Tag Archives: Government

Commentary

How divorce courts put men in debtor’s prisons

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Story from the National Post.

Excerpt:

Jeff Dolan spent Father’s Day in jail, locked away for failure to pay child support. Deadbeat dads don’t garner a lot of sympathy. But you don’t need to study Jeff’s case for long before you realize that he’s anything but a deadbeat. Instead, he’s a man hopelessly ensnared in a crushing bureaucratic machine: He’s in jail because he couldn’t pay child support, but he couldn’t pay child support because he was unemployed … and he was unemployed because the court took his driver’s license for failure to pay child support … after he went bankrupt paying his court costs.

[…]Courts, in their earnest efforts to do right by families, are destroying them, instead. Men, who want only the chance to be good fathers, are crushed under the weight of gender-biased default rulings and the inertia of unfeeling bureaucracies. Whether in far-off Minnesota or, as Post columnist Barbara Kay has shown time and again, right here in Canada, men fighting custody battles are outgunned from the start. Jeff’s story, of being forced into bankruptcy by family court proceedings and then being jailed by those same courts for not being able to pay their court-mandated payments, is no surprise to any number of Canadian dads.

Bill Levy, a Canadian with bitter personal experience in such matters said it best: “Canada has reopened debtor prisons, only for parents. Only alienated parents go to jail for poverty. No Mastercard or mortgage debtors. The Constitution does not permit this, we can’t be forced into servitude. And yet no one will stand up in court and make these arguments. Men, and some women, too, can’t fight back against the court’s preference for expediency.” That mirrors what Jeff’s brother Jon told me in a phone interview: “Jeff isn’t in jail because he’s an abuser or a bad father. He’s in jail because he’s poor in a bad economy where there are no jobs.”

About 45% of first marriages end in divorce, with women initiating about 70% of divorces and getting full custody about 90% of the time. False accusations are regularly used by the person who initiates the divorce in order to get restraining orders and de facto custody of the children, and the child support payments that go with them. It is a massive transfer of wealth from men to women at gunpoint, and a massive loss of liberty for men.

People keep expecting men to step up and take on the role of husband and father, but when the chips are down, 77% of young unmarried women voted for Barack Obama and his policies of destroying the economy. A job is a requirement for men to marry and to take on the role of husband and father. Not only are the schools and universities biased against men, but the industries where men dominate have also been hit hardest by the recession.

We need to spend less time on fashionable causes like environmentalism, gun control, pacifism, animal rights and universal health care, and more time on economics. It’s men who have the most to lose emotionally and financially from a divorce. Not only that, but women commit domestic violence against men at rates equal to men, but the laws (e.g. – VAWA) don’t recognize the truth. The vast majority of the social programs are for women only.

A good start would be to read this summary of the divorce courts by Stephen Baskerville, and also listen to the Dr. Morse lecture on marriage. Either we are going to encourage men to marry and praise them for marrying or we are going to discourage them and then blame them for not marrying. Men respond to incentives. As long as society as a whole chooses to remain ignorant of the facts and chooses to continue to blame men, men won’t marry.

News

How public sector unions cause tax rates to increase

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Let’s take a look at the UK economy after over a decade of rule by the socialist Labor party.

Here’s an article from the UK Telegraph about the pensions of unionized public sector workers.

Excerpt:

It is estimated that, on average, private sector workers would need to put 37pc of their salary into their pension to match the retirement income paid to a public sector worker on a similar wage, if you believe a report by accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Even public sector workers on modest final salary schemes might be surprised to learn how much they would need to save if they were in the private sector.

To get the average civil service pension of £5,928 a year you would need a pension pot of £189,151. The average NHS pension of £6,931 is equivalent to a pension pot of £221,155 and the average teachers’ pension of £9,358 is equivalent to a pot of £298,596, according to Hargreaves Lansdown, the financial adviser.

[…]The figures showed that average total pay, including bonuses, in the private sector in February was £451 a week. Excluding bonuses it was £418 a week. In the public sector the corresponding figures were £462 a week and £459 a week. Public sector pay, on average, is also rising at twice the rate of private sector wages.

Government workers have pensions and salaries that are higher than in the private sector, and those costs have to be paid by private sector workers who actually generate revenue and pay taxes. Public sector employees don’t actually have to do any work for the most part, (excluding things like military, etc.). People only work when they have customers to please, who can choose them or choose a competitor. Government has no competitors, and so they really don’t need to work hard to please a customer.

Another UK Telegraph article explains who pays for public sector union pensions.

Excerpt:

By 2015, almost £10 billion of public money will be spent every year supporting the retirement of millions of public sector employees – up from £4 billion this year, the independent body said.

[…]In 2010-11, the amount spent by the taxpayer on public sector pensions will be £4 billion, rising to £5.5 billion the following year, the report said.

The cost will then rise, on average, by 20 per cent each year until the commitment reaches £9.4 billion in 2014-15. This equates to almost £400 for each of Britain’s 26 million households. The sharp increase, according to the Treasury, is a result of Britain’s ageing population.

[…]There are more than two million public sector workers receiving pensions from “unfunded” schemes.

The schemes are heavily supported by the taxpayer, with employees generally contributing less than their counterparts in the private sector.

And another UK Telegraph article explains how taxes on the productive private sector will have to rise to pay for the pensions.

Here’s one of several proposed tax increases:

We already know that [the capital gains tax] is due to increase, said Grant Thornton, although we don’t know what new rate or rates will be. “We do know that it will be more in line with income tax, so it could go up to 40pc, but the option of taxing up to the highest rate of 50pc has not been ruled out,” the firm said, adding that the measure was “likely to go down like a lead balloon” with investors with share portfolios and anyone with a second home.

Any raise to the capital gains tax is a direct assault on capital investment, and will damage the economy more than raising consumption taxes. The worst thing that you can do in a recession is to punish investors and private businesses. You end up losing jobs, which decreases your tax revenue even more.

And they are going to raise consumption taxes:

The Chancellor may face an “irresistible temptation” to increase the rate of VAT to 20pc now that he has had the opportunity to review the country’s books, said Grant Thornton. The standard rate of 17.5pc is relatively low relative to other EU countries and many economists predict a rise to 20pc, which would cost someone on average earnings about £150 a year.

That one will hit the poor as well as the rich.

And one last UK Telegraph article to explain how the recession has hurt men most.

Excerpt:

Malcolm Hurlston, chairman of the [Consumer Credit Counselling Service], said: “Men have been hard hit by the recession and are emerging as the new underclass. Debt alone is no longer the problem. It is loss of income and other rising costs.

“This deterioration in the economic circumstances for men, still the main breadwinner in most homes, has serious implications for many households.”

The charity said it had seen the number of men contacting it for help soar from 146,00 in 2007 to 221,000 last year, a 51pc jump.

It added that the number of women seeking help had increased by only half this amount over the period, although women were still more likely to contact it than men, accounting for 52pc of its caseload.

Men who contacted the charity during 2009 owed an average of £26,957, down from nearly £30,000 in 2008, but still significantly higher than the £21,915 that women typically owed.

The main reason men gave for getting into debt was a fall in their income, with this cited by 26pc, while 23pc said they had become unemployed or been made redundant. A further 20pc of men blamed their situation on overcommitting themselves on credit.

When one group of people vote themselves higher benefits without any additional productivity, some other group is going to be taxed to pay for it. And higher taxes lower incomes and produce unemployment. The UK is replacing working men with big government dependency.

Commentary

Scott Klusendorf confronts a “pro-life” nun who voted for Obama

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Pro-life debater Scott Klusendorf wrote this article on the Pro Life Training web site.

Excerpt:

Nun: If only our students were completely pro-life on all issues.  I am consistently for life, and that’s why I’m voting for Senator Obama.

Me: Sister?

Nun: That’s right, I’m for Obama.  He’s the real pro-life candidate.  Most people focus too much on abortion.  I’m pro-life and care about all life.  So does Obama.

Me: What do you mean people focus too much on abortion?1

Nun: I mean Bush with the war in Iraq has killed so many people there is no way I could vote for someone like Senator McCain, who will do the same thing.  How can any person who cares about life vote for such a man?

Me: Are you suggesting the President unjustly killed innocent people?  If so, how?

Nun: Yes I am!  Think of all those innocent women and children killed in Iraq—over a million of them since we invaded the place six years ago.

Me: Did you say over a million?  How did you come up with that number?

Nun: I heard it someplace.  Besides, war is a pro-life issue like abortion and right now it’s even worse than abortion.

Me: To be worse than abortion, how bad would an unjust war have to be?

Nun: Abortion, war, poverty—they are all bad.

I’m sure you all recognize the tendency of some people to refuse to make judgments like “greater than” and “less than” when they are debating – because to put numbers to different things and admit that one thing is much worse than another (or more likely) would undermine their view.

The fact of the matter is that 30,000 innocent civilians TOTAL being killed in the process of liberating an entire country and deposing a dangerous tyrant, is NOT the same as 1.2 million unborn babies being killed PER YEAR because their parents refuse to be inconvenienced by the consequences of their own  hedonistic behavior.

And not only are the numbers different but the justification for the taking of a life is different in each case, too. Just wars are fought because the loss of civilian lives is not as bad as the failure to restrain a more dangerous threat to peaceful democratic nations. For example, the deaths of innocent civilians in the fire-bombing of Dresden in order to defeat the tyrant Hitler. But in the case of abortion, the justification is just that the selfish pursuit of pleasure of the parents justifies the killing of an innocent unborn child.

I have always been concerned by naive pro-lifers who think that big government socialism would someone be the answer to the problem of what to do with helpless unborn children. “Social justice” they call it. Well “social justice” won the election in 2008, and now we have taxpayer-funded abortions. Why? Because the people who voted to grow the government didn’t want to be inconvenienced with children. But the unborn children never got to vote – they were just too small to count.