Shortly after President
Johnson introduced his Great Society programs, careful observers began pointing
out that they contained perverse incentives. Tragically, lawmakers didn’t
listen. Result? In thirty years a target demographic (largely inner city poor)
moved from 20-30% non-nuclear family formation to 80-90% non-nuclear family
formation – condemning the poor to remain in ghettoes … which remained poor, and
became lawless and violent to boot.
The Great Society set off
alarms for another reason. It cost over $8 trillion.
By the mid-1970s demographers foresaw a bankrupt U.S. Treasury. The political
process heated up in response: Pundits pundited; Congress established the Office
of Child Support Enforcement;
Ronald Reagan built part of his anti-big-government career around the disturbing
but rare scene of so-called welfare queens driving Cadillacs. All to no avail:
Entrenched interests trumped the common sense critique of governments
re-engineering inner city families. After Newt Gingrich enjoyed no more success
than Reagan, many in both parties waited hopefully when Bill Clinton announced
that he had a plan to “reinvent welfare as we know it”. Perhaps exactly as
“only Nixon [could] open China” only Clinton could fix welfare. His credibility
with the relevant constituencies and bureaucracies might give him a success that
had eluded everyone else. It did … but only because, using Title IV-D, he took
a welfare system desperately in need of a haircut and figured out how to
radically expand it. He converted welfare into a program mainly for middle-
and upper-income beneficiaries. Not since FDR has an American politician pulled
off such a domestic policy coup.
What Is Title IV-D?
Title IV-D is a federal
program to assist in child support collections and paternity establishment.
Through continuing statutory modifications, it has slowly shifted focus from its
carefully targeted original beneficiaries: Welfare recipients. As will be shown
below, for the most part Title IV-D has become an upper- and middle-income
Forced Asset Transfer program between divorced fit parents.
A Migratory Pattern Discovered
The initial idea was that when
applying for welfare an applicant would simultaneously apply for legal services
under Title IV-D to try to locate an absent
parent (who usually had abandoned the child) and obtain a child support order.
Admirable. But mission creep set in. Congress soon authorized expenditures
under Title IV-D for former welfare recipients (mostly those who’d gone
off welfare during a pending effort to locate an absent parent; it seemed penny
wise and pound foolish to end legal services just when they might be about to
pay off).
By the time Clinton launched
his reinvention of welfare, American voters had been exposed to years of studies
and dramatic speechmaking about the nation’s moral failure to collect staggering
amounts of unpaid child support.
Finally, the necessary dots had been connected: The welfare mess was the fault
of all those terrible deadbeat parents. At long last, we knew how to fix
welfare.
But we didn’t.
