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I really disagree–and for the record, I have no dog in this fight, being a married woman with no children.
There simply is no flat rate. If you are just talking about keeping a child alive and with the basics of food, shelter, and clothing, well, it costs almost nothing above the fixed costs of maintaining a household for a single person. Children don’t really need a bedroom of their own–they can sleep in the living room or in the custodial parent’s room, and it doesn’t need to be in the safest area of town–lots of kids already live in rough neighborhoods. And you can dress a child for a couple hundred bucks a year, if you hit Wal-mart clearance sales and Good-willl. And you can eat a fairly heathy diet consisting of rice and beans and fresh vegetables, and it costs you almost nothing. Kids don’t need to go on school-sponsored field-trips or the zoo or take swim lessons at the local Y. They don’t need to ride bikes or go to the library or play sports. All these things are luxuries.
I know people who are sucessfully raising kids with a household income of less than $10,000/year because they have no choice. The vast majority of the 10K is fixed costs–what the actual child costs above and beyond those fixed costs is very, very low–like less than a $100 a month low.
If a non-custodial parent is making $48,000/year (the national average IIRC) it is morally wrong and not it the best interests of society for he/she to be paying $50/month and having his/her child sleep on a cot in a studio apartment, eat rice and beans every day, go to a lousy school, and dress in goodwill castoff, while not owning a book, while not playing a sport, while not exploring the world around them.
What’s odd is that if a child is living in the exact same situation except that there isn’t any non-custodial parent out there failing to contribute, then it isn’t abuse or neglect, or any of those things. If somebody just doesn’t have the resources to give their child any more than the bare necessities. then that’s a shame, but it’s the way it is. But if somebody does have the resources to give their child more and fails to do so, that’s so ethically wrong that I think the law is justified in insuring that it isn’t the case, if for no other reason than the fact that it benefits us all to have as many children as possible grow up with advantages.
They don’t