When Deadbeat Dads Can't Catch a Break

In the 1980s and 1990s, the government found itself financially supporting a lot of single-parent families in which one parent was not contributing to the support of their children. Unsurprisingly, this led authorities to crack down on “deadbeat dads,” with stiff penalties for parents who didn’t pay the money they owed. And that kind of situation might have helped lead to Walter Scott's shooting death on April 4. Like many poor men, Scott owed back child support that had incurred severe penalties, including stints in jail, and his family argues that he probably fled from the police during a routine traffic stop because he feared another arrest.

When you look at the havoc these policies wreak on the lives of poor people, it’s obvious that there’s something very wrong in the system. And yet when you try to come up with a solution that wouldn’t result in these penalties, you start to see how we got here in the first place. Shouldn’t parents support their children? Of course they should. Should the government be paying benefits for children when the mother or father could be contributing? Of course not; benefits are for people who can’t take care of their children, not for people who don’t want to.