CHILD SUPPORT IN THE UNITED STATES

Child Support in the United States

Abstract

Although it is ultimately the responsibility of both parents to provide for the well being of their child or children, once one parent is ordered to pay child support, such support should be a standard amount regardless of the paying parents income

Child Support in the United States

Introduction

The research described in this paper seeks to explore the principal which are often neglected features of federal law and state enabling policy designed to provide incentives for the improvement of child support enforcement effectiveness and efficiency. While other investigators have mainly focused on the effectiveness of state laws passed mostly in response to government demands, we have chosen instead to analyze the effectiveness of two key government principles that rely on rudimentary financial reasoning—“carrot” advances to going states and individuals in the direction of the accomplishment of fundamental child support objectives.

Other investigations that have looked at the effectiveness of various state paternity, enforcement, and assemblage regulations have generally relied upon census data and tended to focus on federally mandated state progeny support enabling regulations, taken up by the states to avoid loss of government welfare funds. Such attach” approaches, aimed at advancing state progeny support program conclusions, are by no means restricted to progeny support programs: federal mandates for state regulations conceived to regulate the operation of motor vehicles on interstate highways, for example, have historically been tied to the risk of decrease of government funds to states for the building and upkeep of these highways.

The two most significant of the “carrot” advances we examined request to the purposeful conceive of the federal Child Support Enforcement Program (also known as the “IV-D” program, mentioning to the part of the Social Security proceed that established the program in 1975), and the IV-A program (public aid, or “welfare”, such as AFDC and TANF). The first of the two advances discovered here is the “disregard”, as it has been applied to varying allowances of progeny support collections on behalf of welfare recipients; the second approach, recounted earlier in general periods, is the federal practice of bestowing performance inducements, furthermore renowned as “earned government funds”, to states for meeting certain progeny Support Enforcement program objectives.

Disregards, as directed to progeny support payments assembled by the states, were often believed to enhance the enthusiasm of AFDC recipients to completely help in the identification and position of the fathers of their children, and in other ways to support enforcement of the progeny support obligation. The method under this policy was to “disregard” a portion of the child support that may be assembled for the family when setting up the month's AFDC advantage payment level. The “stick” principle that served as the equivalent to the disregard was the risk of renunciation of AFDC advantages, otherwise accessible to a family, for malfunction to cooperate with paternity conclusion and other enforcement efforts. These principles were implemented by each state as part of its IV-A, or “welfare” ...