Deadbeat Parents Drag Down Children and Taxpayers

Deadbeat parents do a lot of damage to the children they neglect but their offspring is not the only group that suffers.  Taxpayers are negatively impacted too; these deadbeat parents cost taxpayers $53 billion.  As CNN Money’s Steve Hargreaves reports “Over $100 billion is owed in unpaid child support — nearly half of that to taxpayers supporting children on public assistance.   According to the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, $108 billion in total back payments was owed to parents with custody of children in 2009.”

As with most things in life, when someone or some group fails to fulfill their respective responsibilities another group is left with picking up what remains left undone.  And that’s exactly what’s happening here.  When deadbeat parents choose to become deadbeat, someone or something must step up and provide for the child.  While most of the children do have one parent who’s fulfilling their parental obligations, monetarily speaking the family is still coming up short. The CNN article continues, “If those [back] payments aren’t made and the children then need to go on public assistance, payments are supposed to be made to the government in the form of reimbursement. About 49 percent of that back money — or roughly $53 billion — is owed to the government…”

While $53 billion is no small amount owed to taxpayers, the parents who are not receiving the child support money are the ones really left hurting. According to CNN, “For poor mothers, child support payments represent 45% of their income…”  This situation, though an unfortunate one, is one that the government has the ability to at least somewhat ameliorate. Among its options to force or rightly coerce child support payments out of parents who refuse to care of their families, the government can garnish wages or paychecks, seize tax refunds and or takeaway such state-granted privileges as driving licenses.

Some experts point to the need to increase the staff at agencies tasked with enforcing child support payments as one of the ways to solve this problem of back payments. But as Taxpayers Protection Alliance has demonstrated many times before, more government staffers or more funding does not positively correlate with better or more efficient services.  Until the government is able to retrieve the over $100 billion due to taxpayers and parents, it should do precisely what it expects taxpayers and the single mothers to do— that means doing more with less.  Instead of looking to take additional dollars from taxpayers’ wallets, the government should work to make its existing infrastructure more efficient.  In the end, the government doesn’t even have to spend money to do this.  It just has to bring in money it has so far failed to collect.  Of all the things government fails at, it’s surprising to find this instance, probably one of the only ones, where it has neglected to collect money for innocent children dealt a bad hand in life.  If the government agencies have no other reason to collect these back funds it should do it for the children.