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On the Record: The overlooked element in welfare reform
On the record: The overlooked element in welfare reform
By Richard "Casey" Hoffman April 3, 2000 Austin American-Statesman When Congress chose to unravel the safety net for single mothers with the welfare reform law of 1996, some members and President Clinton stressed the importance of strengthening child-support enforcement. With time limits on their welfare benefits, mothers will not be able to rely on welfare as their main source of support for their children. That clock worries Austin's Richard "Casey" Hoffman, a lawyer who in the mid-1980s ran the Texas child-support enforcement program and today heads Supportkids.com, the largest private child-support collector in the country. In January, federal officials heralded breaking new records in nationwide child-support collections, reaching $15.5 billion last year and nearly doubling the amount collected in 1992. Still, the job of collecting remains monumental. One children's advocacy group estimated earlier this year that 30 million children are owed $50 billion, while money is being collected in only 23 percent of the cases. Following are excerpts from a recent conversation Hoffman had with Maria Henson, the American-Statesman's deputy editorial page editor. On cultural changes The basic problem is the total overwhelm in the government child-support programs because they did not anticipate the breakdown of the American family. Back when my parents got married, 95 percent of the marriages ended with the death of a spouse. Today, one out of two marriages ends in divorce. But more importantly, three out of 10 children in the country are born to parents who aren't married. So the need for child support has become so great that the government agencies have not been able to keep up. The program started in 1975, and in the 25-year history of the program, they finally collect on a little bit more than two out of every 10 cases. 1 out of 5 U.S. children living in poverty The No. 1 reason for children living in poverty and, in my view, the feminization of poverty is failure to pay child support...I think people have gotten away from the importance of child-support enforcement with respect to welfare reform. The compassionate conservatives say, 'Let's move people from welfare to work.' But what happens to these folks after they move to work? From welfare, they hope to get a (minimum-wage) paying job. To be above the poverty line, you've got to get to $14,150 if you're a woman with two children, so you're short...In my view, the way that families move from welfare to work and above the poverty line, they have to have child support collected. And in my view, it's the government's job to make sure that those (welfare) cases get worked first. Now, the government is overwhelmed with not just welfare cases, but anybody who's not on welfare in Texas is allowed to apply for these (collection) services. If you were Ivana Trump and lived here, you'd get these services. What's happened is the non-welfare population has backlogged the system to the point where cases don't get worked based on priority of need. That's where the children slip through the cracks here. Because if the government was allowed to prioritize their caseload and if they were allowed to take care of the neediest children first, then we would see compassionate welfare reform. What I'm advocating is we recognize what this cost is to our children, because they are below the poverty line, and that we dedicate this decade to putting our children first, making sure they get the services they need. In order to do (welfare reform) successfully, you have to invest money in the child-support program. The reality is we're not collecting on more than two out of 10--Texas is not--we're not going to make a dent in this. That's where my heart is. |
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