The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [53]
So women are making more money. But what about the other half of the prescription—child support? The “deadbeat dad” makes a prominent appearance in nearly every conversation about single mothers. There is some truth to those headlines, but there is another truth that gets lost in all the hoopla over the shiftless father: Women have made enormous strides in collecting from their ex-husbands. A generation ago there was little government support for a woman whose ex was delinquent on his child support payments. In the late 1970s, as a young lawyer, I [Elizabeth] tried to help my friend Marcie garnish her ex-husband’s wages to enforce a child support order. The fellow was an international importer from a wealthy family. He had a high-paying job, but he hadn’t paid a cent of his court-ordered support since he had walked out two years earlier—a classic deadbeat if ever there was one. Meanwhile, Marcie and her toddler were supplementing her income as a teacher’s aide with food stamps. Despite my legal training and young-lawyer zeal, I could not find a single person in the any of the county or state offices to help Marcie. When I finally initiated a lawsuit on her behalf (something she could never have afforded on her own), the local district attorney told me that enforcing child support orders “just isn’t in my job description.”
It wasn’t until the 1980s that this system changed. Congress passed a series of laws that guaranteed women all around the country the opportunity to garnish their ex-husband’s paychecks.10 Congress also ordered uniform support guidelines in 1984; until then, each woman was at the mercy of whatever whims and prejudices influenced the judge who decided her particular case.11 The penalties for nonpayment have also been stiffened. In some states a man who falls behind on his child support payments stands to lose his driver’s license or his work permit (such as a contractor’s license). He may even be thrown in jail. Today, federal and state governments spend more than $3 billion on child support enforcement, compared with less than $400 million (inflation adjusted) in the mid-1970s.12 The system is still far from perfect, but these improvements have helped millions of women. Since 1976, the proportion of women receiving child support has increased 17 percent for divorced mothers and 300 percent for never-married mothers.13
The numbers show that the feminist prescription has been followed to the letter. Today’s middle-class mothers embark on single life with better educations, better job training, better legal support, and bigger paychecks than any women in history. They are backed up by more effective state-sponsored child support enforcement than ever before. In a single generation, their gains have been nothing short of extraordinary. With all that progress, we should confidently predict that while single mothers may still have a tougher time than married parents, their situation must be improving. Right?
. . . The Worst of Times
Wrong. Despite all the progress, middle-class single mothers are no more financially secure today than they were a generation ago. Indeed, our data show that despite their amazing advancements at work, in school, and in the courts, these women are actually less secure than they were just twenty-five years ago.
In chapter 1, we described our astonishment when we first saw the bankruptcy data for single mothers. That first look told us that something is amiss. Badly so. Single mothers are now more likely than any other group to file for bankruptcy—more likely than the elderly, more likely than