Monday, January 23, 2006

Va child support laws

Stephen Baskerville writes in the Wash Times:
For the third time in six years, Virginia officials are trying to sneak through policies that will lead to more broken families and more fatherless children. They will also result in massive expropriations of Virginians without due process of law and the jailing of more law-abiding parents. As always in the post-Clinton era, the cynical justification is "the children," but those who profit will be lawyers, judges and bureaucrats. ...

They ignore Kimberly Folse and Hugo Varela-Alvarez, who conclude child-support programs "lead to the unintended consequence of increasing the likelihood of divorce." The panel took no notice of W.S. Comanor's groundbreaking volume, "The Law and Economics of Child Support Payments," where leading scholars characterize the system as "an obvious sham," a "disaster," and "the most onerous form of debt collection practiced in the United States." Citizens who want to redress the balance with these less biased experts must pay for it out of their own pockets.
It should be called mother support, not child support. The policies are based on supporting the mother, not the children.

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