Month: January 2003

See Matt Welch for an account of the war between racist California Republicans, led by Bill Back and Randy Ridgel, and Shannon Reeves of Oakland.

Scum like Back and Ridgel are welcome to leave the party post haste, don’t let the door hit you on the way out, and never come around here again; stupid, rotten mother fuckers like them are a disgrace to the human race.

Everybody’s a hypocrite in some way or another, so I don’t get too excited about commonplace displays of moral inconsistency. I figure it’s better to have high ideals that you don’t always live up to than to have none at all. But there are cases where hypocrisy crosses a line and becomes obscene and therefore worthy of mention. The child support story out of Washington DC presently circulating the same blogs that bashed Trent Lott recently is such a case. It appears to have started with Andrew Sullivan:

WHY D.C. IS STILL HELL: What do you do with a man who has successfully evaded paying child support to kids from two different relationships? Make him head of D.C.’s child-support enforcement agency! Colbert King has the details. The kicker: D.C. collected payments in 12 percent of its child support cases in 2000. The national average is 42 percent.

and it’s been echoed by Glenn Reynolds and Don McArthur (a fan of the racist Gene Expression site).

These folks are all upset about the story of Roscoe Grant, Deputy Director of the DC child support collection agency written by dim bulb Colby King:

For years, the mother and aunt of Octavious Williams tried to get Grant to recognize and then do right by his son, Octavious. They even went to city agencies for help but got nowhere. It wasn’t until the family filed a paternity suit against him that Grant paid attention. And even then, it took a paternity test that came back positive to make Grant own up to the claim that he was Octavious Williams’s old man. Yet it fell to a magistrate judge to force Grant to do the right thing. Last July, the judge ordered him to pay $968 every two weeks to Octavious.

That’s right, our moral leaders are upset that Roscoe Grant didn’t just automatically start giving $2000 a month to a woman who claimed he was the father of her baby without a DNA test. What gall.

King also complains that the DC office of child support only collects money in 12% of cases, compared to a national average of 42%; this statistic caught the eye of the HIV-positive, bareback riding Mr. Sullivan, exemplar of virtue in all things sexual.

So let’s understand how government child support agencies work, and whether there’s any fire underneath all this smoke. Most of the people who collect child support have court orders against the father that were obtained as part of a divorce. Each state has a formula that dictates a percentage of income that has to be paid, and as soon as custody and paternity are decided, so is support. You don’t even have to have a judge issue these orders, they’re handed out by administrative judges, pro-temp judges, and by the child support collection agency itself.

Once an order has been entered, most people pay their obligation directly to the custodial parent, usually the mother, without much fanfare. The court has the power to order the payer’s employer to garnish wages, and this is a normal part of the procedure. Going through this process of obtaining the order and ensuring compliance doesn’t brand the recipient as a gold-digger or the payer as a deadbeat: this is simply how the system works. This money doesn’t show up in the official collection rates, as it never touches the government’s hands.

Now the process does get somewhat more complicated in the case where the child is born out of wedlock and the mother is on welfare, a very common scenario in Washington DC and in neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland. In order to collect welfare, the mother has to identify the father and sign her child support rights over to the state. The state then obtains a judgment of paternity and a child support order, and begins collecting money. It keeps the money it collects if it’s less than mom’s welfare; if it’s more, it kicks her off welfare and gives her the child support. Hence there is a certain symmetry between child support and welfare.

In many cases – roughly half – the man identified as the father by the welfare mother either can’t be found or is not, in fact, the father of the welfare child. Hence, it’s wise for any man presented with a child support order for an out-of-wedlock child to seek a paternity test. You wouldn’t want to have a legal obligation to pay $2000 a month for 20 years if you didn’t have to, would you? Of course you wouldn’t.

This is exactly what Roscoe Grant did, and it doesn’t make him a deadbeat, it makes him prudent. King makes it sound like the mother of Octavious [sic] Grant had to shell out money from her own pocket for a paternity suit, but these proceedings are actually paid for by the state, with the father picking up the tab for the DNA test if its positive. It’s also common for fathers to pay welfare mothers under-the-table while all these proceedings are pending, and we don’t know that Grant didn’t do this himself.

Now some men will sign a voluntary declaration of paternity without the DNA test, so perhaps King is angry with Grant for not doing this. I would take issue with him on that point as well, because the alleged father really has no way of knowing if he’s the real father without a DNA test, and if he signs up for a child that’s not his, he’s just cheated the real father and a the child out of the relationship they deserve.

The collection rate statistic that Sullivan’s so impressed with is also not what it appears to be. States play all sorts of games with this figure, mainly by keeping people in the state collection system after they have no need for it. To understand this, take this example: State A obtains child support orders, begins collecting, and then allows the woman to exit the state system and collect directly from the man’s employer. She gets all her money every month without the delay of up to a month while the state holds the money, collects interest, and cuts her a check. State B, however, requires the mother to remain in the state program as long as she’s collecting support. They all get federal incentive dollars for the money they collect, and this approach maximizes them, even though it inconveniences mother and child.

State A will have a low rate of collection, since most of the cases in its system are pending paternity tests, while state B will have a high rate of collection owing to the large number of cases in its system where paternity has been established. DC apparently follows the A model, more friendly to mothers, than the B model, more friendly to the government.

Collection rates also reflect the underlying ability to pay of the local population. In California, half of unpaid child support is owed by people too poor to file an income tax return; given the high rates of unemployment among black men in DC, that figure is probably around 80%.

But the larger issue is the $2000 a month child support order that King tries to diminish by dividing it into a bi-weekly sum when all orders are monthly. Dad’s contribution is supposed to be matched by a comparable one from mom — this is what all that “equality” stuff is about — so that young Octavious should be supported to the tune of $4000 a month. Will everybody who thinks it takes $4000 a month — or even $2000 — to raise an infant please get in touch with me? I’d like to sell you this fine bridge I’ve got over the Frisco Bay.

But let’s suppose that I’m all wet and this Roscoe Grant character is a scumbag would should be fired from his job in the DC government; what happens to young Octavious and his momma when Roscoe no longer has a paycheck? That’s what I mean about the hypocrisy.
Continue reading “Bandwagon du jour”

Gov. Davis seeks an $8.3-billion tax hike to balance the out-of-whack California budget; he wants to increase the sales tax, increase the income tax on high-earners, and increase the cigarette tax. Along the way, he wants to shift unpopular programs such as welfare to the counties.

This approach to solving the budget deficit is, in a word, insane. While it may play well politically to soak the rich, consumers, and smokers, this approach ends up making the perennial budget problem much, much worse, and the Republicans in Sacramento aren’t going for it. Even key members of the Administration are skeptical:

It’s unclear whether Davis will win support in the Legislature for the income tax hike, even from all Democrats. His incoming finance director, Democratic former state Sen. Steve Peace, has expressed skepticism about raising the income tax on high earners, noting that their income is notoriously volatile. To pass, at least some Republicans would have to support it.

So let’s back up and look at the big picture. California’s budget is always out of whack: we either collect too much in taxes, or too little. This is because the state derives too much of its revenue from high earners, and the incomes of high earners are volatile. So in the surplus years, the Legislature spends like a drunken sailor on new programs, and in the deficit years it shifts the funding of these programs to the counties who rely inordinately on sales taxes to pay their way. Consequently, cities and counties have a never-ending hunger for sales taxes, and they make deals with big-box retailers for rate reductions and property tax holidays to entice them in. Meanwhile, neighborhoods and wholesale businesses suffer.

These problems are aggravated by Prop 13, which prohibits fair assessment of property taxes, by Prop 98, which forces the state to pay too much for education in lean years, and the balanced budget provision in the state constitution that prohibits deficit spending in lean years.

The solutions to these problems are obvious: repeal Prop 13 and Prop 98 and the balanced budget amendment, add an amendment to the constitution prohibiting runaway growth in state spending, and broaden the base of the income tax. Taken together, these reforms would constitute a tax fairness plan that might just pass a ballot prop if it were presented in a bi-partisan manner.

The Davis proposals will make the long-term budget problem worse, and should be rejected.

The Kolkata Libertarian points out that India is confused about GM corn.