Absurdistan in America

In Iowa, the government has confiscated the savings of 11-year-old Rylan Nitzschke. Rylan saved $220 from chores and shoveling snow, but that now belongs to Iowa. Why? Rylan’s father allegedly owes child support (to Rylan), and his father’s name was on the boy’s bank account.

OK, so this is a mistake, and Iowa will return the boy’s savings, right? Wrong. State officials have no intention of returning the money. After all, they receive federal funds for each dollar they collect (and for each father they incarcerate). Rylan’s piggy bank helps balance the budget.

As Congress prepares to pass the Welfare Reform bill, the Washington Times reports that child support enforcement officials are ecstatic over provisions that will allow them to plunder and criminalize more citizens, using children as the justification. Yet no evidence indicates that there is, or ever has been, a problem of unpaid child support other than that created by the government. The child support "crisis" consists of little more than the government seizing people’s children, imposing patently impossible debts on parents (and others) who have done nothing to incur those debts, and then arresting those who, quite predictably, cannot pay.

Now this dishonest and discredited hoax is creating a Western version of "Absurdistan" – the name given by East European dissidents to the Soviet dictatorships that were not only repressive but, at times, simply buffoonish.

West Virginia officials cleaned out the bank account of an 85-year-old grandmother whose son allegedly owed child support. The son paid in none of the $6,450 taken from the account, which comprised her life savings. She was also charged a $75 processing fee.

Canada has a name for such grandmothers: "deadbeat accomplices." These are grandparents, second wives, or other relatives, who can be forced to disclose and part with their savings to government officials.

In California, minor boys raped by adult women must pay child support to the criminals who raped them. "State law entitles the child to support from both parents, even though the boy is considered the victim of statutory rape," the district attorney's office says. One boy was drugged before the sex. Kansas courts have likewise held that "the issue of consent to sexual activity under the criminal statutes is irrelevant in a civil action to determine paternity and for support of a minor child born of such activity." So much for not letting criminals profit from their crimes.

The elderly can also become targets of rape-for-profit. A disabled 85-year-old man, sexually assaulted by his housekeeper and awarded damages for the assault, was ordered to pay her child support, and his pension was garnished. The court denied him access to the child.

According to the Keystone Cops who enforce child support, a "child" is not a dependent minor but any recipient of their chivalry. "We've got some 40- to 45-year-old ‘kids’ running around who are owed child support," says Nick Young, enforcement director in Virginia. In Ohio, a 77-year-old great grandfather who had always paid on time was told he owed $45,000 in back child support and had his wages garnished, even though his youngest child was 46 years old.

In Canada, runaway children sue their parents for child support. In California, a 50-year-old divorce lawyer successfully sued his own parents for child support because, he said, depression rendered him unable to work. Startlingly, such suits were probably intended by a legislature dominated by trial lawyers. Judge Melinda Johnson observed that the statute is "unambiguous," and an attorney notes, "The statute didn't come about by accident."

In Canada and Australia, stepfathers are now ordered to pay the custodians of their stepchildren. Stuart Miller of the American Fathers Coalition comments wryly that such rulings open the door to multiple marriages to obtain multiple child support proceeds from multiple men without the inconvenience of multiple children. In fact, this is already happening, as judges allow "double-dipping," whereby both the biological father and stepfather are ordered to pay full child support to the same custodian for the same children.

Child support has little to do with providing for children. Its purpose is to redistribute money – and power – among grown-ups. Iowa officials say the only way Rylan’s father can prevent the looting of Rylan’s savings in the future is to give the boy's money to the adult with custody.

But the miracle is that Rylan bothers with chores at all. Rylan’s father "owes" his son money, according to the government, not because Rylan earns it through hard work but because his mother divorced the old man. Rylan can simply demand the money of his father, and the state will make him cough it up. Why teach youngsters to work when you can teach them to sue.

Indeed, some states now force fathers to pay college tuition. So kids, don’t work to save for college or study hard for a scholarship. If you can convince your mother to divorce your father, the government will force Dad to pay at the barrel of a gun. Once fathers can be forced to pay law school tuition the machine will be completely self-financing.

States create instant deadbeats simply by increasing burdens. In Virginia, the author of sharply increased guidelines, William Rodgers of William and Mary College, tells officials that if they do not like his formula, he would "create a schedule to suit." Presumably Dr. Rodgers proposes the guidelines he considers fair and reasonable. But if Virginia officials prefer guidelines that are not fair and reasonable, he can provide those too. This is Groucho Marx government: "Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others."

Thus does child support simultaneously corrupt both public ethics and private morals, turning children into cash prizes and even "cash crops." One girl tells a Toronto newspaper of her savvy career plans: "I'm going to marry a really rich guy, then divorce him," she says. "But first I'm going to have his kids, so I get child support."

The war against men and traditional values continues. Stories like these will only encourage men, especially the more prosperous and responsible ones, not to get married, and not to impregnate their wives or girlfriends. The tyranny of family courts and CPS-type agencies may be as effective in holding down population growth as birth control and abortion have been. Our leftist ruling elite is too shortsighted to see that importing unskilled foreginers who work at minimum wage will not sustain the economy (and indeed the fortunes of these limousine liberals) as does a highly skilled and educated work force.

Some years ago, a friend told me a story about a man in Atlanta who was around sixty years old, pot bellied, bald and very ordinary looking but very well off financially. It seems that the old boy showed up one day with a twenty seven year old raving beauty on his arm who was acting as though she were swooning with desire. She actually convinced him that whe was in love with him and he married her and signed adoption papers on her two children. As my friend told it, "the ink wasn't dry before she turned on him like a mad dog and when it was all over she had taken everything he ever had and left him driving an old junker and eating beans". Women like that give honest whores a bad name.

Yeah, but horrific child support doesn't matter to REAL deadbeat dads. You know, ghetto superstar "baby daddies" who impregnate multiple women, multiple ones at the same time on occasion, without ever considering marrying or supporthing them. Instead they continue to make money "the fly way", ie: pimping, drug dealing, theivery, welfare scams.

You also have large broods fathered by illegal immigrants who are impossible to trace and can just fade back to Mexico anytime the long arm of family services becomes a burden. Their many children, of course, are citizens, and thus YOUR responsibility to feed, house and educate. Currently through Community College in California.

What you stated is all too true. Social service agencies have a difficult time collecting child support from true deadbeats in the underclass. Children from these relationships tend to follow the same underclass route as their parents, contributing to the crime rate or the tax burden, and often both. Additionally, if the law enforcement and social service agencies press too hard to collect past due child support, black and Hispanic politicians will whip out the race card. In most cases, the civil servants will back down in a New York minute upon politicians' complaints.

In the meantime, responsible, law abiding men develop a "commitment phobia," and by shunning marriage and fatherhood, decrease the numbers of people in future generations who will support the welfare state and the salaries of police and social workers.

The bottom line is that unfair rules relative to fathers' and husbands' rights in divorce and child support will contribute to the self-destruction of America.

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