Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 24, 1994 TAG: 9402250022
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Whether that is wise or not, one important piece of welfare reform, at the least, should not be put on hold. Government has got to continue cracking down on millions of parents - usually deadbeat dads, occasionally deadbeat moms - who renege on their responsibility to support their children financially.
It's not a far stretch to suggest this phenomenon is also a health-care and a crime issue.
Deadbeat dads, including unwed deadbeat dads, not only consign their children to poverty. Their failure to provide support also means that many children have no health-care insurance and receive little or no preventive and primary health care, because the mother is too financially strapped to pay for it.
Crime? Poverty is the petri dish for breeding crime. A recent national study shows a strong link between violent criminal offenders and households in which the father is absent. More immediately, deadbeat fathers make criminals of themselves by evading their legal obligations.
The federal government and many states have made good strides in recent years toward dealing with deadbeat dads. Virginia has devised an innovative hospital-based program intended to get more unwed fathers to voluntarily acknowledge paternity at the time of a child's birth. This affords the mother (or her advocate in government) an improved chance of collecting child-support payments. But f+iimprovedo is not good enough.
In Virginia, there were 280,389 cases where child support was due in 1992. Child support was collected in only 63,994 of these cases. Gov. George Allen is appropriately calling for legislation "to strengthen our hand in dealing with fathers who fail to meet their responsibilities to their children."
Effective this year, federal law requires that employers withhold child-support payments from an obligated parent's paycheck. This law should keep many absentee parents from getting behind in child payments, and also help child-support enforcement agencies cut down on administrative costs. In addition, it is now a federal crime for an absentee parent willfully to avoid making support payments for a child living in another state.
Of course, no program or law can completely eliminate the problem. Government can't mandate individual responsibility, and parents determined to avoid their obligations can be a cunning lot. Surely, though, the record can be improved. The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement reports that in an average annual child-support caseload of more than 15 million cases, payments by the legally obliged parent are made in only 3 million cases.
Doubtless, in many cases absentee parents don't abandon their children on purpose. Many men without jobs or able to eke out the barest of existences may be turnips, from whom no blood can be gotten. But if all those who f+iareo able actually paid child support, many thousands of families could be removed from the rolls of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and many thousands of children would be rescued from the shoals of deprivation. Absentee fathers as a group could contribute billions of dollars more to their children each year than they do now - without undue hardship for themselves.
Perhaps some day all men who puff with pride when they impregnate a woman will find an even greater source of pride - and honor - in helping to provide, financially and psychologically, for their progeny. Until then, government must be tougher on those who think their responsibility ends with conception or with divorce or separation from their children's mothers.
Government has to do a better job collecting from the deadbeats. For taxpayers' sake - and for the children's sake.
by CNB