Children’s Poverty Spurs Plan to Guarantee Support Payments : Proponents say it could reduce single parents’ use of welfare. Others fear it might bring more births to unmarried women.

For the past generation, the face of poverty in the United States has been losing its wrinkles.

In 1959, the poverty rate among the elderly was a third greater than among children; today the young are almost twice as likely to be poor as the old.

That wrenching demographic shift in the nature of deprivation is propelling consideration of an ambitious plan to build the kind of economic floor under children that Social Security has provided for the aged.

Like Social Security, the idea is at once simple and revolutionary: creating a new government-insured benefit that would guarantee a minimum child support payment to all single-parent families.

Some European countries have similar plans in place, but the proposal would be a major addition to the social safety net in the United States. Most aid to single-parent families now comes through welfare, which disappoints liberals by leaving most recipients in poverty and angers conservatives by creating disincentives to marriage and work.

Child support assurance would not replace welfare, but proponents say it could reduce dependency on it, lift more families out of poverty and perhaps even save the government money.

“You could move (from welfare) toward a system where people collect a lot more child support, there is a lot more incentive to work and people are allowed a lot more dignity,” said Robert Greenstein, director of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

THE PROPOSAL: Although specific child support assurance proposals vary, the version backed in June by the National Commission on Children represents a typical formulation.

The commission proposed that the government guarantee a minimum annual child support payment of $1,500 for the first child in any single parent household, $1,000 for the next child and $500 for any additional child. If an absent parent failed to pay child support or contributed an amount below that level, the government would make up the difference. The assured benefit would be coupled with intensified efforts to collect more of the child support now owed by absent parents who do not pay.

Unquestionably, one reason so many single-parent families are under economic strain--43% of all female-headed families with young children were living in poverty in 1989--is that many absent parents (usually fathers) do not pay child support, and many more do not pay as much as they should.

According to the Census Bureau, just half of the parents eligible for child support awards receive any payment. Of those, only half receive the full payment to which they are entitled. Overall, absent parents pay only about one-fourth of the amount they could afford, according to calculations by Irv Garfinkel, a professor of social work at Columbia University.

Collecting more of that money is the key to any child support assurance plan because, once the government guarantees a minimum benefit, the only way it can keep down its costs is to shake out as much as possible from absent parents. To do that, the children’s commission proposed new enforcement measures.

To increase the incentive for divorced--and especially unmarried--mothers to aggressively pursue collection, the guaranteed payment would only be available to parents who have received a child support award in court.

The plan would encourage women on welfare--who are often the least likely to seek awards--to cooperate by allowing them to keep half of the assured payment if they win a child support award. Under current law, welfare recipients have little incentive to undertake the arduous process of establishing paternity and winning an award because they are only allowed to keep $50 a month in child support. The rest goes to the government to offset the welfare payment.

At the same time, the guaranteed award would be phased in along with a series of proposals passed in 1988 aimed at collecting significantly more money from the absent parents. Those measures, which are not yet in place in most states, require states to identify the Social Security numbers of both parents at the time of their child’s birth, to collect all new child support payments through automatic wage withholding and to establish uniform guidelines that set payments at a fixed percentage of income, rather than leaving them to the discretion of local courts.

THE DEBATE: The child support assurance proposal is riding two strong philosophical waves in the swirling welfare debate.

One is the growing interest of policy-makers across the ideological spectrum in creating programs that encourage work. Unlike welfare, the assurance payments would not be cut off if the recipient works; advocates believe that could eventually encourage many to leave welfare for the work force, cutting the rolls and saving money.

The proposal also benefits from another contrast to welfare: The guaranteed child support payment would be available to all single parents, not just the poor. In practice, most middle-class parents would not receive government money because their child support awards would exceed the minimum, but it would be available in emergencies.

“Its part of our philosophy to say that whether a family is poor or middle-income or wealthy, they all have a stake in each of the other’s doing well,” says Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the children’s commission.

Because of its universal nature, supporters believe that this program would be much easier to defend politically than welfare, whose constituency is weak and isolated.

But this plan has its critics too.

Some are dubious that government can achieve the increased enforcement necessary to minimize the program’s cost. Despite repeated efforts to improve collection, the percentage of eligible women receiving child support payments has not significantly increased over the past decade. “We are in a position of having to run harder and harder just to stay in place because the pool of single-parent families is growing all the time,” says Jason Juffras, a research associate at The Urban Institute.

Many suspect that the only way to dramatically increase collections is to federalize the system; some, such as Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-N.Y), talk of turning over responsibility for dunning errant parents to the IRS. But that worries conservatives, who would prefer to leave states and localities in the primary role “rather than concentrating authority over marriage and divorce in federal hands,” says Allan C. Carlson, president of The Rockford Institute, a conservative think tank.

Other analysts worry that the assured benefit may make it more attractive for unmarried women to have children. By contrast, states such as New Jersey and Wisconsin are advancing proposals to discourage recipients of public aid from bearing additional children outside of marriage.

Supporters counter that the tougher collection procedures might dissuade men from fathering children they do not intend to support and that in Europe even direct financial inducements for childbearing have not prodded women to have more babies. But nobody knows for certain whether the assurance plan would encourage or discourage more out-of-wedlock births.

THE OUTLOOK: Many advocates--including the children’s commission--support a large-scale test of the child support assurance system, not an immediate national program. Beyond the broader policy questions, many technical problems remain unanswered.

Most important, “no one really knows whether this (guaranteed benefit) would cost a little or a more substantial amount,” Greenstein says.

Rockefeller is preparing legislation to test a child support assurance system, while Downey is more likely to propose launching the system immediately. Although some congressional Republicans resist the assurance proposal as a back-door way of increasing welfare benefits, many others are willing to back a test, if not a full-scale program, one House GOP policy analyst says.

“We couldn’t really say that there is enough (information) out there to just start this on a national basis without some testing of it,” Rockefeller says. “But I think it won’t take very long to show that it would work.”

Poverty Shift to Children

Percent of people under 18 and over 65 who are in poverty. 1966 Under 18 years: 17.6% Over 65: 28.5% 1989 Under 18 years: 19.6% Over 65: 11.4% SOURCE: Census Bureau