This piece is in response to Bruce Reed’s essay titled "Let’s Put Dads to Work." Reed’s piece is on welfare reform and his position is that fathers should be forced to work, if only to pay child support to poor, single mothers.
Reed writes, "The goal of requiring work isn't to punish fathers, any more than work-based welfare reform was designed to punish mothers. The real goal is to make states and the federal government get serious about two huge obstacles to overcoming poverty: collecting child support and getting low-income men into the work force."
Studies reveal that poverty is largely a function of having children before marriage. This is an irresponsible personal decision, not something that should be subsidized by the State. Like all Statists, Reed is confused at best. He is firmly convinced that the State offers a solution, when in fact the only real solution is personal responsibility. Learning the hard way may not be fun, but it is very effective. It also ensures that the irresponsible are punished, automatically.
"Poor men who don't work create a host of other social problems. They also represent the nation's greatest underutilized economic asset."
Note that to Reed anyone who doesn’t work is an "underutilized economic asset." If only the State could pass a law to force these citizens to do their "duty" and fork over up to 50% of their gross incomes to support the Welfare State in all of its many guises. Indentured servitude by any other name is still slavery.
"When it reauthorizes the welfare reform bill later this year, Congress should require every state to make absent fathers work off the child support they owe, and back it up with some resources."
Let’s make marriage obsolete through no-fault divorce, then let’s offer huge incentives to single women with children, then let’s make not working illegal for absent fathers, and then let’s offer huge incentives to individual states to force fathers to work to pay off the child support that they owe. There’s at least one major flaw in this logic: studies reveal that up to 30% of all children are not fathered by the husband or the man that the mother identified as the father at birth.
"Marriage is a near-certain ticket out of poverty if you can stick to it."
True, but the State has ensured that it will almost never happen by passing no-fault divorce legislation, thereby issuing get-out-of-marriage-free cards to miscreant, bored, fickle, spendthrift, cheating, and immature spouses at the expense of the children (if any) and the working spouse (normally the husband).
"Many absent fathers are deadbeats only because they're dead broke."
Also true, but usually not because they are refusing to work. Most of these men are unable to work due to ill health, injuries, hospitalization, or incarceration. These dead broke fathers are not the "underutilized economic assets" that Reed makes them out to be. You can’t get blood from a turnip, no matter how hard you squeeze, but the State will continue to try--at great expense to American taxpayers--and then wonder why it failed.
"We didn't require welfare moms to work because they were bad moms. We did so in hopes that their children would be better off growing up in a world where work was the norm. Responsibility should be the norm, too. Imagine the double-barreled impact on teenage boys of growing up with an understanding that fatherhood means a lifetime of responsibilities - and with a father who lives up to them."
This is wishful thinking at best. Now all Reed has to do is turn the clock back to 1950 and all of these problems will disappear. Until he figures out how to do that we are stuck with the sorry state of affairs that exists, thanks to mountains of State legislation that punishes hard work and rewards irresponsibility.
If this isn’t the pot calling the kettle black I don’t know what is. The State is going to teach responsibility and how to be productive? Which State would that be? The State that can’t balance a budget? The State that pretends that the Social Security Trust Fund has cash assets in it? The State that issues fiat currency and then inflates it via the Federal Reserve? The State that deficit spends hundreds of billions of dollars? The State that steals 50% of your earned income to support the Welfare State? Or the State that produces nothing, yet consumes even more than it steals? Take your pick, none of them are viable candidates for this job.
"[T]he best thing the fatherhood movement could do for poor fathers in the coming welfare debate would be to take up the challenge of making them work and helping them do so."
I couldn’t agree more, but let’s also determine who the biological fathers are at birth through automatic DNA testing of the alleged father. If the wife is free to divorce her husband at any time for any reason--or for no reason at all--then it’s only fair to determine the identity of the biological father before the State quickly and irretrievably awards a lifetime of financial responsibility to the wrong man.
DNA testing for paternity at birth would result in 30% fewer births and reduce cases of paternity fraud to zero, overnight. The current situation allows and encourages a wife to go shopping for genes and a checkbook--from two different men--with no negative consequences for either, even though it requires breaking marriage vows for the former and committing paternity fraud for the latter.
"A statewide program in Georgia requires delinquent fathers to work 20 hours a week while getting job skills so they can make good on their child support. In Florida, the Noncustodial Parent Employment Program has placed more than 3,000 parents in jobs at an average wage of about $8 per hour. …In both programs, judges give fathers a choice: Go to work or go to jail."
Its time for judges to give mothers a choice: Tell the truth or go to jail. This is similar to Reagan’s approach to nuclear weapon reductions by the Soviet Union--trust but verify.
Stephen Baskerville writes, "In family court we have literally reached the point where the criminals are putting the law-abiding citizens in jail."
He is referring to agents of the State committing criminal misconduct that includes accepting knowingly false accusations as proven, but it also applies to the tyranny imposed on men who are awarded a lifetime child support obligation in spite of DNA test results that exclude them as the father.
Let’s call this what it really is: criminal, collusion, and conspiracy against innocent men for the sins of the guilty, perpetrated by lying mothers, with State assistance.
Paternity fraud: A female crime ignored by the State whereby the innocent victim is punished by the State and the guilty criminal is rewarded by the State--at the expense of the innocent victim--on a monthly basis, for 18 years or more.
It’s time for all women to start playing by the rules of the game. Paternity fraud is a crime and the guilty belong in jail. Let’s put them there.
Published originally at EtherZone.com