Twenty Years

The community note on this tweet is wrong.

Let me explain. Child support is based upon the sum of the incomes of both parents. There is a chart and a formula. So let’s say that the father has two jobs. One where he works for the fire department, and a second job where he works as a janitor at a theme park. The mother claims to be working 20 hours per week as a bartender making $6 per hour. The child support is calculated and they take 70% of the father’s income for the couple’s two kids, but aren’t taking any of the income from his second job. The amount being taken is still less than 60% of dad’s total income, so they are below the Federal limit.

I would guess that’s what is happening here. The $163 the man is left with is the income from his first job, and he also has income from a second job. The example I used above wasn’t bullshit- that’s what happened to me when I was paying child support. It’s what actually made me homeless. The judge didn’t care. When I told him the money they were leaving me wasn’t enough to survive on because it wasn’t even enough to pay rent, the judge said “Get a second job.” When I pointed out that I already had two jobs, his reply was, “Well, get a third job, then.”

So you do that, and guess what? Now you are making more money, meaning that your child support increases again. It was impossible to get ahead. When I had one job, I was paying $700 per month in child support. I was forced to live on $700 per month. I got a second (part time) job, the wife went back to the judge, and my support went up to $900 per month. But hey, now I had $900 per month to live on.

How was my wife making it? She didn’t have a job. She had $700 per month in child support, $400 worth of food stamps, $300 in earned income credit, $200 per month in WIC, and $300 worth of welfare, plus she was getting $750 a month babysitting two children while their parents were at work. She netted a total of $2650 a month. Yeah, she got half of whatever I was making, plus she got to keep all of her money AND collected all kinds of government assistance money.  That is the equivalent of grossing over $40,000 a year. Meanwhile, I was living below the poverty level on what was left. It is easy to see why many men become “deadbeats.” The child support system is fundamentally unfair, and there is no mechanism in place to ensure that the money actually supports the child.

They take the money right out of your paycheck before you get it. Some men work under the table or drift from job to job to avoid paying. That doesn’t really work. If you try that, they take your professional licenses away. Good luck making a living at anything other than minimum wage without a license. Still, some men work at their own business or have help working under the table. Those men get their passports and driver’s licenses taken. The debt accrues and never goes away, not even in bankruptcy. Eventually, they will toss you in prison if you aren’t paying.

I always knew that my ‘child support’ was going to support their mother, not the kids. That is why things like this always make me angry, when I think about how women use their children to ride the gravy train, while their fathers get accused of being ‘deadbeat dads’ because they can’t afford to pay.

As soon as the kids turned 16, she threw them out of the house and had them live with me. First my son, and a year later, my daughter. As soon as it was no longer profitable, they were unceremoniously thrown out.

She still plays the game to get your tax dollars. Right after the first kid was thrown out, she got a job at WalMart as a cashier, and ‘injured’ her back soon thereafter. She now collects Social Security Disability and collects survivor benefits because the man she married after me passed away. To this day as far as I know, my ex-wife has never had a job her entire adult life other than that one year working at Wal Mart. Now that all three of her kids (2 from me, 1 from the dead guy who came next) are grown and out of the house, she lives in a doublewide trailer near Gainesville with her now elderly mother. Between them, they collect more than $5500 per month in SS benefits.

It’s been twenty years since I last paid child support. It still pisses me off. America’s new class of entrepreneurs are young women having children out of wedlock, or they marry a guy, have a kid, then divorce him, and collect. It may or may not even be his kid. Most people who work for a living actually make far less money than America’s new entrepreneurs. Forget college, the average college graduate only makes $44,000 a year upon graduation after 4 or more years of college. By the age of 20, a young woman can be making more than that with almost no effort, all she has to do is get pregnant a few times.