Normally evil Joan Ryan wrote a remarkably sane column today on child support:
With a state budget deficit of $38 billion, it’s time for California to take a baseball bat to this dysfunctional support-payment system. It doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for years. If it continues as is, the report warned, the arrears debt will surpass $30 billion by 2010.
Unfortunately, her prescriptions, all of which have already been shot down by the legislature, merely nibble around the edges of the problem, which has two parts, one state and one federal. The state part is a statutory guideline that sets the amount of child support orders ridiculously high, and the federal part is a law (the Bradley Amendment) that forbids courts from reducing child support arrears in order to correct a mistake in a prior order.
The rest of it – including an amnesty program – is fluff.