Anne Archer,  wish I could have attended Thursday night's meeting and want to thank you for giving Fathers and Families this badly needed opportunity for input.  I was at the first meeting with your predecessor and the Boston hearing but I did not get to speak on this topic due to the lack of time.  I had my kids for an overnight yesterday and this is like gold given the little time I get with them now. Hopefully this letter will communication this message even more effectively.

  I have been a CEO of 5 different companies over the last 16 years and have lots of expertise in financial analysis and management.  So I do not say this without much professional expertise.  Frankly I am always further horrified with each trip into court. I have now studied the relevant law in some depth over the last year.  The lack of understanding of judges of the financial orders they make and their impact never ceases to amaze me. Lawyers say "judges are not numbers people" - But this is a gigantic understatement. 

 

I wanted to bring your attention to the very common scenario where restraining orders are involved (about 40,000 per year in Mass. now). Simply stated the result is that 90% of the dad's take-home pay is taken by standard operating procedure by court orders to continue to pay for both the house he was thrown out of and then child support on top of that!  We all know Massachusetts child support is 50% higher than most states and is the highest in the nation. It is at least as much welfare for ex-wives as it is child support.  This is really undeniable, as no one spends 40% of their take-home pay on their children. Not to mention that the mother should be sharing in this cost too.  Clearly this is wrong and needs to be fixed. However, a very common scenario actual makes this even much worse for MEN (almost exclusively)!

 the scenario you need to understand is when the father is ordered to pay 40% (after taxes) of his net income for Child Support (average with 2 kids for CS guidelines at 26%) and on top of that another 50% of net income (average bank ratio allowed for the mortgage PITI at 35% of gross) for housing payments for the mother and children during the divorce process. This scenario leaves someone with an average of a $50,000 income with $357/month net to live on for rent, food, car and everything else. Only a homeless person without a car to work can live on this in Massachusetts.

The first thing you need to understand is that today restraining orders are given out to virtually any woman (not man) that asks for them when no actual domestic violence has ever occurred. The judges have been doing this for over 10 years now I am told, since some news story where one woman was killed after an RO was lifted. Shall we continue to assume ALL men are batterers and murders because of this one incident? Of course, this is untrue, un-American, unconstitutional, unfair and contrary to the basic foundations of our legal system, which says we would rather let nine people go free rather than put one innocent man in jail. Yet with restraining orders we "convict" up to 95 people for each guilty 5.   The guilty ones will get caught again soon enough.  However, these ROs are given out even though they almost never meet the standard of case law set by the Mass. Appeals court. You can walk into nearly any district court, almost any morning and see these handed out in droves without any exploration of what actually happened, why protection is needed etc.  It takes 2-5 minutes and poor dad isn't even there.  As soon as a woman says the word "fear" (and attorneys and DV advocates coach women on this) the judge issues the restraining order. So the fact of the matter is that LAWYERS SAY between 50% and 95% of these restraining orders should never be issued. Judges are afraid and actually break their oath of office (I have read this) each time they issue an RO due to this outside media pressure.  Even if there was domestic violence, this is no reason to put someone under financial orders that are often impossible to follow, and hence also illegal. This is how to really manufacture criminals and that is exactly what this system does today.

 

 

I am convinced this unbridled combination of restraining orders and child support payments is one major reason people start going into the underground cash economy and lying about their income - they basically have no choice to survive. Few people can live on 10% of their previous income for the entire 12-24 month divorce cycle to play out. Could you live on 10% of your current take-home pay? Of course not.  This creates a bit of a spiral effect over time, as the judges see this happen and then assume everyone is lying and therefore compensate by INCREASING their orders further - and so on, and so on . . . What happens is honest people like me get the shaft due to the sins of others because judges apply stereotypes instead of actually judging. Personally, as you can probably tell, I think the judges are totally out of control and break the law more than the criminals. I have seen my judge break the law between 2 and 5 times every time I have gone to court in my case. I can't say if it is out of ignorance or arrogance, but does it really matter? Bureaucracies need to have checks and balances against individuals. Our forefathers designed juries for this purpose and this has been unconstitutionally removed from family court as an option. Anyone with a civil claim of $20,000 gets a jury trial in superior court, yet with our children at stake and 40% of our income for up to 23 years we get a single judge, with questionable qualifications.

 
So what does this mean for child support guidelines?

well these these housing payments are ordered support by judges and they should be directly credited to child support. Yes 100% deducted right off the top of the calculated CS figure.

if dad is already paying 50% of his income for all the home expenses, he should not be paying another 40% for child support on top of that. Who could possible think this is fair or reasonable? It is insane.

It places almost any man in an untenable situation, unable to live, unable to work, unable to even defend himself legally in the divorce. They must focus on survival. And how can they be fathers to their children when they are fighting for their own survival?  No wonder so many men are leaving the state and the country - they have little choice - jail or run.  Obviously this is also one major reason the suicide rate for men involved in divorce is 9.9X that of women.

 

Hi Anne, hope you are feeling better.

 

I attended the Fathers and Families gathering on Thursday, I was in line but didn't get a chance to speak because of time constraints.

 

Ned limited the discussion to the guidelines but I believe a big picture view is in order to get a better understanding of why your committee is very important.

 

Many divorces today are initiated by the women in the marriage somewhere around 80%, I believe that this is the case because of the "Holy Grail" known as Child Support.  The winner takes all mentality is killing the family today, in order to get the Holy Grail all a women has to do is follow a simple recipe which is commonplace in the state of Massachusetts.

 

The ingredients are 1 Restraining order = Advantage in the courtroom = custody of children = child support

 

If the Holy Grail was eliminated or reduced down, you would essentially be forcing couples to at least try to resolve their problems.  It use to be child support was meant to get a parent who left the family to help provide for the child but that is not what is happening today.  Today good fathers are being forced out by mothers who know they will get a guarantee income which can be spent any way they want.  No accountability at all, the custodial person may not even spend any of that support on the child, but if the non custodial person misses a payment they are brought into Probate Court like a criminal. Solution: Debit cards/pcards which allow record keeping of expenditures for the child

 

The Holy Grail Guidelines does have other problems which need to be resolved, one of which is the $20,000 disregard exclusion from the custodial parent's(mother's) income when calculating the Holy Grail.  The disregard was supposed to be for paying for rent, utilities for the custodial parents, but nowadays a non custodial parent needs to have almost the same facilities so why does the custodial parent get this disregard and not the non custodial parent.  Solution: This should be eliminated, currently the only other jurisdiction with it is Washington, DC and they are recommending eliminating it.

 

Emancipation of children in most states is 18 or when they finish high school but in  Massachusetts it either when a child finishes college or reaches 23.  Most judges will continue the support even if the child isn't going to school but may have a brochure from a college at their home, this is wrong.  Why is it social security doesn't pay for the surviving children of deceased parent past 18, or married couples aren't forced to pay for their children to go to college.  In Massachusetts non-custodial parents not only have to send their children to college which takes considerable amount of resources but they also have to pay for child support to the custodial parent when most likely the child is living at the college.  This is wrong. Solution: The guidelines should be 18 or until the child graduates from high school because it is too cost prohibitive for a non-custodial parent to pay for both college and child support (which would be probably used by the other parent to pay for the education or worse for their own personal use.).  Another point to be made is that the custodial parent may get financial aid and not disclose that to the other parent so the custodial parent is also paying less of share of the cost of college tuition. 

 

Another problem with the guidelines is it act as a disincentive to work harder, if a non custodial parent knows that as their pay increases the amount of child support will also increase why should they work harder to accomplish this, the rule and the courts do not easily reverse this if that same person loses their job or get a lower paid job.  Now the person falls behind in child support and is label a dead beat dad, meanwhile mom can sleep all day and nobody cares.  Solution: A New Hampshire committee recommends looking at what is costs to raise a child and that should be used with each parent paying 50% of that amount.

 

I honestly believe that by lowering child support in most cases make reduce the number of divorces, restraining orders and social problems are children are incurring today.

 

Sincerely,

Wayne R. Jewett