John Washington III: The Child Support System 'Was Built to Feed Itself — Not to Help Parents'

John Washington III turned to child support on Friday, and his charge was structural: the system, he said, protects itself first. 'The system does not have the parents' best interest at heart. Not the mother. Not the father. It has its OWN interest at heart,' John Washington III wrote, adding that the State of Texas does not care, 'because Texas benefits from the system exactly the way it is.'

His argument followed the money. The federal government pays states bonus money based on how much child support they collect, John Washington III wrote, and it picks up most of the cost of running the program. 'So the more money the system pulls out of parents, the more money flows back to the state,' he wrote. 'Parents are not the customer. Parents are the product. A system that gets paid by the collection will always choose collection over common sense, every single time.'

He pointed to two mechanics he called a trap. When a parent falls behind, the state comes after the driver's license — 'the one thing he needs to drive to work and earn the money to pay it,' John Washington III wrote — and then charges interest on the growing balance, six percent on money a parent already could not pay. And in cases where a family needed public assistance, he wrote, the state can keep collected support to pay itself back first: 'The children wait in line behind the government.'

John Washington III drew a line between parents who will not pay and parents who cannot. 'I am not talking about parents who refuse to take care of their children,' he wrote. 'A child deserves support, and a parent who can pay should pay — that money belongs to the kids.' What he described instead was 'a machine that profits from struggle, punishes people out of a paycheck, and calls it justice.' His proposed rebuild, stated as a presidential candidate, carries one rule: 'the money goes to the children, and a parent who falls behind gets a path back — work, a fair review, and a real chance to catch up. Keep your license. Keep your job. Keep supporting your kids.'