FUNNY HOW THIS IS THE ONE TIME WHEN THE GOVERNMENT CARES WHERE ITS MONEY GOES: Megan McArdle: When Deadbeat Dads Can’t Catch a Break.

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.

So you demand that parents pay child support. But if you simply set the support at a fraction of their income, you will encourage people to work off the books and hide their incomes from the court, or get back at their ex-partners by minimizing their income so as to yield very little in the way of support checks. So judges set child support at the amount that a parent could be expected to earn working a full-time job.

Naturally, it’s not enough to just mandate payment; you also have to mandate penalties, or else selfish mothers or fathers will simply refuse to pay. Punishments were set up for noncompliance, and systems were set up to automatically garnish paychecks. It all seems very fair — unless the system makes a mistake, or Mom or Dad genuinely can’t find enough work, at which point it suddenly becomes Kafkaesque. I once watched a colleague struggle through New York state’s bureaucracy, which through its own screw-up had garnished so much of his paycheck that he basically had no money for food or rent. The error took months to fully resolve, because why should they care about some deadbeat dad feeding himself?

They care about the moms a lot more. But there’s no pity for the dads. Given all the stories of horror, it’s amazing that so few of them go postal.