Ellington

A few years ago, when the Illinois General Assembly was thinking about reforming the state's child-support enforcement laws, I spent two or three days observing proceedings in family court.

One after one, non-custodial parents, mostly men, whom a judge had ordered to start paying child support or face jail time, stood before stone-faced judges and either brandished proof of payment or had to explain their reasons for failing to meet their court-required obligation.

Some of the men who stood in judgment spoke quietly about hard times and, in turn, falling behind on their support payments. They just needed a little more time to find a job or a better-paying one, and they would get back on schedule, the clearly embarrassed men promised. I described this category of father as "dead broke."

There was another category of child-support scofflaws. These were guys who worked and were often professionals with well-paying jobs. Unlike the dead-broke dads, the deadbeats spoke loudly and brashly about their reasons for refusing to pay monthly support. A lot of those explanations had to do with how the court calculated their support (state law allowed payments of as much as 20 percent of gross income). Many of the dads wove tales of distrusting custodial parents with lump-sum payments and offered anecdotes of moms blowing cash on fancy new clothes; there was almost always a story about the presence of a new boyfriend.

Illinois lawmakers wanted to amend child-support enforcement laws to distinguish between parents who are dead broke, who fell into hard times and couldn't afford to make scheduled court-required payments, and deadbeats who can afford to pay but come up with excuses to withhold support from their children.

This reminds me a lot of how Mississippi historically fails to meet the basic needs of its citizens, who are at the bottom of every quality-of-life metric imaginable, including public education and health care. Of course, the reasons for this are complicated, rooted in an economy and social structure detrimentally dependent on slavery and, later, Jim Crow. So naturally, when the national economy falls on hard times, poor cities and states feel it most acutely. Nor does the blame lie at the foot of any one public official, political party or division of government.

The situation in Mississippi may be dire, but it's not hopeless. There are opportunities to drastically—not incrementally—improve things in Mississippi, but our leadership seems fixated on solutions looking for problems.

For example, take our approach to paying for public education. Seventeen years ago, lawmakers—Democrats and Republicans—created and adopted the Mississippi Adequate Education Formula, known as MAEP.

In that time span, lawmakers followed through on its obligations to schoolchildren by funding the plan—twice. As a result, advocates of full MAEP funding argue, public schools have been shorted $1.5 billion.

That's more money than Mississippi has in the bank, and cutting a check could wreak all kinds of fiscal havoc. But rather than reckoning with this reality, lawmakers in recent years have, like those deadbeat dads I observed in court, sought to move the goal posts. A common tactic of Republican budget writers has been to divert attention off the failure to fund schools and question the validity or nitpick the inputs of the MAEP formula, which includes factors like average daily attendance and rates of free and reduced lunch.

Another common refrain in the debate over the education formula is that local school officials would misspend adequate education funding on administrative overhead rather than put the money to use in classrooms, even though the proponents of this argument haven't produced any evidence that such malfeasance occurs.

It reminds me of one man I interviewed about child support whose excuse for not paying was that his ex-wife would probably buy drugs with the money, even though he admitted that he had no proof that the mother of his children was in fact a drug user.

Mississippi's health woes are so persistent that stories about diseases in which Mississippi leads the nation can just about write themselves every year. Again, Mississippi faces an opportunity to make strides by expanding access to state-sponsored health programs. The federal government is practically begging poor states with the worst health to allow Medicaid expansion by taking federal matching Medicaid funds. One reason: Our poor health inflates health-care premiums for everyone else.

Of course, because of Medicaid expansion's association with President Barack Obama, many Republicans feel like it's a no-win scenario for them, politically anyway. 
 However, political leaders have not bothered to devise their own health-care expansion alternative, which Republicans could brand and market as their own anti-Obamacare solution. Even more puzzling is the Republican leadership's rationale for resisting Medicaid expansion.

First, Gov. Haley Barbour commissioned a study that his administration interpreted as Medicaid expansion being too costly for the state. That study was ultimately panned because analysts did not consider the costs associated with lack of health insurance. Then, Gov. Phil Bryant and Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves changed their tune, saying they didn't trust the federal government to follow though on promises to pay for large chunks of the expansion should Mississippi choose to participate—a classic deadbeat-dad move.

Last week, the Associated Press asked Gov. Bryant how he planned to solve persistent chronic poverty in the state. His answer: Intercept casino winnings of parents who owe back child support.

"So you won't be going around gambling and winning at the dice table and not taking care of your children," he told the AP.

One absurdity of the statement is that I doubt the governor has a shred of evidence that this is a serious problem in Mississippi beyond one or two anecdotal exceptions, shades of the voter-ID debate of a few years ago. Another is that it completely lets the state off the hook for its failure to take care of poor children, due in large part because of failures of policymakers over the years.

The sad part is Mississippi is not broke. We have a robust rainy day fund, and we pay our bills on time and don't have the same pension problems that some states, like Illinois, face. Yet, officials continue to shirk their obligations, and the rest of the nation has to support us. By the governor's own definition, that makes Mississippi's political leaders deadbeats.

It's unlikely that enormous strides will be made in this legislative session that coincides with a state election year. At some point, though, the state is going to have to start acting responsibly and meeting its obligations. Hopefully, lawmakers will start that process this year.