We attended a birthday party in our suburb recently for a 1st grader. I asked the hostess what she was up to lately. She said “Physical labor.” It turned out that what she meant by “physical labor” was caring for two healthy children, both of whom were the responsibility of the government/taxpayer from 7:15 am to 3:15 pm on weekdays (1st and 6th graders). She does no work for wages. Her house is not especially well decorated or organized. The four food groups that I’ve seen her serve: microwave, frozen, wine, and takeout. Perhaps she was the source for Bill Burr’s “The most difficult job on the planet” ?
[Separately, her personal situation provides a good micro example of the macro economic shrinkage to the U.S. from our family law system. She and her to-be-former husband are embroiled in divorce litigation. Massachusetts is a winner-take-all state and both she and her husband are seeking to become the winner. Both have decided not to work during the roughly three years that the case is expected to last. Each litigant hopes to be declared the “dependent spouse” and “primary parent,” which would entitle that person to live off the other for at least the next 17 years (until the youngest child turns 23). Although there are alimony guidelines intended to limit the duration of alimony as a function of the length of the marriage, if one litigant can convince the judge that he or she cannot work, alimony could be extended until the death of the payor. What’s the twist here? One litigant holds an MBA from an Ivy League business school. The other litigant is a fully trained attorney with experience in one of the hottest and best-paid areas of law. Both previously earned more than the salary of a judge in Massachusetts and both will be testifying that it is impossible for them to find work, even as they drive past 50 restaurants with “help wanted” signs on their way to the courthouse.]
Readers: What’s the most epic description of hardship you’ve heard from a suburban parent lately?
Sounds as if the primary objective of each is to spite the other — while their lives dwindle away. Nice that the legal system encourages this sort of destructive behavior, both for themselves and for their children.
Jack: Why would irrational spite have to be the motivation for wanting to make millions of dollars without working? Consider people who go to work every day to earn $175,000/year (equivalent in spending power to $100,000/year in child support). Is it “spite” that motivates them to get up every morning and go to work? Or the desire for a paycheck?
At the end of this process, a Massachusetts court will order one of them to work for the next 20 years to support the other, who will enjoy a huge amount of leisure time. Why would a person need “spite” as motivation for seeking to be the receipient of the cash instead of the office-bound slave?
Take the kids away from both of them and give them to a nice Amish family in Pennsylvania. Tell them both they are required to work and pay Alimony to the Amish and help with a barn raising once a year to help them understand how truly blessed they are. In Texas, we require spouses to work this out, and alimony is hardly ever paid.
Do the people who invite you over to their houses ever read your blog? I enjoy your sense of humor but I imagine this lady is going to be pissed about what you wrote because it makes her look pretty silly.
toucan sam: Nobody reads my blog! Certainly this mom is far too busy caring (at least for half the nights and whatever portion of the days they aren’t in school) for the two boys to engage in frivolous blog-reading!
Glen: http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Texas is a winner-take-all state, but the fruits of victory are not as rich as in Massachusetts (Texas child support profits capped at about $20,000/year for one child) and it is an inferior state in which to be a divorce litigator because litigants can’t spend $1 million in fees arguing about a child’s schedule (if the parents don’t agree, the child will spend approximately 43 percent of the time with the loser parent). But, based on our interviews, Texans litigate ferociously to be the winner rather than the loser of custody lawsuits. Due to the lack of alimony and limited child support profits, it wouldn’t be rational in Texas, as it is for these two in Massachusetts to withdraw from the labor force.
Take away the incentives and the poor behavior disappears.
Yeah, Texas sounds like an awesome place to get divorced… https://nypost.com/2017/12/23/i-was-forced-to-raise-my-kids-in-texas-for-14-years/
SuperMike: The general tension between the interests of an adult plaintiff and minor children was covered in http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/06/19/promise-of-divorce-ruined-by-children-australia-parental-relocation-study/ ; In the early days of no-fault, it was an adult plaintiff’s dream:
Then the law and customs shifted to give more priority to the interests of children in continuing contact with both parents (even in jurisdictions with a strict winner/loser parent system):
Turning to this specific case… the author says “the attorneys reminded me that the constraint only affected the children and that I was free to go by myself. Is there a mother who would consider that?”
There are lots of mothers who consider and then actually do move to follow their dream/new lover/whatever, leave the kids with the dad, and pay the dad to be the “primary parent”! Mostly these moms are in Europe. (We found plenty of examples in the U.S., though, typically when the mom found a much wealthier man who was willing to marry her and where child support profits from the father wouldn’t have been material to the new household’s income. One mom shed four kids and Massachusetts child support profits that went with the four kids. After suing the second husband and mining out about $1 million (after about 2 years; it would be closer to $2 million in 2018 dollars), she went back to court to get the four kids and their associated cashflow back.)
This woman couldn’t do it because she was living off her kids (Texas caps the profitability of children, but at roughly 10X the Swedish level, for example). If she had moved away from Texas and her human meal tickets she would have had to get a full-time job. She says that she was getting $20,000/year tax-free in 2002. The BLS says that is $28,500 in today’s mini-dollars. Texas median hourly wage right now is $17.40. If we assume a 15 percent tax rate, that’s roughly $15/hour. So this woman, by getting primary custody of the children (57% time), got the same spending power as a median Texan working 1900 hours per year (36.5 hours per week).
She says that she was never able to hold a full-time job because she had to do the heroic mom job. But if the dad was taking care of the girls on the Texas statutory schedule of 43% time, shouldn’t she have been far more free to work than the typical wife/mom? She says “I was independence personified, a show of strength that my daughters could rely upon and emulate,” but wouldn’t her daughters have mostly learned that a college-educated adult can’t work get out of bed to work full-time and needs to keep cashing checks from a former sex partner?
The divorce didn’t work out for this adult woman nearly as well as it would have in Massachusetts or New Jersey. She’d likely have gotten much higher revenue and been able to take her kids and move them to wherever she wanted on Planet Earth. Think about it from the kids’ perspective, though. They got to have their college funds preserved rather than spent on legal fees for a parenting time battle. Their access to two parents (mom 57% of the time; dad 43% of the time) was preserved, albeit not at the 50/50 level that research psychologists have found is optimum for children’s health and well-being.
The woman got way more cash than she would have in Sweden or Germany and way less than she would have in Connecticut or Massachusetts. Is that injustice? Apparently it is to her!
When people ask me what I do for a living, I reply sincerely, “I torture children”. About 20% are horrified, and the other 80 get the joke and ask me what grade/subject I teach.