Finally, individuals in the mainstream press and media are beginning to cover the illegal, totalitarian machine, that is called Child Support. Already ruled unconstitutional by three states and in a published opinion by the US District Court, the State and Federal Child Support system is nothing more than another way to off set the costs of welfare, food stamps, general assistance programs nationally.
Programs, I might add, that are already funded by the tax paying citizens. Then assessed in whole (the total estimated balance of everything the state & feds give away via welfare to the custodial parent), against the non-custodial parent. This is a tribunal system that is unregulated, unaccountable and wields unrestricted police powers. These state and county departments employ individuals not licensed to practice law, yet enables them to execute legal action and take other actions that are restricted to certified and licensed law enforcement departments and officers. This is why a few states have already ruled them unconstitutional and illegal.
Not to mention, that they have turned CIVIL proceedings into CRIMINAL proceedings. This is strictly prohibited in every state in the nation. Including Federal Courts.
Take a look at this article by the New York Times.
‘Dead Broke’ Dads’ Child-Support Struggle
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Every month, on order of a Colorado judge, Jason Stribling sinks deeper into debt.
Mr. Stribling is obligated to pay $899 a month in current and back child support for his 15-month-old son, Nasir. The only job he says he can find is a part-time one at a Denver recreation center that pays $600 a month. When he does the math, Mr. Stribling said, he feels as if he is drowning.
”I am, like, stunned,” the 24- year-old father said. ”Sometimes I get so mad at the mother of my son.”
His personal sinkhole of child-support arrears, which Mr. Stribling dug for himself by failing to support his son for nearly a year and by losing his job because of a citation for driving under the influence of alcohol, is more than $9,000 deep and accruing interest at 12 percent a year. While the specifics of his case are unique, his situation is not. Across the country, child support owed by poor fathers like Mr. Stribling has swollen to about $21 billion and is rising at a faster rate than for any other group of men.
The growing mountain of debt is similar to the arrears owed by absentee fathers who have more money and better jobs. It was created by men ignoring their responsibilities and, in many cases, hiding themselves and their income from child-support enforcement. But there is a fundamental difference, officials agree, between ”deadbeat” and ”dead broke” dads. Once caught, many poor absentee fathers simply cannot pay their monthly child-support orders, nor do they have a reasonable chance of paying their arrears.
After a decade of extraordinary success in establishing paternity, tracking down fathers who owe child support and using high-tech sleuthing methods to sniff out their money, states like Colorado, along with the federal government, have hit a wall in collecting it.
”Even with all our strong-arm tactics, there is a percentage of fathers that is dead broke,” said Dan Welch, a senior administrator at Colorado’s division of child-support enforcement. ”We have come to realize that all of the enforcement tools in the world can’t make somebody pay if they don’t have the money.”
The debts also have the unintended effect of pushing many poor fathers into the underground economy and away from their children, say child-support experts, including advocates for mothers owed child support.
Mr. Stribling is a volunteer in a small, federally supported program here that encourages poor fathers to negotiate with child support enforcement officials, rather than hide from them. The program helps them persuade judges to set child support orders at levels fathers can realistically pay, while forgiving some arrears and helping them re-establish regular contact with their children. If a father begins to avoid making payments again, he will become responsible for all his old child-support debts.
A judge ordered Mr. Stribling last September to pay $899 a month, basing his order not on what Mr. Stribling was earning, but on his ”earning potential,” said Brenda Banks, a caseworker for the Colorado division of child-support enforcement.
The judge’s ruling was understandable. Until August, Mr. Stribling had been earning $48,000 a year as a technician at Qwest Communications, even as he was evading child-support payments. He lost that job after his driver’s license was suspended for the drunken-driving citation. In two court appearances last fall, Mr. Stribling failed to persuade the judge that his earning potential had fallen and that the only job he could find paid $7,200 a year.
As part of the program, Ms. Banks, the caseworker assigned to help fathers, has calculated that Mr. Stribling can afford to pay $350 a month. That is about 40 percent of what the judge ordered, but Ms. Banks said she believed she could help Mr. Stribling convince the judge that the revised amount was reasonable. While the mother of his child would receive lower payments, Ms. Banks said, at least she would be paid regularly.
In the past decade, child-support collections from the estimated 11 million fathers who do not live with their children have nearly doubled, to more than $18 billion a year. Most of that money comes from fathers who have stable jobs and can afford to pay.
Where the money does not come from is the 2.5 million poor noncustodial fathers in the United States. According to a study by the Urban Institute, nearly 30 percent of these men are in prison. Among the remainder, nearly half are unemployed. Those who do have jobs earn an average of $5,600 a year, well below the poverty line.
”You can’t get blood from a turnip,” said Elaine Sorensen, a labor economist at the Urban Institute and an expert on child support. ”The bottom line is that for poor fathers these laws are just unrealistic.”
Poor fathers are often asked to pay significantly more, as a percentage of their income, than middle- class fathers, according to the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a social policy research group that studied 5,500 low-income fathers in seven cities in the 1990’s. Nearly two-thirds of the poor fathers tracked by the study had child support orders that demanded more than half of their income.
That was Mr. Stribling’s experience.
”I could barely live off the $600 I was making,” he said of his monthly salary. ”Then they took 55 percent of it.” (The maximum that child support enforcement can take under federal laws is 65 percent of a person’s salary.)
About the same time that family researchers and policy makers concluded that child-support laws were largely ineffective when it came to poor fathers, a flood of new research was released that emphasized the importance of fathers in children’s healthy emotional development.
As a result, there seems to be growing bipartisan consensus to reconsider the way child-support payments are collected from poor fathers.
”This is the new frontier of child-support enforcement,” said Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families in the Department of Health and Human Services. ”It means reaching out to those men who want to do the right thing, who want to pay child support, but who need a little help getting there.”
To that end, President Bush, in the budget he sends to Congress next week, will propose a change in how child-support payments from poor fathers are handled, said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Researchers have known for years that a major disincentive in the willingness of poor fathers to pay child support is where their money goes. Most of that money is now kept by states, as repayment for welfare benefits paid to an absent father’s children.
The president’s budget will include a provision to send all of the father’s payment directly to his family. It will also propose spending up to $286 million in federal money over five years to reimburse states for welfare benefits they have paid to the children of poor fathers.
Even groups that demand tougher enforcement of child-support orders agree that, when it comes to poor fathers, state and federal laws penalize and isolate men, usually without helping mothers or children.
”What the current system does is accumulate this unrealistic debt that will cause a certain number of poor fathers to just hide,” said Geraldine Jensen, president of the Association for Children for Enforcement Support, an organization of 50,000 parents whose children are owed support.
Efforts at reform, however, are still confined to small demonstration programs like the one here in Denver. It is part of a three-year test program under way in 10 cities, financed with federal and Ford Foundation money.
Mr. Stribling will soon finish an eight-week course that he says has given him a way to gain control over his life, while getting along with the mother of his son. Efforts to reach her were not successful because Mr. Stribling would not provide her name.
There is, however, substantial evidence that many abandoned mothers benefit when the father of their children participates in programs like the one here. A study by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation found that participation increased the dollar amount of child support actually paid by poor fathers. It also found that these programs uncovered large sums that fathers had been hiding.
That is not to say that all poor fathers will be reached. Counselors say some of the poorest fathers lead lives complicated by crime, drugs or alcohol.
Mr. Stribling does not have these complications. An Army veteran with a high school diploma, he says he plans to use the G.I. Bill to attend night school to get a degree in nursing.
In recent weeks, he has been allowed to spend more time with Nasir.
”I can look him in his face and see me,” Mr. Stribling said. ”He’s so funny. It’s the little things he does. He’s the best person in my life.”
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