. That IV-D had to develop this way was a function of design logic. Those responsible for the 1996 revision knew what would happen.
Conclusion
The perverse incentives that wrecked inner city poor populations beginning in the 1960s migrated into the middle and upper classes beginning in 1996.
We began this Executive Summary with a quote from Dickens – the accuracy of which now may be seen causing no end of trouble with IV-D, which incentivizes state and county judiciaries and bureaucracies nationwide to wedge themselves into private civil disputes between middle and upper class parents. Half of America’s families – already suffering from divorces – have been transformed into potential or actual public troughs for judiciaries, bureaucracies, and special interests vested in Family Law. This is extraordinarily dangerous. We can remove the danger if we will act contrary to another of Dickens’ observations:
Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities,
or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.
In this instance the business at hand is our stewardship of the health and security of our nation – now and in the future. To succeed we must act as units, not fractions, in the activities and moralities of the business at hand. We must act as individuals who know the difference between right and wrong. What was done to the beneficiaries of the Great Society was not only a mistake, it was wrong. To inflict the same kind of mistake on a much wider scale today would not only be wrong, it would be fatal. Esse quam videri.
* Jim Loose is Chairman of the Board of People for Equal Parenting, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to reform of family law.
[2] President Ford signed the bill creating OCSE, while expressing doubts that it was constitutional.
[3] As will be seen, in subsequent statutory revisions “absent” versus “noncustodial” becomes a crucial distinction.
[4] Claims as high as $100 billion were made. It seems these claims were not interrogated for common sense. How much was due to obligors (often poor people with problems, referred to in footnote 8 below) never being able to afford the original obligation (not infrequently a statutory minimum imposed in a proceeding from which obligors were absent)? How much was due to obligor inability to lower the obligation after losing a job (a task s/he couldn’t do without a lawyer s/he couldn’t afford)? Such obligors are in a cruel Catch-22, and the legal system has been unwilling to do anything other than keep the counters clicking away, rolling up month after month of steadily higher unpayable obligations. Politically palatable claims that we need to pay attention to these people’s children instead of these people’s problems don’t make the problems disappear. The author believes the number of truly willful deadbeat parents may account for as little as 4% of America’s total reported child support arrearage. Note: gender is a red herring. Today, one-in-five of America’s 20 million noncustodial parents is a woman (soon to be one-in-four). Retrieved from the World Wide Web, August 30, 2006: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cse/pubs/reports/projections/ch02.html#NCC (see Table 2.1 and Figure 2.8).
[5] Note the appropriation language in 42 U.S.C. § 651 – “(A)ll children (whether or not eligible for assistance under a State program funded under part A” [i.e., non-welfare] “of this subchapter) …”. No means testing. Further, § 654 (4) (A)(ii) requires that participating states have plans that include, “any other” [i.e.,non-welfare] “child, if an individual applies for such services with respect to the child”. Again, no means testing. This all but invites abuse by state actors as soon as sufficient incentives are in place – an invitation that state actors have proven quite ready to accept. For example, in large counties in Texas family court judges have flouted Congress’ § 654 (4)(A)(ii) requirement for individual application by slipping into local court rules their own fiat that divorce decrees that contain a child support order, “shall be deemed to include an application for IV-D child support services”. (Emphasis added.)
[6] Simultaneously, it made maximizing the remaining federal funding for welfare (i.e., Title IV-A) contingent on participating states maximizing collections and distribution of middle and upper class child support.
[7] Through the nexus of 42 U.S.C. § 658a (a) and (b) and § 654 (22).
[8] Because the other parent is usually unemployed, unemployable, or confined to state facilities (setting in motion the dynamic described in footnote 4, above). For example, in Texas in 2005, of the $1.78 billion in distributed child support collections, approximately $20.6 million went to welfare recipients, while $737 million went to people in the middle and upper classes (i.e., as little as 2/10ths of 1% of the program has gone to the putative target beneficiaries). Retrieved from the World Wide Web, August 30, 2006: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cse/pubs/2006/reports/preliminary_report/table_3.html. Texas’ ratios are typical of other states. See pie chart in Figure 5: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cse/pubs/2006/reports/preliminary_report/ , which shows 45% of the benefit of IV-D being distributed to people in middle and upper classes. Bluntly, today’s IV-D does little for welfare beneficiaries and much to impoverish middle and upper class families. It has become an all-too-obvious mixture of middle and upper class welfare program and pure political pork.
