This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 24 Jan 2008, by Wisely.
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24 Jan 08
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no evidence has ever demonstrated that large numbers of fathers were or are deserting their families and not paying child support. Unchallenged research has long established that fathers are forcibly separated from their children by divorce courts and criminalized by child-support orders that are patently impossible to pay. The “deadbeat dad” is largely the creation of bureaucratic policies and of the feminist ideology that drives them.
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Over the years, child support has increasingly functioned less as a way to reduce or recover welfare costs and more as a forced subsidy on middle-class divorce. States are paid by federal taxpayers based on the amount they collect. This encourages them to neglect welfare families, for whom the program was designed, because there is little money to be had. Instead, enforcement agencies have shifted their focus to middle-class families, for whom the program was never intended, because they can collect large sums and, with them, lucrative federal funds, which can then be spent for any purpose. Using child support, state governments found they could raise revenue through the growth of single-parent homes.
The perversity of the incentives is diabolical. States have a financial incentive to generate fatherless children in the middle class, which they procure by providing sweeteners for single motherhood—expedited divorce, automatic and exclusive mother custody (regardless of fault), minimal visitation by fathers—turning as many men as possible into payers (including some who are not even fathers) and setting child-support awards as high as possible. It is hardly surprising that the vast majority of divorces in which children are involved are now filed by women.
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Stephen Baskerville, an assistant professor of government at Patrick Henry College, is the author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland House).
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17 Jan 08
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