Congress makes life easier for deadbeat parents

He's been married several times, this father of five. But things keep falling apart in his relationships, aided, no doubt, by his proclivity for choosing his next spouse before he's successfully shed his current one.

I know his story because wife No. 1, whom he married just out of high school, has been dear to me for more than 30 years.

She is the mother of his first two children. He, however, has never been their father. Since the marriage exploded when they were little, he has seen them twice, although she would have let him have regular visitation — even encouraged it. He simply moved on, expressing no further interest in them.

When they divorced, the children were awarded a small amount of child support. It wasn't much. He was young and wasn't earning much. In this case, the difference between support of $75 a month and $5,000 is negligible; he's never met the monthly obligation anyway. Zero equals zero in any equation.

She worked extra hours to support her young family, trading sleep for time with her kids and eating more noodles than she cares to remember. Money was incredibly tight.

She tracked her ex from future spouse to future spouse, providing the Office of Recovery Services with his Social Security number and keeping them updated on his current location. A couple of times, she even managed to find out where he was working and pass that information along.

It didn't matter. The ORS didn't garnishee his wages fast enough before he'd changed jobs. She got an intercepted tax refund once, but that was about it. Her children are now in their early teens.

He is, for all intents and purposes, nothing more than a sperm donor, fathering children and abandoning them. We know of three other children; there may be more.

And his life looks like it's going to get a bit easier.

As Congress looks at the proposed budget for the nation, complete with its $40 billion in savings over five years, a chunk of the cuts comes from the budgets of those charged with collecting owed child support. Much of the rest of the cuts are from programs that aid the elderly, the disabled and the poor.

The populations overlap, giving some of the poor a double slam. Statistics show that a fairly high percentage of those who rely on public assistance for income, health insurance or both are people who wouldn't need it if those who owed child support met that obligation.