Legislature must correct child-support inequities
Santa Fe New Mexican, 7/22/07
By Josh Gonze and David Standridge

The rap musician, 50 Cent, might not like paying $25,000 a month in child support for one child, but he’s lucky his son resides outside New Mexico.

That’s because in New Mexico, child support is unlimited. It has no ceiling as it does in nearly every other state. In New Mexico, if the payer’s gross income exceeds $8,300 a month, child support is 11 percent of gross income, rising to infinity.

It is irrelevant if the child does not benefit from the child support. No law requires child support to be spent on the child. The statute permits judges to deviate from the guideline, but downward deviations are rare.

In addition to paying child support, high-income payers pay “extraordinary expenses,” which bizarrely include the principal costs of child raising such as medical bills, schooling, summer camp and daycare. Of course parents are responsible for supporting their children. The problem is that our statute has harmful unintended consequences for children. The arbitrary 11 percent harms children by propelling parents into endless litigation over the parents’ gross incomes.

In some cases, child support diverts money from the child — the exact opposite of its purpose. In one case in Santa Fe, dad pays $1,755 a month in child support for one child, with joint physical custody. In a situation such as this, it does not cost that much money to raise a child half of the time. The excess money could then be used by the mother on luxuries for herself as another form of alimony.
In other states, the law either sets a flat ceiling or requires judicial discretion based on actual needs of the child once income tops a certain level, such as $100,000 annually. The legal concept is that beyond a point, child support becomes alimony in disguise. In Texas, once the payer’s net income reaches $6,000 a month, that’s the maximum income that can be considered, and the percentage for one child is limited to 20 percent or $1,200 a month for one child. In Nevada, the upper limit is a flat $800 per child. In Hawaii, as in many states, if child support is above the reasonable needs of the child, the judge is required to set child support on a case by- case basis.

Many courts outside New Mexico have ruled that excessive child support is contrary to the purpose of child support. Plus, federal regulations require the states to base their child-support laws on economic studies of the actual cost of raising children. Numerous studies exist on the cost of child-raising, including one by the Department of Agriculture, which reports that for high-income families in 2006, it cost $1,313 a month per child.

There is little question that for high-income earners, child support is higher in New Mexico than in any other state. In all likelihood, this was not intended by our state Legislature. It was an accident that our Legislature can and should correct. Failure to do so only empowers parents to view child support as a monetary windfall in light of the true economic needs of the child.

Since roughly half of parents are separated, court-ordered child support is a routine part of life in America. This includes good parents who do not need the government to tell them to support their children. Often what they find is that child support can be a bewildering tangle of harsh laws that actually have nothing to do with supporting children and everything to do with a second source of income for the other parent.

Josh Gonze is a happily married father in Santa Fe with two young children. David Standridge is a family law attorney.