Yet this is exactly what should happen if the purpose of the benefit is to top up inadequate child-support payments by non-custodial parents.
Child-support payments allow more children to be supported than could be funded otherwise. Taxpayer dollars are scarce, and the public debt continues to rise daily.
The requirement to pay child-support also rests on the elemental proposition that those bringing children into this world bear prime responsibility for supporting them.
Yet at one point the article argues that non-custodial parental payments are merely a less efficient form of raising tax revenue than broad-based taxes at a low rate.
This is akin to arguing that paying one's own credit card bill is less efficient than having taxpayers pay it.
After all, if past actions don't have consequences with respect to children, why should they when it comes to liability for credit card bills?
The article also asserts that taxpayers, rather than non-custodial parents, need to pay more to custodians in low income households and more again to non-custodial parents by way of employment subsidies, apparently regardless of the circumstances.
An accompanying article in the same issue, New Deal for Kids, by Victoria University of Wellington Professor Jonathan Boston and University of Otago Senior Researcher Simon Chapple, similarly calls on taxpayers to fund "significantly higher" child-related benefits and to provide "extensive sole-parent employment supports".
Their proposition seems to be that over 25 per cent of children in New Zealand are income poor and that around 18 per cent of New Zealand children are experiencing relative hardship in terms of material living standards.
Their definition of income appears to treat social welfare benefit as income. So in their minds, bigger benefits mean bigger 'income' and less income poverty.
But problems of relative poverty, welfare dependency and lack of self-sufficiency will remain.
Whether larger benefits mean less material hardship depends in part on how well the money is spent, and, longer-term, on how many other children are born to parents that cannot support them.
The authors do not raise these questions. Yet, household income, however defined, is not a good measure of the quality of household life.