Posted on 09/09/2002 10:08:37 AM PDT by RogerFGay
Tommy Thompson’s Reign of Terror
by Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.
The government claims a crisis of unpaid child support. Leading scholars have declared these claims to be everything from a "myth" to a "hoax." Yet some in the Bush administration seem determined to continue the failed policies of the Clinton years. Health Secretary Tommy Thompson recently announced mass arrests of parents he says have disobeyed government orders.
The Clinton administration’s "Project Save Our Children" illustrates that more political chicanery is perpetrated in the name of children than any other cause. The secretary has begun a "nationwide sweep" to arrest (what he calls) the "most wanted deadbeat parents." By the government’s own figures, however, the "worst of the worst" amount to only 69 fathers worthy of prosecution.
Even assuming these few men may be scoundrels, why don’t authorities simply arrest them and be done with it? Why all the fanfare from the federal government? Perhaps because these prosecutions are political.
"We will find you," President Clinton would intone against fathers. "We will make you pay." In Maryland, government billboards announce, "We're Looking for You, Child Support Violators." No government warns bank robbers or drug dealers that the government is watching them. This is not law enforcement: It is terror.
"More notable than any one arrest," we are told, is the "message that the administration is sending" that it will use federal agents to enforce divorce. In other words, the aim is not to prosecute lawbreakers but to spread fear. Terrorizing citizens into obeying its orders is not an appropriate role of government in a free society, even when the orders are legitimate.
In this case, the orders are not legitimate. They are creations of a divorce industry eager to encourage divorce by making it more lucrative. A child support "obligation" is simply what judges and bureaucrats decide a father must pay to have his children taken away.
Most divorces are filed by women, usually with no legal grounds. Most obligors have therefore done nothing to incur the imputed obligation, which is set by the same enforcement personnel who collect it. These officials have an interest in separating children from their fathers, imposing impossible child support burdens, and then arresting parents who inevitably fail to pay.
By the government’s own account, what is billed as "child support" is little short of plunder. Among those arrested was a man earning all of $39,000 a year and ordered to pay $350 a week for one child, almost two-thirds of his likely take-home pay.
These men have no hope for a fair trial; they have already been pronounced guilty in the media by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, with no platform to reply in their own defense.
The divorce industry has corrupted local government throughout America. Now its poison is reaching up to the highest levels of our government. The administration is soiling its hands in some of the worst sludge left by the Clintons.
Stephen Baskerville
Audio commentary available on freecongress.org.
Dr. Baskerville teaches political science at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from the London School of Economics.
Yet if the mother takes that $1400 and buys booze, cigs and lottery tickets does she get hounded by the Feds? Or anybody else?
Fathers can be punished severely for not supporting their children, but the mothers aren't accountable for a d*mn thing.
Then the father should take the mother to court for custody of the children on the grounds that she's a lousy mother.
Doesn't work....for several reasons:
#1 Where is he going to get the money for the lawyer? These vultures don't work for free. I imagine that he would barely be able to keep a roof over his head with the "generous" $125/week that the industry allows him to keep.
#2 The court doesn't care about the kid or the environment...as long as it's mom providing it, everything is okay by them. Sure, they'll let him file and they will all go through the motions so the industry can collect more in fees from him. Kids are a tool to these vultures...nothing more.
As divorced fathers we can expect to get as much sympathy from the government and society as Saddom Huissein or Usama bin Laden. Anytime this subject is brought up in public discourse, all a father has to do is say something, anything, about the system being unfair and he will be scoffed at for being a deadbeat who dares to question what's good for his own kids. Men like the one in this story are not born...they are made, and the industry makes more every day.
I obviously have the wrong attorney. I only get 25% of that amount from an ex who makes much more.
The father should not have to do that. What I'm getting at is there is NO accountablity on the part of the spouse that receives the CS money.
The father is held accountable for each penny but the mother is not.
That's an inequity and should be changed.
I wonder how much support Webster Hubble paid for his daughter? Maybe that's what irks him.
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