Posted on 02/14/2008 4:46:06 AM PST by oblomov
Article is in PDF format. Quotes:
"The welfare subsidy on single-mother homes was never really ended so much as it was shifted. Reformers essentially replaced welfare with child support, on the reasonable but largely irrelevant principle that fathers rather than taxpayers should be supporting their children (which is irrelevant for reasons we will see)."
"Child support thus transformed welfare from public assistance into law enforcement, creating a federal plainclothes police force with no clear constitutional authority."
"Perhaps the most striking aspect of this mobilization is that the initiative came entirely from government officials. No public outcry ever preceded these measures, nor did any public perception of such a problem even exist until officials began to say that it does. The public never demanded that government take action, nor was any public discussion of this alleged problem ever conducted in the national or local media. No government or academic study ever documented a nonpayment problem."
"Scholars largely agree that unemployment is “the single most important factor relating to nonpayment” (Braver 1998, 33; see all of chap. 4). One study team (Bartfeld and Mayer 1994) found that 95 percent of fathers with no employment problems for the previous five years paid their ordered support regularly and that 81 percent paid in full and on time. A federal pilot study commissioned by the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) itself also found no serious problem of nonpayment. A full-scale government-sponsored study was planned to follow up the pilot, but OCSE cancelled it when the pilot study’s findings threatened the justification for the agency’s existence by demonstrating that nonpayment was not a serious problem."
(Excerpt) Read more at independent.org ...
On of the most interesting facts pointed out in this article is that the "deadbeat dad" frenzy was a phenomenon requiring "urgent action" by our rulers despite the lack of a public groundswell for such action.
It's open season on white males. Don't ever forget it.
The end result of any nanny state is a totalitarian police state. That’s why I get irritated when people bitch about how we’ve moved so much closer to Oceania under Bush, when the seeds were laid by Clinton. Before Katrina, there was Waco. Before Iraq, there was Kosovo and Mogadishu. Before the Patriot Act, there was AEDPA. Before warrentless wiretapping, there was Echelon. I can go on and on. Yet I still see these morons everywhere wishing for “the glory days of Bill Clinton.” I’m not a big fan of GWB’s, but I believe him to be a good and moral man. Which is something nobody can say with a strait face about Billy BJ.
Exactly. The mother gets the man’s paycheck (sometimes vice versa) for getting pregnant or breaking up family, with no conditions except the children live with them.
What is worse is that judges can throw the men in jail for not paying, with no trial, no defense, no conviction, and since he cant pay from jail he is hostage till his relatives come up with money. In comparision democrats and mcCain want to give terorists due process rights.
I have no problem with the law going after “dead-beat dads” if it’s proven that the dad has abandoned the family and is living well somewhere else.
The problem I have is with the courts or their reps deciding that dads who WANT to support their children should pay so much in child support the dad can’t afford a place to live. They don’t seem to care that those dads have bills just like the moms. And, I don’t like the fact that some of those moms don’t spend the money on child support, instead spending on themselves.
And, finally, the courts don’t pursue “dead-beat” moms they way they do the dads.
Don’t forget the army of bureaucrat “social workers,” mostly very liberal white females with suburban upbringing, whose sole purpose is to take children from poor families and put them in foster care. Mostly because the poor just don’t live the way the suburban libs think they should live. Then the kids wallow in foster care for months, develop attachment disorders guaranteed to make them juvenile delinquents in a decade, thus creating another army of liberal white female social workers of suburban extract known as “juvenile probation officers.”
The public welfare system is just a many-headed hydra that exists only to consume, and consumes to exist. Nothing good comes of it.
And the alternative is....
(drum roll, please)
........
I’ve always thought child support was wrong. Some people are quick to kill a family knowing they can still have some money coming in without the hassle of being a good spouse.
I think people should be more discriminating about whom they have sex with.
And this is coming from a guy who is owed more than 20K in cs. I set it at $10 a week for each of my 2 boys at my lawyer’s insistence that it should not be zero, and that was like almost 16 years ago. (I know the math doesn’t work out. There must be penalties in there or something)
Maybe he and Nancy Pelosi will listen to us this time?
Carolyn
Time to re-read “The Ballad of Carl Drega” while listening to the Clash’s “Working for the Clampdown”!
“deadbeat dad”. Feminazis love that term. Interesting how feminazis are responsible for men losing their jobs to unqualified individuals, and for throwing men into jail for not paying child support while they are unemployed.
Don’t forget the army of bureaucrat “social workers,” mostly very liberal white females with suburban upbringing, whose sole purpose is to take children from poor families and put them in foster care. Mostly because the poor just don’t live the way the suburban libs think they should live. Then the kids wallow in foster care for months, develop attachment disorders guaranteed to make them juvenile delinquents in a decade, thus creating another army of liberal white female social workers of suburban extract known as “juvenile probation officers.”
The public welfare system is just a many-headed hydra that exists only to consume, and consumes to exist. Nothing good comes of it.
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Brilliant post, imho!
I will add to it only this thought: that the “social worker” class et al are the judas goats of socialism’s slaughterhouse, useful in calming the doomed sheeple, but possessing no moral dimension, save self-preservation, whatsoever.
They put many in big debt , before the first real child support is due.
You can find yourself owning the system and friends of the systems thousands and thousands of $$$ on other charges, then add the daily interest rates.
Its evil...
finding yourself $10,000.00 in debt right off the bat...
Then they destroy your credit, and make you a felon, and if you get sick or disable ,or lose your job the meter don’t stop. Then you are put in jail, and the meter don’t stop.
This is why many, many just break or die
The prefect killing machine of fathers in the U.S.A.
What is doing it is the USC 42/666 Bradley laws.
The laws of Satan
Eliminate “no-fault” — i. e., unilateral — divorce and you will eliminate this bogus “child support” problem.
People in countries where potential divorces must be agreed to by both parties, with post-divorce financial support and living arrangements agreed on before the divorce is finalized, think that the American states where a person (usually a father) can be divorced against his will and subsequently impoverished, and through no fault of his own, are barbaric.
Sounds like Debtor’s Prison.
Or you get men that like to screw, even produce babies then go their own way.
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