Every few years, Virginia officials try to push through measures that will divide families, plunder and incarcerate law-abiding parents and channel money to lawmakers’ cronies such as lawyers and civil servants. Proponents of HB 933, now before the state Senate, have offered no justification whatever for increasing child support, since child support increases automatically with the cost of living.

The child support system in Virginia and most other states is riven with chicanery. The corruption has been documented by numerous scholars, including W.S. Comanor’s The Law and Economics of Child Support Payments, where leading scholars characterize the system as “an obvious sham,” a “disaster” and “the most onerous form of debt collection practiced in the United States.”