The War on Some Debts

[Tim May]

At 8:40 AM -0800 2/3/98, Eric Cordian wrote:
>In a further blatant erosion of Constitutional rights, the California
>Supreme Court has ruled that a person owing child support who fails to
>seek or accept work may be jailed and fined for contempt of court, and
>that this does not violate any Constitutional bans on involuntary
>servitude or imprisonment for debt.

Oh, things like this have been common in California, and elsewhere, for a
long time. It's a big part of the reason many guys I know don't fall into
the marriage trap.

Not only does the court demand that fathers (and, in 0.001% of cases,
mothers) go back to work, they also calculate what the "expected
compensation level" is of a person and assess them alimony and child
support based on _that_ number.

As one example, a friend of mine at Intel was working at home to set up his
own business. His wife left him (cleaning out the checking account and
having movers cart the furniture away while he was on a trip) and then sued
for outlandish alimony and child support benefits.

The court based the amount he owed on what he _had been_ earning as an
engineer at  the company, and what the court figured would have been his
current earnings there, not on what he was actually earning doing his
startup company.  His "earning potential." (Wait til the IRS and Congress
figure they can start taxing folks based on their peak earnings
potential...)

He had to fold his business startup and go back to work. And not just at a
job he liked...he had to find one that paid enough to pay off the bitch,
based on his peak earning potential. This is also known as "supporting her
in the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed"...never mind that when
they were married my friend made damned sure she didn't spend money the way
she wanted to...in her case, she presumably saw the divorce as a way to get
half of all the saved assets, plus an extremely lucrative alimony/child
support deal.

(Meanwhile, the bitch took her property settlement, blew it on an expensive
new car, lots of new furniture, expensive vacations, and, of course, didn't
do a lick of work...until the money ran out. And now that the alimony has
run out, she's now reduced to working as a technician for a disk drive
company. My friend worked his butt off, saved his money, invested wisely,
and is now once again "retired." He doesn't plan to make the same mistake
again. He's mostly hoping she doesn't hire some new lawyers and try to get
another piece of his newly-accumulated assets!)


>This reverses nearly a century of contrary rulings.  Look for this
>"improved" interpretation to be expanded to other kinds of debts and
>judgments as well, as soon as massive public acceptance of it for the
>carefully picked child support issue is engineered.

And, by the way, this whole mess about child support, alimony, and such is
a big reasons for citizen-unit tracking programs. Many levels of
government, from local social services to national agencies, want to know
where the father-units are so that money can be siphoned off to the
mother-units and child-units. All of the talk about "privacy laws" is
mooted by the desire by Big Brother to track and trace "deadbeat dads" and
others who BB thinks need tracking (everyone).

I'm generally in favor of fathers paying for their children, but not the
way things are done now. Where the father may have no visitation or custody
rights, where the mother is often free to just kick back and watch soap
operas on t.v. while the father works his butt off to pay for both
households, where "community property" is divided without regard for who
put the money in in the first place, and so on.

If women want to look at why fewer and fewer men are "prepared to make a
commitment," their favored psychobabble term, they need only look at how
the courts have declared marriage + divorce to be a golddigger's dream.

Marry a guy, divorce him a few years later, which he can't even contest,
and have half of all of his accumulated assets, plus a lucrative benefits
package. Such a deal.

And even being a queer doesn't save someone...I hear that in California the
gays and lesbians are pushing for community property "rights" to be
established.

The whole system needs to be nuked.

--Tim May



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