Family, Marriage, Society

Unraveling the Federal/State Child Support Racket

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Little by little, the truth behind what they call “child support” is leaking out.
It has very little, if anything to do with children or supporting them. It’s all about doing whatever the state can do do get money from the federal government.

Yes, the federal government dangles funds over the state’s head. If the state increases child support orders and they are “efficient” in collecting the money that is almost impossible to collect from these orders, the state gets more revenue for their general fund.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg!

State officials are challenging county child support agencies to spike their collection rates, setting ambitious goals in hopes of improving children’s lives and keeping Ohio competitive in seeking financial incentives from the federal government.

Last year, the state launched an initiative to increase dollar collections to keep Ohio competitive in receiving performance-based incentives from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Ohio, the seventh largest state, is sixth in child support caseload and fourth in collection, said Jeff Aldridge, deputy director for the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services.

Aldridge said even higher-performing counties like Butler and Warren should always be striving to improve their rates.

The above excerpt is from HERE:http://m.journal-news.com/news/news/state-pushes-counties-to-collect-more-child-suppor/nZkDJ/

More evidence is revealed in THIS article in Ohio:

Ohio wants counties to get more aggressive in collecting owed child support.

The state quietly has launched an initiative called the “I-70 Project” urging every county to hit at least 70 percent on its collections by September 2015.
Only half the state’s 88 counties can make that claim now.

“Obviously, it’s good for families,” said Angela Terez, spokeswoman with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. “They’re getting more of the money that they are owed. It’s win-win, because we get more money to help fund our programs, which also help families.”

The federal government is dangling additional cash for states as an incentive to boost their numbers. Terez said it’s not clear how much because it’s based on formulas.

Ohio gets $29 million now for child support efforts.

Family, Parenting

The Male Birth Control Pill

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I was researching information about the male birth control pill and ran across this great post. They touch upon several issues. I think more needs to be said about this. What would really happen if there was male birth control pill?

Read more HERE

…..Most men are getting the picture that when it comes to sex, they are more than just the initiator, they must come to grips with being on the defensive. I really don’t care about fairness, but about motive. I will not even get into false rape accusations in this post that is for another post entirely. If we count up all of the “options” a woman possesses, including various adoption options, a woman can keep a man out of a child’s life forever! He has very little say in the matter. He can sue, but unless she gives the baby up for adoption, and has not succeeded in misinforming him completely; he is out of luck. When the option of abortion is chosen, a man has no choice. She will go to a tax-funded, non-profit, non-disclosed location to have the procedure performed. The father may never know, even if he discovers what is going on, he is always too late.

The reverse is also true of abortion. When a man does not want a child with a woman, he had better pray she does not have access to his genetic material. Whether by shear stupidity on his part, or subterfuge on hers, family courts will not care how it happened, but that a pregnancy occurred. This is not a problem; taxpayers do not want to fund anyone’s children, illegitimate or otherwise. Why people argue so much about Welfare, no one here is saying that. What is being said however is that if she decides to carry to term, whether she is married to him or not, it is solely her choice. His desire to have a child, or not is not up to him once she gets pregnant. I am not going to discuss what I think a man’s responsibilities are. My point in regards to the man is that a woman always has a way out; a man is at her mercy as soon as he has been with her. He has no way out or recourse unless it is given him by the mother. If men had the adoption to “opt-out” of the responsibility of a child, this would drastically even the playing field on sexual reproduction; but kill society even worse than the current level of uninhibited sex has already done.

Compounding the issue further are family courts. Women gain custody five to one nationwide, and more often men are left with support. This dynamic has shifted several areas of society against men. From numerous government entities, to a task force of lawyers firms and “professional” court aides, men are at their wits end on how to just “be with” their children. Not to mention how to avoid government enforced poverty. Young men are taking notice, and marriage rates are slipping. Marriage rates, not relationship rates. Men and women are getting together more than ever before. Also, they are switching partners more than ever before. Tax subsidies are doled out to states as they collect child support, and this increases their incentive to ever burdening the payer. Arrearages, state seizure of tax refunds, professional and driver’s licenses, passports, credentials, and throwing payers in to modern day debtors’ prisons are all having an effect. As prisons are more and more controlled by private firms, which receive tax subsidies as well, men have their work cut out for them. Lose your job, and you had better get creative, or pray that the “overburdened” family court judges have time for you between tee times, and feminist speaking engagements.

Family

How We Fail Our Boys

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I read “Men On Strike.” It is a well written book that ruffles a lot of feathers. Helen Smith nails many topics that people want to ignore. She puts things out there in the open for people to see.

I’m glad it was a woman who wrote the book because if it weren’t, all hell would break loose. It is funny how the author of this article calls her misogynistic even though she is a woman. Truly bizarre. It seems like people who use that word attempt to disarm those who expose inconsistencies and flaws in the radical feminist platform. It is silly and no longer works. The game is over.

The facts speak for themselves:

“For every 100 girls age 6 to 14 with a learning disability,” she writes, “160 boys have a learning disability … For every 100 females age 15 to 19 who commit suicide, 549 males in the same age range kill themselves … 100 percent of school shooters have been male … 70 percent of high school valedictorians are now female.”

The pendulum has swung too far in one direction. We need balance.

Read on:

Two new books—including the newest tome from the author of ‘Queen Bees and Wannabes’—explore why young men are falling behind in American culture.

‘Half a century after The Second Sex, Title IX, and The Feminine Mystique, have we reached a point where women have certain advantages over men? Earlier this summer, Helen Smith’s book Men on Strike tackled this subject with vigor, if not with rigor (the authors main sources were commenters on her blog, arguably a self-selecting group of Men’s Rights Activists —MRAs, as they call themselves—or sympathizers). Her main argument is that the power dynamic has shifted so much that it’s now women, not men, who control America. Men, therefore, have been reduced to impotent slobs, relegated to the basement or cuckolded and divorced while continuing to pay child support for a kid who isn’t theirs, or failing out of college through no fault of their own, or being falsely accused of rape by foolish women.
…
Wiseman strikes the perfect note in arguing for forging families and societies where we give boys “a language for talking about their worries and experiences like we do with girls.” This means paying attention to everything from your son’s “first Halloween costume with a six-pack sewn into it” to the way his friends call each other “gay” when they really mean stupid, immature, or weak.

Boys, Wiseman told me in an interview, “want strong friendships, and they want to be able to navigate bad things that happen: there are betrayals, there are rejections, there are huge disappointments, and boys don’t know how to talk about it, and they don’t even think, in some ways, they have the right to talk about it. Because of that, they get to a place where they just push it down.” It’s time to start helping with this navigation, so that boys can grow up to be emotionally healthy men—and so that they don’t later blame their problems on feminism.’

Family, Marriage

Let’s Drink to Phasing Out the First Lady

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A great comment from below this article: “So, Michelle Obama is supposed to move back to Illinois – where she is licensed – to practice law while her husband stays in DC? Is she supposed to leave her kids or take them with her and away from their father? That certainly is not the type of role model I am looking for. Even in volunteer work – which is what the first lady is doing – people use what they have learned in college. I will raise my glass to a strong woman who devotes her time to her husband, her children, and to an issue with passion, even if she isn’t getting paid for it.”

I feel we need less lawyers who don’t care about family and more mothers (like Michelle) who actually DO. This is yet another example of our media steering people away from what is truly important… FAMILY!

Divorce

Let No Court Put Asunder

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.From This American Life.

Listen to the audio HERE:

Ira Glass
Act Three: Let No Court Put Asunder. Now, we have this example of somebody trying to make break-ups less horrible than they are. Barry Berkman used to be like any divorce lawyer. He fought for his clients. He tried to get them big settlements. But he came to believe that what he was doing actually was not so good for most of his clients, which is kind of a big problem. Here’s the kind of thing he would see. A guy comes in, ready for a divorce.

Barry Berkman
His wife had a lot of money. They had worked out a deal. But they did it on their own, without seeing lawyers.

Ira Glass
What did they decide?

Barry Berkman
And what they decided was that in order for him– he was a musician, didn’t have that much money. But in order for him to live close to her and to be able to see the kids, which they both wanted, she was going to give him enough money to purchase a small co-op. And it was great. They were both happy as could be. They were ready to do it.

They were told to see lawyers. He came to see us. We were fine with it. We said, sure. This looks good. You did a good job. She went to see a lawyer. No way. How can you give him that much? It’s not right.

Ira Glass
That’s what her lawyer was saying?

Barry Berkman
Absolutely. For the lawyer, it was too much, because he had an argument which could, theoretically, end up giving her the greater part of her separate property. She ended up listening to the lawyer. We ended up with a custody fight as well as a divorce fight.

Ira Glass
Wait. And is that because the money fight got so bitter at one point?

Barry Berkman
Exactly.

Ira Glass
Really?

Barry Berkman
Yeah. Then, they started fighting over the kids, which they hadn’t fought over at all.

Ira Glass
Well, wait. How did that kick in? Like what was the moment where it went from being just about money to being about the kids too?

Barry Berkman
What happened was, the parties got so angry at each other that they started quibbling about everything. So if he had a gig and couldn’t be home on time one evening, she decided he was an unfit parent. If she was spending too much time with her new boyfriend, which this guy decided wasn’t appropriate, she became an unfit parent.

So the parties ended up fighting not only about money, but about the kids. Used up a good bit of her vast inheritance in the case. And in the end, she ended up buying him the same, or similar, co-op in a similar neighborhood as the one she would have in the first place. But it took a couple of years, embittered everyone. And you had to think, was this worthwhile? Did it have to happen?

Ira Glass
Adversarial style divorces still make up half of all divorce proceedings in the country. And Barry felt like most of those cases ended up like this one: incredibly expensive, taking a huge emotional toll on everybody, damaging children. So after 15 years of doing these cases like this, he started looking for a different way. And he found something called collaborative divorce.

In collaborative divorce, each spouse gets a lawyer. And then, the spouses and the lawyers sit down in a room together to work out some kind of agreement. But under the rules of collaborative divorce, if one of the lawyers thinks that the other side is being intransigent or unreasonable, not only can he not threaten to go to court, if it does go to court, he has to give up the case. He has to give the case to another lawyer to do. So the lawyers have an incentive to work everything out.

So, OK. They all sit down together, the spouses and the lawyers. And Barry Berkman says that even though the spouses enter the situation with good intentions of working everything out, the biggest obstacle he has is something very simple.

Barry Berkman
I think, often, what happens is, couples in conflict lose the ability to listen to each other.

Ira Glass
And so you find yourself, very often, saying to your own client, no, no, no, no, no, listen to what they’re saying.

Barry Berkman
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Ira Glass
And so one of the things–

Barry Berkman
Not to agree with it, but at least to understand it. That’s the whole question. To recognize that your point of view doesn’t necessarily invalidate your spouse’s point of view.

Ira Glass
You’re saying the most important thing people need to do is simply just listen to each other and try to get along.

Barry Berkman
I would say listen to each other. I don’t know about getting along.

Ira Glass
They don’t have to try to get along.

Barry Berkman
Certainly, listening goes a long way.

Ira Glass
Do things get so reasonable that you get people listening to each other well enough that people eventually just get back together?

Barry Berkman
I’ve had that happen once.

Ira Glass
What happened?

Barry Berkman
What happened was, we had people who simply couldn’t listen to each other. He became very, very busy in his own law practice. She felt she was losing him. Part of it was, they couldn’t find the time to talk to each other.

Ira Glass
But this collaborative divorce process makes you actually show up to meetings with your spouse and your lawyers and start talking. And as these two people talked, they started to see each other’s side of things. Maybe he hadn’t been around enough. Maybe she could have been more supportive.

Barry Berkman
I think the turning point came when they were talking about what to do with the house, and each one kind of recognized that they didn’t really want to be living anywhere without the other person.

Ira Glass
Usually, of course, the spouses do not get back together. When the process works, Barry Berkman says, at least they end up feeling a little better about each other.

Ira Glass
Do people ever say at the end of this process, they appreciate your help and they’re glad for the results, but they’re still full of pain?

Barry Berkman
Yeah. I mean, we’re not going to get rid of the pain. The pain is there. Long marriages, the pain is there. I think going through this process enables people to get in touch with that pain and the real sadness that they’re experiencing, which is sometimes covered up by their anger.

Ira Glass
Are you saying that at the end of this process, actually just going through the dividing of assets– which is really, in the end, all you’re trying to do– actually makes people’s anger dissipate? When you do it this way?

Barry Berkman
I think going through the process where we reach– and it’s not just the assets. The assets are usually relatively easy. Don’t forget we have the kids and the parenting and the decision making. And that’s often a lot tougher.

I think, going through the process where people reach points of understanding where maybe for the first time they get a glimpse of where the other person is coming from– And so all of a sudden, they realize, you know what? It’s not necessary to demonize this person anymore. And when they have those moments of understanding, it goes a long way toward helping them get on with the rest of their lives, actually.

Ira Glass
Barry Berkman is a lawyer in New York and on the board of the New York Association of Collaborative Professionals. Collaborative divorce, by the way, was invented by a Minneapolis lawyer named Stuart Webb.