Two Senators, one a republican and the other a democrat, have called for prohibiting states from taking part of child support payments to fund child support services. Here’s the article about their bill in the New Kerala.
The Senators, Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Herb Kohl, D-Wis., say their proposal would put an extra $4 billion in child support collections in the hands of parents over the next five years. “It simply does not make sense to tell a family that is on welfare or trying to get off of welfare that the State is entitled to the first cut of a child support payment,” said the Senators.
As I said just the other day, this is exactly the wrong approach to take with child support. It’s entirely appropriate to ask parents to make a modest contribution to child support enforcement. Spread across all the payments made by divorced and separated parents, it’s a pittance.
States’ budgets are already stripped to the bone now, so they cannot and will not fill the void this bill would leave. A decision to pass this misguided bill would be a decision to gut child support services, leaving millions more parents with no support at all .