firstly it doesn't matter how much a father earns for a woman and her kids to be in need of welfare does it? this is among the most assinine idiocies i've ever had the unpleasure to read. congratulations yoshie. your obsession also reveals that you are no different than conservatives who can only manage to concern themselves with the deserving poor. nice job.
secondly, the stats are available. readily. are you so lazy that you can't be bothered to look them up yourself? they won't tell you directly if noncustodial parents are doing okay. but that is *your* obsession which is apparently all about your criteria for deterrmining who is worthy and who isn't. you also need to understand the history of welfare reform of which you are apparently fairly ignorant. women have always received CS when on welfare. there has always been CSE. the issue was that people were underreporting in order to get both welfare and under the table cash pymts from noncustodial parents. yes, people used CSE to manipulate welfare policy. that doesn't mean that the decades long struggle for better CSE for non welfare eligible women wasn't worth it and should be abandoned.
your answer is collective resonsibility is the real solution. we don't disagree. but on the way there don't knock down what little we have. CSE is something we need to continue to foster. it's do=able. it has political support. but all you care about are the deserving poor and ripping out the CSE structure we're starting to build for the working poor and median income women is i guess a okay with you and carrol.
good work. the two big feminists on this list don't give a crap about women or they are so ignorant of the topic that they blabber on without one clue typing inanities about how suporting CSE is contradictory to the goal of strengthening the social safety net.
thirdly, carrol seems to think my proposal is impractical. HA HA HA. carrol, about two thirds of welfare eligible women have for at least two decades now rec'd CS based on a similar system. when you're poor enough for welfare or legal aid and get a divorce, they set it up so you have to pay directly to social services. what's wrong with ALL noncustodial parents having to do it that way? better yet, work for just what i suggested: direct transfer right out of wages. cut the red tape.
clearly neither of you know a thing about any of this.
fourthly, you tell me offlist that i am not politically serious and that my problem is that i'm not working on it in terms of national level social movement issues. screw that. this is not how social movements work to begin with. you obsess about it being large scale b/c you lack historical perspective. if you'd bother youself to study the history of social movements you'd know this. we need to continually work at the small scale so that when things start to blow our way we are in place, organized and ready to push it further. not to mention helping moving it in more progressive directions as we go along.
the push for child support enforcement and uniform CS was for women who were not poor/lowincome but who were being punished by the courts b/c people somehow felt that they didn't deserve child support awards or enforcement of them if they weren't in poverty. weeeooo just like you yoshie. somehow, welfare eligible women can't possibly have ex's who makes 32k a year. why heck, apparently we can't be among the working poor.
your attitude is the very reason why working poor and moderate income women have gotten little help and why we had to fight hard for CSE. but you want to rip it out from everyone based on news articles cooked up by conservative think tanks. good work
this is why it is wrong to knock CSE, CSE and the push for a judicial system that recognizes children's basic right to their noncustodial parent's support is imperative. those children do not deserve to grow up with 5k or even 10k less per year if their parents are capable of paying that money.
when you say the state should pay, do you really think people in this country want to pay for the child support that goes unpaid to women who are making, say, 30k? 15k? 70k? because that's what you are advocating. you're advocating that we just forget about fathers contributing. let's just keep making women responsible for sharing their incomes with their kids because they have no choice, they live with their kids the great majority of the time, so must pay for them. but let the fathers go because we'd rather make the state pay? are you nuts? who is going to support the raising of taxes to pay for the children of a woman who makes 20k when her ex is making 20 or 30 or 50k? a lot more people will support CSE and perhaps even globalizing the direct transfer of CS pymt option i suggested than will ever ever support any efforts to subsideize of single parent working poor and moderate income families.
we need to fight for CSE. even if we had the old system back, plenty of women would be struggling away on 15k or even 30k. they would make too much for help but not enought to hire lawyers to enforce support. you need to keep CSE in place for the working poor who wouldn't be eligible for benefits from the state anyway. criticizing it is wrong because it feeds into the crap pumped out by conservative think tanks who are spinning the same damn line that you are.
that you pick up on media reports spun out of that shite is astounding to me. what crap.
>I'm all for alternative institutions, but I don't think they can meet the
>needs of poor women and children in Ohio (especially if recession comes).
>Why not make the state pay? They got money!
firstly, i did say that we should make the state pay. i specifically said that in the part you conveniently cut out. secondly, building alternative social institutions is imperative for it can teach us what the state cannot: that *we* are the state. that all power is to the people. not the state. it also teaches us how to work together, how to achieve something collectively and how to feel a sense of efficacy in the struggle.
alternative inst. also teach us how to get beyond the despair and apathy that always accompanies such difficult struggles. (as you seem to indicate, you despair over why no one shows up. gee, i wonder why. ignorance is bliss eh? how you can bitch about that is truly a puzzle to me and you have one fucking helluva nerve to bleat about people being apathatic.) and, more importantly, as i said on the working class civil society thread, these alternative social institutions provide the infrastructure and networks upon which to build a wider struggle when historical circumstances help push us further toward the goal of socalism. things start clicking. connections are made. i saw it happen. i saw the women's quilting group see the connections between what they did and the need for fighting a nuke dump siting. ditto all the other groups i mentioned in that post last week. expecting the "state" to do it for us, as you say, means that you don't have an understanding that it's not the state but that the state is you and and everyone. the state isn't paying yoshie, you, lehman, your parents and ohio residents are paying. that's the state.
and it's another reason why we need grassroots organizing around alternative social practices and isntitutions---to make that hit home. *we* create them -- not some abstract Other called the State which we "Make" pay. what shite. such an approach to thinking about the state is precisely what will doom socialism.
kelley
Women above poverty level:
64% were awarded support 9% weren't supposed to receive support
of those women above poverty who were supposed to receive CS 77% rec'd payments --about half rec'd full paymnt
23% did not receive payment
Women below poverty level 43% were supposed to receive payment 6% were not supposed to receive payment
Of those who were supposed to receive payment 68% rec'd payments --about 1/2 full pymnt --the rest rec'd avg of partial pymt 80% of award 32% didn't receive payments
(tidbit, women who rec'd child support made an avg of 21,829; men who rec'd cs made an avg of 30,030.)