There Is No Spoon Review of the 'Deadbeat Dad' Propaganda Movement
June 3, 2003
by Roger F. Gay
The story of Jayson Blair, who made up stories for the New York Times, caused
me to reflect on the "deadbeat dad" propaganda campaign that was
especially intense during the early 1990s. The motives and intentional lies in
that campaign were much more sinister and led to much greater damage than
anything that was likely contemplated by Mr. Blair. Unlike Mr. Blair, the
"deadbeat dad" propagandists have not yet been exposed by the
mainstream media. Their legacy lives on.
The Perceived World The early 1990s experience included an overwhelming media
campaign aimed at demonizing fathers in support of radical reform of the
nation's divorce laws; particularly the laws pertaining to the setting of child
support award amounts and the process of payment. For years on end a very high
percentage of the nations newspapers, news magazines, and television networks
regularly attacked "deadbeat dads." Congress had injected the federal
government into child support enforcement in 1975 by creating the U.S. Office of
Child Support Enforcement. At the time it was an unpopular (and generally
regarded as unconstitutional) political step supported by the National
Organization for Women. From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, a growing
group of researchers supported an increased federal role in dictating the way in
which child support amounts are determined as well as tougher enforcement. In
the mid 1980s, entrepreneurs began stressing the potential profits for
collection businesses if proposed reforms were enacted.
The head of the National Governors Association appeared before Congress and
threatened opposition to all welfare reform by every governor if it did not
include child support enforcement funding. With extreme bipartisan support,
Congress passed major reforms in the 1980s that included billions of dollars in
additional funding. The 1990s became a decade in which child support reform was
on the lips of virtually every politician, took up a plank of both Republican
and Democratic party platforms, and was a subject of every presidential
campaign. The politics and media campaigns were so intense that in a televised
debate, George Bush (the father) commented that it seemed like the
"deadbeat dad thing" might be the most important issue to voters; to
which Bill Clinton replied, "It's the economy, stupid." By the mid
1990s, the U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement consistently reported
dramatic increases in child support "collections," seemingly proving
that the new enforcement regime worked. The amount reported
"collected" through the new system far exceeded the billions of
dollars in annual investment required to keep the program going. Republicans and
Democrats all seemed impressed and battled to take credit for reforms.
Republicans targeted "activist judges who legislate from the
bench," and judges hoping for political advancement seemed to respond. We
are now more a country dependent on the partisan politics of democracy, like
socialist European countries, than we are the "free country" devoted
to individual rights as prescribed by the Constitution. Partisan politics, and
media coverage of partisan politics, has divided the country into two opposing
groups, neither of which includes noncustodial parents.
So that seems to be it then. Social conservatives and progressives agree.
Republicans and Democrats agree. State and federal politicians agree. A grand
collection or reporters for major media organizations agreed. They're all backed
by researchers, bureaucrats, technical analysts, and political consultants who
agree. And the courts will do nothing to get in the way. The world is stacked
against noncustodial parents, and there is apparently nothing that can be done
about it.
There Is No Spoon As early as the 1970s, major news organizations were
trimming their costs by eliminating investigative reporters and support staff.
By the 1990s, it didn't take a huge conspiracy for the vast majority of
reporters to get a major news story completely wrong in the same way. It was
cheeper for retail news outlets to buy news from a wholesale provider.
Organizations like API, covered major issues like child support with a single
and very busy reporter. Everyone else just copied.
Too busy to do any serious investigative reporting, wholesale news writers
quickly transformed limited source opinion into articles that appeared to have
been investigated. Child support stories were often backed by press releases
from Congressional offices, collection agencies, or feminist groups. A single
press package could contain statements from several individuals and
organizations supporting the same view. Arguments in favor of one position would
be presented as fact by wholesale writers, who used quotes from the same press
package to bolster the story.
The vast majority of reporters were simply repeating what was handed to them.
At times, wholesale articles were simply published as is. Many articles were
produced by superficial modification of the wholesale article, just enough to
change the by-line.
No one was seriously trying to understand what was really meant by the words
they received. A good example is the evidence provided by the U.S. Office of
Child Support Enforcement that "collections" had increased as a result
of the enforcement program. The percent of what is ordered that is paid never
increased. In fact, it has decreased in recent years. The government had been
busy enrolling more people in their program, many of whom were good regular
payers. But they labeled all payments made through their program the same way as
"collections." What was universally characterized as a policy success
was actually nothing more than the fruitless expansion of a worthless and
expensive big government program.
Something similar happened in the research community. There are no great
academic institutions of child support or universities competing on fundamental
child support research. Single source opinion traveled through a small fraction
of the research community and beyond like a virus. For quite some time,
virtually no one else had sufficient interest or funding to argue.
One of the best known examples is a conclusion presented by Lenore Weitzman.
Dr. Weitzman is famous for asserting that following divorce the standard of
living of men increases by about 24 percent, while that of women and children
drops by a whopping 76 percent. These "facts" were repeated in
hundreds of articles, both popular and academic, and even appeared in a budget
proposal to justify increased government expenditure on child support
enforcement. But they weren't true.
Even follow up research, while producing different numbers (closer to even),
repeated an inadequate analysis that delivered inaccurate results. For about a
decade, every published article on comparative standard of living showed that as
a group, women came out worse following divorce than men. The analyses only
considered the working income of men and women. Not until the late 1990s, when
Arizona State University professor Sanford Braver reviewed the research, did
anyone include child support and alimony payments when making the comparison.
Braver showed that including child support and alimony, custodial mother
households (accounting for children as well) were actually better off than the
paying fathers they left behind.
At least for a short time, conclusions by Elaine Sorensen at the Urban
Institute seemed destined to replace Lenore Weitzman's misinformation. Elaine
Sorensen took fathers as a group literally; as though the income of all fathers
is put together somehow in a big pot for child support payments. She
underestimated actual payments at the time, and overestimated group father
income, concluding that since fathers (as a group) still have money left over
after paying already arbitrarily high child support awards, additional across
the board increases in awards would be appropriate. Even though the flaws in
Sorensen's analysis have been pointed out, the awh what the heck, he can afford
it philosophy is still with us. The Georgia Supreme Court recently decided that
arbitrarily high child support awards are not unconstitutional, interpreting and
applying the concept of "ability to pay" the same way Sorensen did.
"If he's got money take it. That ain't so arbitrary. And it don't make no
never mind if he don't. Throw him in jail and that'll teach 'em (as a group).
Deadbeats don't got no rights." [paraphrased]
Another popular misconception had its origin in a summary of child support
statistics gathered by the Census Bureau. One might still recall that only half
of the child support owed is paid in full, another twenty-five percent pay some
of what is due, and twenty-five percent pay nothing at all. That wasn't really
true either. On the basis of census statistics themselves, "some" of
the twenty-five percent paid was actually most of what was due. And a more
detailed investigation of the method behind the statistics (asking custodial
mothers how much of what they were due was paid by fathers) revealed that
fathers actually pay significantly more than what was reported. The Census
Bureau conclusion, regardless of its flaws, gave evidence that fathers who owed
child support were paying much more than the public had been given to believe;
around seventy percent of what was due. This put the record of payment in the
United States, prior to federal enforcement reforms, on par with nation's that
had been operating very sophisticated collection programs for decades. In fact,
actual payments by fathers with child support orders were probably running
closer to eighty percent, with fully employed fathers reportedly paying all that
they owed. The primary cause of nonpayment was not that the "deadbeat
dad" refused, but that a father who would be paying had insufficient income
to pay the amount he had been ordered to pay. Among the reasons for inability to
pay; the father is dead but he's still a statistic.
Work on design of child support guidelines, once conducted independently by
lawyers and judges and by local bar associations, has experienced an unusual
downsizing. Post reform, the source of technical philosophy regarding how
guidelines should be designed has been reduced to a very small number of people
really down to one. An assistant psychology professor in North Carolina, with no
background in child support research, but with flaming political ambitions,
wrote a report with funding from the U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement.
Ronald Haskins' "research" was not scientifically peer reviewed, and
it made no sense when exposed to scrutiny, but his opinions were repeated far
and wide as though scientifically established fact.
Haskins went on to become a high ranking Republican congressional staff
member, specializing in welfare reform. I think that move was based on what is
known as the Peter Principle; one moves up to their level of incompetence. But
his background in psychology apparently made him useful as a manipulative
propagandist. One of the "growing number of researchers" who repeated
Haskins' results without review became an assistant secretary of Health and
Human Services for Bill Clinton's first term. This was politics, not science.
Serious research does not support the reforms.
The U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement hired child support collection
entrepreneur Robert Williams to provide technical assistance to states on
developing their child support guidelines. Williams suggested the possibility of
using one of either of two models. One assigns an arbitrary percent of income as
child support, and the other, based on Haskins' views, uses statistical
information on the intact family "cost or raising children" as the
basis for a post-divorce child support determination.
Williams recommendations were not scientific either. The only scientific
conclusion that can be drawn is that the statistical approach to design of child
support guidelines does not work. It was business. Arbitrarily high awards mean
greater child support debt and higher profits for collection agencies. Since
additional federal funding is doled out in proportion to the amount of child
support paid, state politicians are rabid fans of arbitrarily high awards; so
are the bureaucrats who depend on federal funding for their jobs. But it's
happened again; this time with the push of federal funding. States adopted child
support guidelines based on the views expressed by Haskins and Williams. There
is a working assumption that this is the only view on development of guidelines
that is needed. The effect has been profound. The Haskins / Williams approach is
not objective. It is arbitrary. The basis of his model is an arbitrarily chosen
set of numbers. The method is indeterminate. No matter how many times one
employs the same statistical approach, there is absolutely no possibility of
proving the results either right or wrong.
Based on this one approach however, courts have determined that there is no
way to avoid the subjective nature of child support decisions. Therefore, the
amount of child support awarded must necessarily be a political rather than a
rational decision. This too is up for challenge. Prior to reforms, lawyers,
judges, and local bar associations worked independently on development of
guidelines. Many of them worked from existing statutes and case law (pre-reform)
to formulate mathematical models that are objectively related to the purpose of
child support and actual family circumstances. That work has continued, and has
been extended by the Project for Improvement of Child Support Litigation
Technology.
Republicans, Democrats, state and federal politicians, bureaucrats, political
analysts, and child support collection entrepreneurs are after one thing money.
It's not for the children. It's primarily for a share the billions of dollars in
pork-barrel spending. We are currently spending tons of dough on defense and
security. Does anyone really want or need to throw billions of dollars in the
toilet on an old and useless pork-barrel program after all the assumptions upon
which it was based have been proven untrue? Somebody put a press package
together and send it to API! Roger F. Gay
_________________________________________________________________
Roger F. Gay is a professional analyst and director of Project for the
Improvement of Child Support Litigation Technology. Other articles by
Roger F. Gay can be found at Fathering Magazine and the MND archive.
