| MND COMMENTARY |
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Case Study: Deadbeat Politics in Galesburg, Illinois April 15, 2005 by David R. Usher This situation is an excellent microcosmic study which pristinely isolates the damage done to society and family in more complex world of politics. Justice has been set aside entirely in civil nonsupport cases. Incarceration does not constitute removal of one’s freedom (thus requiring a high standard of scrutiny). It is considered a method to compel a person to do whatever the court wants. The fact that one’s freedom has been revoked is immaterial. In these cases the reasonability of the support order, and whether the father can earn the amount ordered, are not defenses and cannot be pled. The only question before the court is “did you pay or not”. What a marvelous idea. Make it impossible for poor men to be fathers (so they cannot parent their children), and turn them into workaholics for the state. This is in addition to seizing any and all assets, taking away driver’s, business, and professional licenses so men cannot work or get to work, and inventing child support tables that pretend the father has no living expenses of his own. As in most publicized cases, the politicians in Galesburg picked two men who are way behind on child support. Douglas Alexander and Justin Jobe are the current poster boys for Knox County’s antifamily politicians. It is entirely possible that these two men are bums. But we don’t know that, because the Galesburg Register Mail couldn’t care less about why these men are behind on support. And these men do not in any way represent the serious employment problems facing everyone in Knox County, Illinois. Galesburg is a small town of 33,000, surrounded by expanses of cornfields.. Maytag, the largest union employer in the entire area, closed its plant in October, 2002 leaving over 1600 workers unemployed. The jobs were relocated to a Maytag plant in Reynosa, Mexico. The total ripple-through job loss is approximately 4,166 jobs. The impact on the area is devastating, especially because there is no other major employer in the area. Divorced men: Impressed guarantors of global economy shifts and the welfare state Every divorced father who lost his job in Galesburg as a result of the Maytag closure, but has been unable to find equivalent employment, or has been unable to get his child support modified downward immediately, has become a slave and guarantor to the welfare state and the global economy. The Galesburg Register-Mail and local politicians are quite aware they are putting divorced men in the impossible position of being the guarantors of the welfare state and the divorce revolution. They are also keenly aware that shifts in the economy cause unemployment and increased needs for welfare. The Galesburg Register-Mail’s recent article “Lack of support” makes my major points for me (as quoted from their article in italics below). Bureaucrats know exactly what they are doing to insulate the state from the welfare problem it created via no-fault divorce, poor economic policy, and trying to end poverty by forcing chain-gang policies on the poor:
"It has gone from being viewed as a family problem to being a societal problem," Watts said. "The general public doesn't feel this is just a family matter. It affects them as taxpayers in a number of ways."
“Watts said non-payment of support ends up costing taxpayers when the Illinois Department of Public Aid issues food stamps and medical cards to provide health care for the children…. Figures for how much the non-payment of child support costs the Department of Public Aid are not available, but research by the Center for Law and Social Policy estimates if all support were paid, cash assistance would drop 26 percent, food stamp costs would be reduced by 19 percent and Medicaid costs would be 5 percent lower. An Iowa study estimates potential state welfare costs are reduced by 86 cents for every dollar in child support collected…. Bradley said if she were receiving monthly support payments, she would not have to depend on public aid and other assistance.”. Authors note: The Register Mail did not bother to tell us if the father was also a Maytag employee or why he isn’t paying support).
“Pam Compton, the acting administrator of the Illinois Department of Public Aid Division of Child Support Enforcement, said in the 1970s, the department only worked on support cases for parents on welfare. In the 1980s, its services were expanded to provide free services to all custodial parents who ask for assistance in collecting child support …. "Technically, our client is the Illinois Department of Public Aid," Mangieri said. "That is who we represent because they have expended taxpayers' money for the benefit of the child of non-support …. Dinges said "research by the Center for Law and Social Policy shows that child support is a critical source of economic stability for moderate and low-income families. For Bradley, regular child support payments would supply that stability " (Author’s note: where does this child support come from? A good job? Making a quick illegal buck in the underground economy to stay out of jail?)
“Child support collections significantly reduce the federal, state and local costs of providing cash assistance to single parent families and lowers the costs of Medicaid and food stamps” …. An Iowa study found that potential state welfare costs are reduced by 86 cents for every dollar in child support collected.”
The welfare deficit is as high as ever. Politicians just found a handy new name to "pass the buck" and make themselves look good. States are still handing out welfare like Johnny Appleseed, using the courts and DCSE to get it back from millions of poor men, most of whom will never have the money. Perhaps somebody should have read "Robin Hood" to these people when they were children. They never learned that you aren't supposed to steal from the poor to give to the poor. We see that the Register-Mail failed to add up its own facts honestly and relate the real story to us. Much of the language in the article is “deadbeat spin” of political convenience on simple facts that even a ten-year-old child could understand. It is classic “symbolism over substance’, but perhaps more destructive than most. Knox College, a small liberal arts college located in Galesburg is quite aware what happened in its current article Globalization On the Prairie. Knox suggests that help is on the way: “Because Maytag’s relocation was deemed the result of foreign competition, displaced workers from the plant can receive educational benefits and extended unemployment insurance through the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program. In the next two years, the most fortunate among the dislocated in Galesburg will become service-providers—nurses or radiology and computer technicians—in Galesburg’s post-industrial economy.” Here is what Knox missed: unemployment benefits do not come close to satisfying any child support obligation. No family court or DCSE tribunal will grant a child-support abatement to allow a divorced father to take time for education or training needed to change careers so as to maintain the previous high income level. If men are not allowed to seek the education required to transition to Galesburg’s new service economy, then what are these men supposed to do? I would like to hear from the good men in Galesburg who are most certainly being abused by these politicians. I would like to help you organize to end the economic terrorism of men in Galesburg. A Petri dish in the larger laboratory of deadbeat politics The situation in Galesburg is not unusual. However, it is immensely valuable because it can be studied as a relatively pure example of what transpires in the larger political diaspora all across America. The politicization of welfare has wreaded disastrous results on families. Even military reservists called into active duty are being turned into deadbeat dads as we speak. I can think of no greater national outrage than to send a man overseas to be shot at or blown up, while we are are making a criminal out of him stateside and pretending it is a wonderful thing. In "Lack of Support", the state pretends that it is reasonably simple to modify a child support order when the obligor’s income changes: “Assistant State’s Attorney Dean Stone said when a non-custodial parent’s financial situation changes, through losing a job or finding a better job, support payments are modified.” This is absolutely incorrect. The Illinois Department of Child Support website contains plenty of information about getting support initiated or enforced. There is no information for the NCP about how to get it modified. In fact, modification is not even mentioned on the one and only web page describing the “services” available to non-custodial parents. This is the first clue that these services are being intentionally withheld, in probable violation of federal law. I called the Illinois DCSE hotline. Buried in a nondescript section of their PBX menu, I eventually found an address in Springfield, Illinois where one can mail a request for modification. There is no form for the request available, and no information about what one should send or what the requirements for modification are. Illinois uses a private contractor to enforce child support, but does not provide any equivalent, easily accessible services to the non-custodial parent. Elaine Sorenson suggests that Stone’s comment about modifiability of child support orders is not credible in her article “A Little Help For Some Deadbeat Dads”. She informs us that only 4% of noncustodial fathers who were paying child support received a downward adjustment when it was called for: How is the current system unfair to lower income fathers? In most cases, their child support orders are in excess of their ability to pay. Noncustodial fathers who become unemployed. or disabled cannot simply walk into a support enforcement office and have their orders adjusted downward as the result of their change in status. The process for adjusting orders is quite bureaucratic-information must he verified, forms reviewed, and in man states a judge must approve the modification. This takes time and, often, money. There also is a reluctance to reduce child support orders on the assumption that incomes will eventually improve. But in the meantime arrearages accumulate. According to U.S. census data. only 4 percent of noncustodial fathers who were paying child support under an order received downward adjustment when their earnings felt by more than 15 percent between one year and the next. The Center for Family Policy and Practice also finds Dinges’ comment incredible in Negotiating the Child Support System: Recommendations from a Discussion of Policy and Practice:
In his 1999 Family Law Quarterly article “Child Support at a Crossroads”, reknowned attorney Ronald K. Henry reported: Federal law requires that child support services be made available, without discrimination, to both custodial and noncustodial parents. [31] All states have procedures for initiating child support modifications. Many violate federal law because they will only process upward modifications or requests made by custodial parents. Some states contend that they have an attorney-client relationship with the custodial parent. This is not correct. The child support bureaucracy represents the interest of the state in ensuring fair support of the child and does not stand in the position of private attorney to either parent. [32] The failure or refusal to process requests for downward modifications both violates federal law and creates uncollectable arrearages which adversely affect the state's enforcement performance. Following federal law with respect to downward modifications will improve compliance and reduce enforcement costs. The benefit of downward modifications in reducing the accumulation of arrearages will also be helpful to states under the new incentive formula that is currently being phased in. Because of the federal Bradley Amendment, a child support arrearage is unmodifiable even if it is utterly uncollectable because of the obligor's poverty. Accordingly, states have an interest in identifying the circumstances under which child support obligations should be suspended or modified prior to the accrual of an arrearage. If an obligor becomes temporarily disabled or is laid off from his job and has no income for a period, it does no good to pretend that an income exists since any child support accrual will simply become another uncollectable arrearage on the state's books. Just as intact families sometimes have to deal with interruptions in income, child support enforcement needs to recognize when an obligor is unable to pay. If Ron Henry is correct, abused men in Galesburg may well have a class-action suit, and perhaps a Rico suit as well. The Center for Law and Social Policy strongly iterates the fact that child support obligations often bear no resemblance to the earning ability of low-income fathers. They make many solid recommendations for policy changes that would be very beneficial to parents and states. Wendy McElroy reminds us that we treat American war hostages just as cruelly as stateside fathers. In the early 1990’s, Boeing employee Bobby Sherrill was held captive by the Iraqis for five months when they invaded Kuwait. He was immediately arrested when he returned home, for arrears of $1,425 in child support that had accrued during the time he was held hostage. This is brilliant evidence of unconstitutional insanity right here in America. Now here is the clincher: Phyllis Schlafly recently pointed out that even our military reservists called into active duty in Iraq are being turned into deadbeat dads. Even they cannot get their child support modified! Missouri is the only state protecting reservists, in a law I conceived and got passed in 1991 when we initiated the first war in Iraq. How can we turn men we called into active duty into criminals while they are being shot at in a foreign land fighting for freedom? Is this really America? Every breathing soul should be heating up the phone lines to congress over this tragic abuse of good men. Beyond the appalling issue of our military reservists, there is no other state statute or federal law requiring a just and timely modification of support for other men faced with involuntary economic hardship. We do not demand that married men support their families to an arbitrary standard created by bureaucrats. Accordingly, there is no constitutional rationale authorizing our present practice holding a large number of men to a higher and rigidly inflexible standard of family support simply on the basis of marital status, particularly where no fault was found or assigned. Federal Subsidies: Perverse incentives bar fairness and sane public policy There are no federal incentives encouraging fairness or reasonability on the part of DCSE, judges, or county officials. And there are no federal targets for ensuring that what they do is fair. Every nickel of federal funding to states provides incentives to continue handing out welfare, create unreal child support orders, and then abuse divorced fathers. In addition to other items mentioned in this article, there is one in particular federal entitlement that is most disconcerting. Most folks do not know that local jails receive an automatic federal entitlement to lock up and warehouse men behind in child support. In 1990, the incentive was at least $125 per night. I have not been able to discover what the current amount of the federal subsidy is. This entitlement is particularly dubious in Knox County, Illinois. Knox has a brand new, high-tech county jail that is nearly completed. Knox County desperately needs paying guests to finance the new hotel. Drunks and most other guests do not provide income to the county. But “deadbeat dads” do. They are already helping pay for it. Welfare fraud: Fathers criminalized for crimes of mothers In 1991, Missouri State Auditor Margaret Kelly issued a stunning audit of the Missouri Department of Social Services [Report 92-24, March 24, 1992]. She reported that the State had collected $28 million in child support, but had given out $58m in welfare benefits to un-entitled recipients. To get benefits, mothers applied for welfare but failed to show the child support they were receiving on their applications. Social services did not crosscheck their own records for existing support orders, and gave benefits to mothers. Kelly ordered the CARS (Claims Action Restitution Service) to recover the monies. They promptly responded by filing AFDC collections against fathers, most of whom had paid child support while mom was "double dipping". This is completely legal, because federal law does not require states to recover fraudulent claims from the person who received the benefits. These men were forced to pay child support twice, and many who could not were incarcerated as deadbeats. The latest audit of Missouri Social Services indicates there is still substantial welfare fraud in Missouri, however the newer audit fails to reveal the size of the problem, or indicate any change in practices of the state. It is quite probable, given the strong proclivity of politicians and social service agencies to act like “Johnny Appleseed”, that this problem exists in other states, showing up only as incarceration rates and uncollected child support. An armchair history of welfare and child support, where it went wrong, and what you can do to restore pro-family politics and social policies in America Prior to 1964, welfare was essentially a public tithe to help poor families. This is as it should be, if government is to be in the tithing business at all. But in 1964, changes were made such that money given to poor mothers became collectible from poor fathers. What most folks thought was the “War On Poverty was actually a “spend and tax” policy, with the poor being the benefactors and victims according to their sex. Unfortunately, you can’t collect money from turnips. This money was, and remains uncollectible to this day. Meanwhile, the feminist divorce revolution devoured about half of all married families (primarily in the middle and upper classes), leaving many families poorer because of the simple structural fact that former couples cannot magically support two households and a bevy of lawyers and psychologists without coming up short. All of a sudden, poverty moved into the middle class; but most scholars prefer to cry about the “shrinking middle class”. Instead of doing something about the divorce revolution, we simply added legions of divorced single mothers to the so-called “War on Poverty”. The existing system makes it virtually impossible to differentiate between genuine poverty and the larger problem of feminist-driven predatory poverty. Politicians simply invoke the former as moral justification for expanding the latter, while the spin and political noise ratchets up another notch. Between 1964 and 2004, America handed out a total sum of money that is actually greater than the national debt, and also discovered out it still cannot not collect it back from men. That’s because you can’t fix the family deficit by funding more of it. By 1994, taxpayers had enough of the welfare state. So Congress “cooked the books” by passing the Personal Responsibility and Work Act of 1996. What was once called “welfare” was quickly renamed an “advance on child support”. The redecorated “deadbeat dad” state sailed into the new century, hurling epithets in all directions, in spite of the promised “kinder, gentler society”. Nothing has changed substantively. The uncollectable amount of “child support” still accrues as a federal deficit, just as before. The only difference is that our accounting system pretends that the welfare state isn’t. We don’t really give out welfare any more. Bureaucrats decide what standard of living women should have and then expect men to provide it under all circumstances. I must point out that “no fault divorce” does not exist and never did. Fault is automatically assigned against men without hearing or fact, and then men become slaves to the families they are not allowed to participate in even though no fault was ever shown as to why they were ejected in the first place. Any man who can’t provide that standard of living is labeled a “deadbeat”, and put in a position where he has no way to succeed in modern society. Many of these men end up perennially in child support debt, working for 25-cents an hour in a contract prison operated by CSI or another private agency to pay a monthly child support amount that assumes they are earning real money in the real world. According to the Office of Child Support Enforcement in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, many states do not regard incarceration, in and of itself, as a basis for modification. This is one reason why the United States has a largest percentage of its population in prison of any other country in the free world. Holding Feminism Responsible for “Fatherless America” Feminism brought about some long-overdue changes getting equal rights for women to vote and be on the workplace. My grandmother, Mrs. Roland Usher, and her sister, Mrs. Florence Richardson were leaders of the suffragette movement. I respect their work completely. Enron also did some good things before it pulled off the biggest investor fraud in Wall Street history. Now it is time to recognize the fact that feminism went beyond all reasonable goals. Feminism is primarily responsible for “Fatherless America” -- the most expensive, painful social debacle in American history. It is time that we hold post-1960 feminists squarely responsible for it. We must realize that feminists, liberals, and feminist neoconservatives are the last people we should listen to for policy solutions. We must look to those who can provide policies that reasonably restore the importance of marriage, allowing natural economic and social forces to rebuild the cultural value of marriage without interference from radical feminists. Living in the Answer Government spent the last 45 years “living in the problem”. Nothing has improved substantively since PROWA was passed in 1996. Father-absence, divorce, illegitimacy, poverty, and child well-being loom as large as ever. We know it is impossible for government to resolve these social and economic problems reactively. A proactive, forward looking approach is mandatory in order to see the changes that America both needs and wants. Whenever you hear the words “uncollected child support”, remember you are listening to a collective of anti-family politicians in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Both parties are very guilty of this. There are a very few Republicans and Libertarians who understand the larger dynamic, and who refuse to participate in anti-family politics. I encourage these individuals and organizations to confidently organize, act on principles, and speak out. Most Americans are sick and tired of the institutionalized gender war started by feminists in the 1960’s, and want to see an end to it in their lifetimes. I am frankly surprised that mainstream Republican conservatives have been unwilling or unable to walk away from the welfare state and set forth a new “Pro-family Contract For America”, that is truly based on personal responsibility. Policies expecting spouses to work through the normal problems and processes of marriage and aging would not be a “marriage trap”. Programs funded to help responsible spouses get an irresponsible or troubled spouse into treatment for addictions such as chemical dependency, gambling and sexual addiction will clearly reduce the need for divorce. Most men and women just want a decent marriage. Public policy only provides them with two options: “live with it” or get a divorce. Providing active “pro-family” options will give Americans what they want and need. It will also provide useful historical courtroom evidence for easily assignment of fault against an irresponsible spouse in the event a divorce is really needed. We should never again place children in the custody of a parent who has been irresponsible to the marriage – which is largely what we have been doing for the past 45 years. In addition, welfare and child support must become separate, independently accountable programs. Welfare should return to being a simple tithe, and limited accordingly. We should rely more on charitable organizations, who know the individuals in their area far better than bureaucrats in Washington do. Child support must be entirely reformed, as follows, to remove the perverse political incentives that presently drive the divorce revolution and cause the state to pretend they can erase the poverty problem by ordering and enforcing unreasonable sums of support. The present system is completely unreasonable. Many men are pushed into the underground economy. The unreasonability breeds resistance, encouraging men to hide enough money so they can even eat. When fairness is established, we will see very few men dropping out or refusing to comply.
When we make this change, we will finally hold fathers to the same level of support that we hold married fathers to. Divorced fathers will be as likely to be able to support their children as their married counterparts, and have no reason to not comply. The few bums and cheaters will become obvious, and the relatively small caseload will be manageable.
NCP’s have been denied due process for years: Federal courts hold that child support orders are entirely a state issue. States know this, and act illegally knowing that there is no federal oversight, no matter how egregious their actions are. If Congress is to continue funding child support enforcement collections, it has an absolute duty to ensure that support orders are viable in the first place.
Federal code must stipulate what cannot be classified as child support, and set maximum amounts of support that can be ordered, expressed as a percentage of periodic income. Federal law must require states to fairly credit NCP’s for each day that children are in their custody, and provide baseline child support amounts for an average state, with cost-of-living adjustment percentages for each state. Judges should have some discretion, but this should only be available within the limits reasonably established in federal law.
New positive policies will clearly reduce poverty, deficit spending on welfare and social services, and even reduce the severity of the looming Social Security Retirement Fund crisis. David R. Usher is a Legislative Analyst for the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition. |
Politicians in Galesburg, Illinois think they have a plan to be a “demonstration county” for Illinois child support enforcement. Knox County State's Attorney Paul Mangieri and Judge Harry Bulkeley plan 
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