A mathetmatical approach to “dead beats”

KXAN.com – Austinite On List Of Top Child Support Evaders

You may have seen this list in your own town with different names, but each with enormous amounts of debt listed in their name and with a bullseye on their head.  These men are wanted deadbeats and should be picked up at any cost.  But really, do you know what the amount that you are looking at really is?

From the article:

The number one offender, John Vines, owes his ex-wife, Dolly, $130,000. She lives here in Austin, and their son needs help with his tuition at Texas State University.

Attorney General Greg Abbott says these criminals continue to make their situations worse month by month.

"When they are initially ordered to pay child support, for John (Vines) and these other people, it’s a couple hundred dollars a month," Abbott said. "[That’s] an amount of money that, if they’re out of jail, if they have a job, they should be able to come up with that amount of money."

 

First off a sidebar:  hopefully these men have actually been "convicted", else this station faces a defamation case.  And a conviction can only be done by a judge.  They may be wanted on suspicion of contempt to pay child support, but unless they actually have a conviction, that is false.

But onto Abbot’s wildly inaccurate claim that these men are ordered to pay "only a couple of hundred dollars a month".  Okay, let’s look at John Vines, who owes 130796 to his wife.  Note: she has said that her son is about to enter college.

Taking that 130,796 and dividing it by 200, we come up to a total of 654.88 months, or approximately 54.57333333333333333 years.  That’s right, if John’s son can wait a little more than 11 years, he can collect social security.  Now some may accuse me of being a little too literal with the DA, but even if you double the amount, $400, it comes to about 28 years.  Now, he could have waited around about ten years to enter college, but I don’t think they mean that.

Now, let’s look at what would happen if we calculated the other way.  John’s son is entering high school, so that approximates 18 years.  Giving the custodial parent and the DA the benefit of the doubt and saying that the debt was accumulating for 18 years, it comes out to approximately $605.53.  The last time I checked, a "couple" meant two, three if you were stretching, not six.  Minimum wage (and again, we’re being real generous with the DA and the CP by assuming that the current federal standard existed all those years) comes out to approximately  $892.67.  Two thirds of a minimum wage job is eaten up by child support, and the costs that child support is intended to pay that could have been covered with the NCP’s own costs (such as heating, utilities, and some food which can be shared) must now be doubled.

But the real world rarely goes all one persons way.  The DA is being fundamentally dishonest with the public.  Child support has several factors that some people may not know about and would sway a public towards some if not total sympathy with the parent that is behind on debt.

• Child support can be figured retroactively, in some states back to the birth date of the child, whether or not a person knew of or should have known of the existence of the child of if the custodial parent blocked the other parent from participating in the child’s life by denying DNA tests.
• Child support can be "imputed", or set upon an amount that the courts think the non custodial parent should make if they think that ncp is "voluntarily underemployed".  This can go on even when the parent in question was dismissed for whistle blowing (as with John Mutari), or the non custodial parent has a terminal disease (William Street, who died on his second day in jail for failure to pay the child support).
• Child support has an interest rate which the states are free to use for as long as the debt remains.
• Child support cannot be reduced or forgiven retroactively by the courts, even when the debt stays where it is because the courts have not acted speedily on the modification in order to avoid future harm to a parent in financial straights.
• Custodial parents can often become "stay at home moms" or "stay at home dads" with no requirement to do anything but sit back and collect the child support.

So the next time you look at one of those debts, think about exactly how it is being calculated.  That "couple of hundred a month" the DA freely talks about seems to occur several times in that month.