As welfare and child support enforcement programs show, there is zero proof that further government intervention into families would be a good investment for taxpayers.
After more than a decade of welfare reform, out-of-wedlock births remain at record highs, and married couples now comprise less than half the nations households. The impact of welfare reform is now virtually zero, says Robert Rector of Heritage Foundation.
Welfare reform, as currently conceived, cannot possibly make a difference. Out-of-wedlock births no longer proceed only from low-income teenagers. Increasingly, middle-class, middle-aged women are bearing the fatherless children. This excludes children of divorce, which almost doubles the 1.5 million out-of-wedlock births.
The problem is driven not only by culture, but by federal programs not addressed by welfare reformsuch as child support enforcement, domestic violence, and child abuse preventionwhich subsidize single-parent homes through their quasi-welfare entitlements for the affluent.
Its not called the welfare state for nothing. Even more serious than the economic effects has been the quiet metamorphosis of welfare from a system of public assistance into a miniature penal apparatus, replete with its own tribunals, prosecutors, police, and jails.
The subsidy on single-mother homes was never really curtailed. Reformers largely replaced welfare with child support. The consequences were profound: this change transformed welfare from public assistance into law enforcement, creating yet another federal plainclothes police force without constitutional justification.
Like any bureaucracy, this one found rationalizations to expand. During the 1980s and 1990swithout explanation or public debateenforcement machinery created for children in poverty was dramatically expanded to cover all child-support cases, including those not receiving welfare.
This vastly expanded the program by bringing in millions of middle-class divorce cases. The system was intended for welfarebut other cases now account for 83% of its cases and 92% of the money collected.
Contrary to what was promised, the cost to taxpayers increased sharply. By padding their rolls with millions of middle-class parents, state governments could collect a windfall of federal incentive payments. State officials may spend this revenue however they wish. Federal taxpayers subsidize state government operations through child support. They also subsidize family dissolution, for every fatherless child is another source of revenue for states.
To collect, states must channel not just delinquent but current payments through their criminal enforcement machinery, subjecting law-abiding parents to criminal measures. While officials claim their crackdowns on deadbeat dads increase collections, the increase is achieved not by collecting arrearages of low-income fathers already in the system, but simply by pulling in more middle-class fathersand creating more fatherless children.
These fathers havent abandoned their children. Most were actively involved, and, following what is usually involuntary divorce, desire more time with them. Yet for the state to collect funding, fathers willing to care for them must be designated as absent. Divorce courts are pressured to cut children off from their fathers to conform to the welfare model of custodial and noncustodial. These perverse incentives further criminalize fathers, by impelling states to make child-support levels as onerous as possible and to squeeze every dollar from every parent available.
Beyond the subsidy expense are costs of diverting the criminal justice system from protecting society to criminalizing parents and keeping them from their children. The entitlement state must then devise additional programsfar more expensiveto deal with the social costs of fatherless children. Former Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary Wade Horn contends that most of the $47 billion spent by his department is necessitated by broken homes and fatherless children. One might extend his point to most of the half-trillion dollar HHS budget. Given the social ills attributed to fatherless homescrime, truancy, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, suicideit is reasonable to see a huge proportion of domestic spending among the costs.
These developments offer a preview of where our entire system of welfare taxation is headed: expropriating citizens to pay for destructive programs that create the need for more spending and taxation. It cannot end anywhere but in the criminalization of more and more of the population.