Bush Unveils Plan to Collect Child Support : Campaign: The proposal is one of a series designed to portray him as aggressively tackling domestic problems.

President Bush on Wednesday targeted “deadbeat” parents, calling for a toughened federal role enforcing child support obligations that would include withholding their wages, denying them federal loans and putting tax collectors on their trail.

As he began his campaign day in Wisconsin, Bush directed a stern message at the millions of parents--nearly all of them fathers--who do not meet court-ordered child support payments. “If you owe child support and you haven’t paid, then you’re going to pay a price,” Bush said. “You’ll get no passport, no professional licenses, no housing or student loans, or any other help from the federal government until you do right by your children.

“The bottom (line) is, if you haven’t done what’s right for your kids, don’t expect any help from Uncle Sam from this day forward.”

The hastily assembled package is one of a series of proposals from a revamped domestic policy since James A. Baker III became White House chief of staff.

Wednesday’s plan came as Bush faces lagging support among women, as well as the continuing uproar over Vice President Dan Quayle’s criticism of the television show Murphy Brown and its central character’s unwed motherhood. Quayle’s attack had set off a wave of protest that the Administration was unsympathetic toward single mothers.

If Bush’s legislative recommendation is approved by Congress--a step that could not occur until next year--it would inject the federal government in a massive way into the chase for deadbeat parents.

The program’s initial cost was estimated at $100 million, which would pay for the greater federal enforcement effort and coordination with similar state endeavors. But a White House official contended that cost ultimately would be offset--by a 15 to one ratio--by increased payments from absent parents that would help reduce government welfare payments and Medicaid benefits to poor families.

The President, who after stumping in Wisconsin traveled to New Jersey, punched away with a new vigor at Bill Clinton one day after surprising the Democratic nominee with a proposal for four consecutive Sunday night debates.

In both states, Bush was endorsed by several local and state-wide police associations. And in Newark, N.J., he ventured into a crowded union hall of construction workers to receive the endorsement of the 7,000-member AFL-CIO Heavy Construction Laborers Local 472.

There, he revisited Clinton’s efforts to avoid the military draft during the Vietnam War, referring to a letter the Arkansas governor wrote in 1969 explaining his decision to back out of a commitment to join the Reserve Officer Training Corps. In the letter to the head of the University of Arkansas ROTC program, Clinton expressed hope his explanation “will help you to understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military . . .”

Bush said to loud cheers: “I do not loathe the military. . . . (Vietnam veterans) served their country with distinction and honor. We ought to salute them, not loathe them.”

Earlier, in Wisconsin, Bush was greeted by an upbeat crowd of thousands in Fond du Lac, which lies in the heart of a state he lost in 1988 and is generally counted in Clinton’s column this year.

The child support plan he unveiled there would require employers to withhold support payments from absent parents’ wages. Overdue support payments would be treated as tax liabilities and collectible by the Internal Revenue Service. Parents delinquent in payments would need to establish a payment or deferral plan to qualify for new federal benefits. Legal services organizations receiving aid from the federal Legal Services Corp. would be required to use at least 10% of that money to help custodial parents obtain child support.

In addition, passports could be withdrawn, or denied, to delinquent parents. And such federal licenses as those required to pilot an airplane could be denied.

Outlining the scope of the problem, Bush said that in 1989, fathers were absent from 10 million families and that slightly more than half of all absent parents were ordered to pay child support. Of this group, only half met their obligations on time, and each year families fail to receive $5 billion in court-ordered support, he said.

His proposal was put together over about five days, said a senior White House official who worked on it. The official said it draws largely from recommendations prepared by the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Interstate Child Support that was established under the Family Support Act of 1988.