This Is Why People Have A Difficult Time With Child Support
The Bradley Amendment is unfair and destructive.
The Bradley Amendment was named after its sponsor, Democratic Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, and was passed as part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986. The Bradley Amendment prohibits the retroactive modification of child support arrearages by the state or any other state.
No matter the circumstances, a child-support debt cannot be retroactively reduced or forgiven even if the debtor is unemployed. The same applies if the person is hospitalized, in prison, sent to war, proved not to be the father, never allowed to see his children, or loses his job, or suffers a pay cut.
Under the terms of the Bradley Amendment, someone who experiences income loss must apply immediately to the court system to have the size of their payments adjusted. If they don't, they will be liable for the payments they could not make and will accrue interest. Furthermore, under the Bradley Amendment terms, they cannot erase it once this debt is incurred. This incredibly rigid law imposes a punishment that makes it impossible for most people to get out from under a Bradley debt.
READ: Do You Have To Pay Child Support? No, You Don't!
There are endless stories of people who are now crushed by a debt they will never be able to pay.
Bobby Sherrill, a divorced father of two from Parkton, N.C., worked for Lockheed in Kuwait before being captured and held hostage by forces in Iraq for nearly five harrowing months. Due to the provisions in the Bradley Amendment, he was arrested the night he returned from the Persian Gulf War for failing to pay $1,425 in child support while he was a captive.
In 1980, Clarence Brandley, a Texas high school janitor, was wrongly accused of murder. He spent nearly ten years in prison, most of it on death row, until his exoneration in January 1990. In 1991, Brandley sued the state for wrongful imprisonment. The state responded with a bill for nearly $50,000 in child support that Brandley didn't pay while in prison, thanks to the Bradley Amendment.
Geoffrey Fisher had a brief relationship with a woman and believed he was the father of her child. He began paying child support but fell behind over time. Finally, the Department of Health and Human Services ordered him to pay child support. Later, the three-year-old girl they had together was placed in foster care. When Fisher pushed for custody, the state ordered a paternity test, which proved he wasn't the father. At that point, one branch of the human services department told him he could no longer see the girl because he wasn't the father. A judge decided he no longer had to pay child support. However, the attorney general's office claimed that Fisher still owed $11,450, approximately three year's worth of back support payments from the child's birth until the paternity test. State officials stated that Fisher failed to file a court motion to relieve himself of financial responsibility to the child. Fisher was thus regarded as the legal father and responsible for child support.
By federal law, none of these men can have their child support arrears modified or eliminated for the time they couldn't have made the payments. The Bradley Amendment says that once a child-support obligation has been established, it cannot be retroactively reduced or forgiven by a judge.
A few states have passed a recent law to end child support if DNA proves a man is not the father, but that doesn't eliminate the Bradley debt accrued before DNA results came in. There is no excuse for Congress and state legislatures allowing these kinds of injustices to continue.
PODCAST: The Child Support Hustle with Kenya N. Rahmaan
I briefly spoke about this topic on my podcast with Kenya Rahmaan. On her site, The Child Support Hustle, she dives deeper into the subject and has solutions to address this issue:
Repealing this amendment will put an end to parents entering the child support system in deep debt. In turn, parents face severe punishment associated with owing child support debt. For instance, license suspensions and passport revocation would, in large part, start increasing job opportunities both in America and overseas. Secondly, credit scores, drastically lowered due to child support arrears, which are a hindrance for parents from obtaining basic living needs such as housing, employment, and transportation, would be restored. Erasing all state-owed debt accumulated because of the Bradley Amendment will ensure that parents have money that is better spent on their children.
Clayton Craddock is a father, independent thinker, and the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
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This Is Why People Have A Difficult Time...
This only addresses one aspect of why people have a hard time with child support but let's take this one for the moment. I can understand the underlying thought process of it. If I incur a debt to you prior to 2015, what happens after 2015 should not get me off the hook. Suppose you lend me $300,000 to buy a house and later I become paralyzed and can't work. Should you have to just let me keep the house without receiving any repayment from me? I understand the underlying principle. The fact that a judge cannot exercise any judgement and has no leeway to make any adjustment, however, is a major problem. In the example of proof that a man was not the father, for example, the original debt was incurred based on false information and any amount unpaid should be wiped out. This may not seem kind to the mother, but if it was not his child then it was unjust from the start. (Insert argument saying she should repay what she actually received, along with legitimate counter arguments.) Likewise, a man who was kidnapped ought not to be expected to pay what he was unable to earn due to the kidnapping. Again, there is no justice in that. Had the couple been together at the time of the kidnapping, there might have been hardship but no issue. (If it is proved that he staged the kidnapping in order to avoid paying support, he'd reasonably be expected to pay. It's pretty hard to imagine that being the case, however.)
So, the devil is (again) in the details. The underlying principle regarding debt incurred is not unreasonable. The wording of the bill is.
The greater issue with child support stems from the presumption that when parents split, their physical custody and financial responsibilities are not divided 50/50 and the basic argument for that is "the child's best interest," which would mean having an equal amount of time with each parent in order to CONTINUE to have the best possible relationship with BOTH parents. If the custody and responsibility were divided 50/50, child support (as we know it) would be eliminated. This assumes that there is no obvious risk to the child, such as an abusive parent and it can allow for some adjustment and fine tuning so the child continues to benefit to the fullest extent possible.
Forget what is unfair and destructive for the parents. In fact, forget the parents. This would be fair and constructive for the child who has already suffered from a fractured home.
'Child support, like 'income tax', is purely state extortion, while the attendant penalties for declining to comply are nothing but state terrorism. The only defensible course of action regarding either one is to refuse, openly and persistently, to be thus extorted and terrorized. Any measure short of this is just a lot of hot air and will never yield any result.