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2004 U. Chi. Legal F. 167 (2004)
Fudging Failure: The Economic Analysis Used to Construct Child Support Guidelines

handle is hein.journals/uchclf2004 and id is 171 raw text is: Fudging Failure: The Economic Analysis Used to Construct Child Support Guidelines Ira Mark Ellmant Federal law requires that all states have guidelines to de- termine, in most cases, the amount of a child support award. Federal law also requires states to reexamine their guidelines every fourth year to ensure that they continue to set appropriate awards in light of possibly changing economic conditions. These revisions are typically carried out with the assistance of eco- nomic consultants. This Article is about the substance of that revision process as it is conducted in most states, and in particu- lar the method employed by the economic consultants that assist in the revision process. Their method assumes a particular con- ception of how child support awards should be formulated. I ex- plain below why this conception is most accurately labeled the continuity-of-marginal-expenditure model. Consultants then engage in a technical exercise through which they implement this model, ultimately yielding a set of recommended award lev- els for varying family sizes and parental incomes. This Article explains why this model simply fails to engage the basic policy questions that must be addressed in any rational analysis of child support policy. Moreover, it shows that even if, adventitiously, the model were correct, its implementation is t Professor of Law and Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar, Arizona State University. I am grateful to the Center for Law and Society at Berkeley, and its Director, Robert Kagen, for the hospitality provided to me during the fall of 2003 when I did most of the work on this Article. I must note my enormous debt to Grace Blumberg, whose analysis of child support guidelines in our efforts together with the American Law Institute provided the intellectual foundation upon which this Article is built. I also thank Geoffrey Paulin, senior economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who tirelessly responded to many inquiries about the Consumer Expenditure Survey; my friend and colleague Sandy Braver, whose comments on an earlier draft, combined with our many discussions, have helped me enormously; Kelly Bedard of the Economics Department at U.C. Santa Barbara, who made herself available to read an earlier draft very quickly, and Tara Ellman, whose extensive experience in handling economic data proved crucial to uncovering and clarifying many of the puzzles with which this Article deals. 167