Talk about your Catch 22’s. John is a deadbeat dad. He is currently married and has two stepchildren. He also owes about $10,000 in back child support to his ex wife. John is 27 years old and still going to school part time. He used to work a full-time job as well as going to school, but now he and his wife and two children try to get by on her salary alone. He has stopped attending classes because there is no money for it. When the court settled on the monthly amount of child support he was supposed to pay, they based it on his future income after he received his business degree and not on what he was currently making, which was next to nothing. Before he remarried, John went from job to job, usually at restaurants or retail establishments. He would work until child support would garnish his paycheck, and then move on to try to find another job. One time they left him with about $150 for the month to pay for rent, groceries, and other expenses after his child support payment was deducted. He has tried to go back to court and ask for a lower monthly payment but to no avail. He thinks that it is because he comes from a wealthy family, but they (the court and his family) refuse to help him out.
According to a recent article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, there were 360,435 cases of unpaid child support in Missouri in fiscal 2006, and 601,908 in Illinois. It’s a common scenario and a difficult question. How do you make fathers responsible and enforce child support laws without putting the deadbeat dad in a position where he cannot make the payments? So far several tactics have been tried. In some states the offender’s names are published on the Internet. Other states revoke the deadbeat dad’s driver’s license or seize his bank account or tax refunds and some prosecute and deliver jail sentences to the offenders.
The only problem with this kind of enforcements is that in some cases they can nullify the dad’s ability to make the payments. If you can’t get to work, you can’t hold a job. And if they put you in jail, the child support payments continue to accumulate while you are incarcerated and you are caught in a vicious circle from which there seems to be no escape. But on the other hand, it’s certainly not fair for one parent to bear all of the responsibility of raising the child and ultimately in the end it is the child who suffers.
Now, under a new law enacted last week, Illinois wants to immobilize the deadbeat parent’s car with what is known as a “Denver Boot.” State governments are heavily involved in collecting child support payments because of the large amount of money that non-compliance costs them. So far the crackdown seems to be having an effect. Illinois collected a record $1.22 billion in back child support payments last year. I think that these deterrents help the state collect from deadbeat parents who are working and able to pay, but just don’t want to. But penalizing some to the point of them not being able to hold a job or have transportation simply drives them further underground.
