Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Interesting things you learn by reading government reports

So out of boredom, anger, or for reasons not exactly known by me, I have been reading Washington state's Child Support Enforcement reports and findings. Actually, I am thinking of making a push to require deadbeat parents to either pay up or attend mandatory Work First programs like we require parents on TANF to do. After I get some numbers figured out, I'll need to see who would be the most friendly state rep to take the idea to.

In December a new report was published on state guidelines for setting support amounts. There was a bit of a debate (reading between the lines of the minority opinions published, it seems like the debate might have been a raucous) about what child to include when calculating family size. In they end they decided to count all the kids from both the non-custodial and custodial parents families, but:

A minority of the workgroup felt that later-born children should not be considered
in modifying support for the first family. Individuals supporting this position pointed out that the first family has an economic interest in the stability of the
support order and has no voice in the decision by the noncustodial parent to have
additional children in subsequent relationships. The custodial parent of a child
from a subsequent relationship enters into the relationship knowing of the
existence and financial obligations toward the child(ren) of the first relationship.


I find it funny (odd, not haha) that we have numerous ways of punishing poor custodial parents for having more children than they can afford, such as restrictions of TANF and Section 8 housing grants to the number of children in the family when the grant is first applied for, but we don't have those kinds of measures in place for non-custodial parents who continue to have have children while not paying support on the older kids. Could it be that most poor custodial parents are women, and poor women have always been at the mercy of society when it comes to their reproductive choices, but non-custodial parents are usually men and we have an aversion to punishing men for "spreading their seed"?

No comments: