Change On Federal Benefits Payments Could Leave Child Support Debtors With No Income

[TheKentuckian]

117. By no possible logic is this sustainable, your "choice" is not one. It is toxic for society.

What will these folks with mandated zero income do to survive and what will be the costs of the blowback from those actions.

I also add the the choice isn't between starving and freezing children and starving and freezing adults but between starving and freezing adults and the government getting a fake bit of return on their welfare investments. Fake because the systemic recovery costs and especially jail time wipe out more than can optimistically be recovered. Six months in jail might cost the state more resources than someone's obligations over several years.

I think we can be wiser than this, more thoughtful, and less rigid mentally and I say this as a kid that grew up on the wrong end of this with a sperm donor that didn't contribute an iota and stepfather (that I thought was my father) getting the little change for me and my sister whittled away to less than school lunch money over time, much less really.

We as a people have a dangerous prediliction for looking at policy and law strictly in a vacuum. We cannot be bothered to look at the whole and how one thing impacts another.

There is no net societal benefit of creating a layer of people with a mandatory lack of income, no matter how "correct" or altruistic the reasoning may seem. Hell, even the 65% is stupid in the context of most earners because there isn't enough left for such a person to be self-supporting and so they become a drag somewhere be it on the system in a game of really goofy robbing Peter to pay Paul or on other struggling people of similar or worse economic standing, who then need more aid or are less able to improve their lot, advancing and spreading generational poverty.

I do think we should make it really tough to get arrears by making reasonable child support a payroll/benefit deduction for everyone with an order to pay, which won't fix all the problems but it will keep those with income on the straight and narrow which I think would head off the majority of problems.