The New York Times ran a piece on the subject of trying to squeeze cash out of low-income deadbeat dads such as Walter Scott (my posting on the same subject). The comments are kind of interesting, considering the self-professed liberal nature of the readership.
Sara Rainey:
At York County Prison in York South Carolina, those who are incarcerated due to child support can be put on a work release program after passing a background check and a drug screen. If they already have a job, they can be put back on their job that day, or the following day. If they do not have a job, the work release coordinator will help them look and obtain a job outside the facility. Then the inmate gives their check to the work release coordinator who takes 55% for child support, a small percentage for the facility room and board and save the rest for the inmate. These inmates can pay down their child support, and pay the county for the incarceration and have a job and money saved when they are released. Although most inmates that obtain a job while incarcerated do not keep that job once released. It is a win/win situation for the inmate and the county. This needs to be researched more.
Given that a high percentage of people imprisoned for failure to pay child support happen to be black men, how is this different from an 18th century cotton plantation? I wrote a response to her comment: “Can I buy a big cotton farm in South Carolina, build some basic dormitories, then ask the government to send me some healthy adults to live in my dorms and pick cotton during the day because if they run away the government will hunt them down, shackle them, and return them to me? Since I want to make sure that the workers are young, strong, and fit, perhaps I can go to a government-run auction and bid on the defendants who seem best suited to the work on my farm?” In other words, getting whatever child support a court has ordered has become so important to liberals that they are willing to advocate for a plantation system staffed with chained black men.
Kate in Virginia:
The reason these mothers are not required to work when their children are young is that the US does not pay a living wage. If the woman cannot earn a decent salary, it doesn’t make economic sense for her to work outside the home.
But let’s not pretend that mom’s not working. Taking care of little kids is work.
Because women cannot get a fair deal in the labor market, in other words, low-income black men should be put into prison unless they compensate women for the unfairness of the patriarchy.
(Her comment “taking care of little kids is work” is also interesting for its assumption that the modern-day parent collecting child support is actually taking care of children. It turns out that getting the loser parent ordered to pay for commercial day care or after-school care, in addition to guideline child support, is the trend in most states. But much political support for child support that yields a profit over actual expenses is based on the idea that the winner parent should be paid by the loser parent to perform child care tasks.)
sfdphd (from San Francisco):
Jail or revoking driver license doesn’t make any sense at all. These people need to be kept working and their wages garnished, not put in circumstances where they cannot work to earn the money the child needs. Then in jail, the taxpayer is paying for the guy. That’s just stupid.
I also believe that if they cannot support the first kid, they should be required to get a reversible vasectomy until they can afford to support their children….
Quick summary: Since most low-income black men will eventually get ordered to pay child support and fall behind on payments, most low-income black men will eventually be forced by the government to have vasectomies.
The article and comments are both interesting for how few people mention the profitability of children for adults. An adult with no child is not entitled to much in the way of welfare. An adult with a child gets benefits that cost over $60,000 per year (budget.senate.gov), i.e., more than $1 million over an 18-year period. Can putting a bunch of black guys into prison (with or without letting them out during the daytime to work on a plantation) cause low-income Americans to ignore this opportunity? The Times doesn’t write about the government workers getting paychecks from the system: a $6 billion payroll in the state and federal offices of child support enforcement, judges, prison guards, etc. The typical low-income child is actually hurt by the child support system, even when child support is paid (see “Child Support and Young Children’s Development” (Nepomnyaschy, et al, 2012; Social Science Review 86:1), a Rutgers and University of Wisconsin study of children of lower income unmarried parents), but plenty of (mostly white) adults benefit financially when low-income black men are pulled into court and then prison.
The comments contain a lot of attacks on low-income low-education black Americans by white liberals with, presumably, advanced educations and New York Times subscriptions. According to the attorneys we interviewed for Real World Divorce, highly educated white people are avid seekers of tax-free child support profits, and periodically there are newspaper articles about some spectacularly rich (white) people seeking to add to their cash hoards through child support (see realworlddivorce.com for some links). The vast majority of the women that we learned about who made money by selling abortions (go to bar, get pregnant with high-income guy, hire attorney, get fetal paternity test, market abortion at discount to net present value of expected child support payments) were white. But somehow it is poor blacks who are behaving badly and must be scolded.
Phil:
You’ve presented some very compelling information and statistics. It would be great if your book as well as the information that you have presented can promote some action to reform these divorce laws, but given the enormous amount of vested interests and financial incentives involved, the success of any attempts at reform seem highly uncertain.
Given that, it would be helpful if you can provide some advice and information on what a man should do, at an individual level, to protect himself from the current system. Should he avoid marriage? Should he get a pre-nup before marriage(one of your earlier posts seems to suggest that even a pre-nup can be legally contested and is effectively worthless)? Should he advocate for a domestic partnership in place of marriage? Should he just resign himself to this potential fate if he is married?
John: Our book is not about “reform” (i.e., changing laws). Lobbying against a $50 billion industry doesn’t work in the U.S. And if you’re getting $200,000/year in tax-free child support you probably don’t think that the system needs “reform.” Our book is about educating consumers so that they can make the most of the opportunities that state legislatures offer. Remember that for every person for whom family law presents a problem there is another person for whom it is an opportunity. It would be fair to call it a zero-sum game if not for the $1 million in legal fees that might be consumed.
Women have some opportunities to obtain cash from the system that men don’t have. For example, a woman who comes to the U.S. as a summer worker in a luxury hotel can have sex with a guest during the right time of the month then get U.S. taxpayer-funded attorneys and officials to hunt down the father, establish paternity, get a child support order in place for $50,000/year or $200,000/year or whatever the formula kicks out, and finally have all of the money paid to her on the other side of the globe. She can go from guest worker to one of the richest people in her home country in 9 months. (Why doesn’t this happen 100 percent of the time? We interviewed some Eastern European women in Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and Naples, Florida and found that they greatly underestimated the potential profits from an American pregnancy. There was also a cultural reluctance to live off a child.)
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t opportunities for men who want to turn their own bodies or children into cash. The man who marries a high-income woman, has children, and subsequently winds down his working efforts will activate all of the benefits that courts like to bestow on stay-at-home parents (“the dependent spouse”). Courts will assign the “breadwinner” role to a female defendant and then order her to continue to serve in that role for another 20-30 years while the man uses the cash to play around with younger women. We interviewed a female businesswoman (earning perhaps $200k/year) in Massachusetts who married a firefighter. He needed to work only two days per week to receive his full salary. So she was assigned to care for the children on those two days and pay him about $40k/year in tax-free child support.
Do you think it would be immoral to marry your business school sweetheart, have a couple of kids with her, let her Wall Street job fund your lifestyle while you work 20 hours/week at a non-profit, and then sue her as soon as her fertility is exhausted and she isn’t as attractive to you as a 22-year-old? And in fact maybe you decide that you can’t wait for the formal end of the marriage before you’re down in the Caribbean having sex with some of your young girlfriends. Well your behavior isn’t immoral under family law. The no-fault divorce system will reward that behavior with tax-free child support, alimony, and somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the fortune that she worked for.
Are you ambitious and determined to be the breadwinner and provide for your family? In most states that’s like painting a big target on your back for a plaintiff, but you still have options:
1) move to Sweden, Denmark, or Germany where child support is not sufficiently lucrative to motivate plaintiffs to seek primary custody
2) move to Nevada, Texas, or any of the other states where child support is capped (albeit at 6-12X the Swedish level) and therefore reduce a plaintiff’s motivation to seek primary custody
3) move to Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, or Pennsylvania where a 50/50 schedule for children of separated parents is the norm, regardless of the existence of a breadwinner/stay-at-home partnership during the marriage
To answer your direct question: the pre-up can’t address the child custody and child support stuff. If you have a lot of premarital assets and you’re in a state where premarital property can be sought by a plaintiff it is probably worth having a prenup clarifying ownership and also ensuring some sort of fair opportunity for your spouse to accumulate adequate retirement savings (if you had “a lot of premarital assets” then presumably your own retirement is secure).
Should you avoid getting married altogether? Obviously a commitment by the parents to stay together and work together is helpful to children, but marriage in many cases makes it less likely that the partners will stay together since the marriage gives one person a financial incentive to sue the other (the example guy above married to the Wall Street executive; if unmarried, he would have had to stay with her to keep enjoying most of the fruits of her career (though in a quickie relationship with kids he might have made a decent profit from 18-23 years of child support, assuming he was in a jurisdiction where men can realistically get at least 50 percent custody)). The lawyers we interviewed say that kids are better off when unmarried partners separate than when married partners separate (since a lawsuit is not required to end a voluntary partnership). So… if you care about your kids, don’t get married. If you think you’ve found someone that you might one day want to sue, marriage may make sense.
Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/us/skip-child-support-go-to-jail-lose-job-repeat.html?_r=0
“I am behind now, and they are threatening to suspend my driver’s license — and I’m a truck driver,” he said.
Not sure “Skip” is the most accurate verb for the described circumstances.
Last week I talked about the necessity and inevitability of eugenics. That society, via government, will control who is allowed to procreate. Then today I found this. It’s written from a UK point of view. But I think the author, Adrian Woolridge, has it right. Although not likely in democratic countries for another century or so.
“WHAT IN TODAY’S WORLD WILL APPAL OUR GRANDCHILDREN?”
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/what-todays-world-will-appal-our-grandchildren?page=4
“The next freedom that will become unacceptable is the freedom to have children. Our grandchildren will be appalled to hear that the biggest decision we take was once seen as a purely private affair. That they could have families without thinking of the environmental consequences, without taking a simple exam to test their competence, without having the means to support their children. Governments will show episodes of “Little Britain”, featuring Vicky Pollard, who has children in order to get a council flat, as an example of a society gone mad.”
“Our laissez-faire attitude to having children is an accident of history. Architects of the welfare state such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb argued that the government could be expected to provide education and welfare only if it also had a say in who had children, and how many. Burgeoning welfare states everywhere experimented with eugenics, encouraging some people to have more children and preventing others from having any. The horror of Nazi eugenics shifted these policies from mainstream to unacceptable.”
More from above:
“The next 50 years will see the unacceptable become acceptable again as the memory of the second world war fades and worries grow about the pressure of billions of people on a fragile planet. Three things in particular will make the new eugenics mainstream. The first is the enormous cost of today’s arrangements. In the United States 14% of children under 18 are growing up in single parent families who have difficulty supporting them. The attitude of the poor contrasts sharply with the careful planning of the rich: educated parents who delay childbirth until they have a career and a partner. The rich will demonise the behaviour of the poor.”
Any encounter in American life nowadays (child support, job promotion and firing, etc.) is resolved by each party pulling out his deck of victim cards and comparing to see who is carrying the larger # of victim points. White males always carry the lowest # of victim points so it is a given that they will lose almost every time. However, it is sometime unclear in certain situations whether, for example, women carry more victim points that blacks or gays more than women, etc. In the 2008 election, Obama had the high cards against Hillary but in this situation women apparently carry the higher cards.