Author Description

In Assuring Child Support, Irwin Garfinkel, former director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, proposes a comprehensive new program of child support enforcement and insurance called the Child Support Assurance System. In the United States, rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth are climbing so dramatically that over half of the next generation is likely to spend part of its childhood in single-mother families. As many as half of these families will live in poverty, caused in large measure by the failure of the current system to secure adequate child support from absent parents and to assure minimum support when parents cannot provide it. Assuring Child Support shows how these problems could be remedied by a new national system of child support enforcement that is both feasible and affordable - a practical reform that is within the nation's grasp.^ Garfinkel critiques the current system of the court-mandated support and federal assistance programs as both inefficient and unfair, arguing that it fosters irresponsibility among absent parents - usually fathers - and encourages welfare dependence over employment for single mothers. He then details the three essential components of the Child Support Assurance System: a monetary support standard set by law; routine income withholding to facilitate collection from the nonresident parent; and government insurance against non-payment of the full benefit. Supplementing policy and economic analysis with accounts of pilot tests in Europe and the United States, Garfinkel's emphasis throughout is on a system that fosters full financial responsibility in both parents while at the same time providing a social safety net.^ In concluding chapters, Garfinkel anticipates and answers critics of CSAS, carefully demonstrating how this program can pay for itself by reducing welfare use and increasing the parental support for children. An important book on one of America's most pressing problems, Assuring Child Support compels us to recognize the precarious future facing many of the nation's children and recommends sound reforms for providing them with more secure and promising lives.