NEW YORK (Reuters) – If child support reform is introduced in Florida, it could be too late for Tarie MacMillan, a 65-year-old who runs a jewelry store near Tampa.
15 years ago, MacMillan was ordered to pay her ex-husband $7,000 a month. Still, she has joined the crusade to lobby state legislatures to change the legal requirement for a spouse to provide financial support before or after a marriage separation or divorce.
Some states have already restricted sentencing, particularly for marriages less than 20 years old. However, most states, such as Florida, are still in the works or are constantly evolving.
“I thought I was my own island of misery to go through, but once I got into it, I was very impressed. “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” she said.
Alimony, also known as spousal support or spousal maintenance, is an ongoing payment from the higher earning spouse to the lower earning spouse. It has changed and shifted over the 40 years since the Supreme Court ruled that it applied equally to both genders.
Yet it still has a strong focus on men paying women. According to the 2010 census, only three percent of the roughly 400,000 child support recipients are male, up half a percent from 2000. The recipients claimed $9.2 million in payments on their tax returns in 2013.
Unlike child support, which is common when a divorced couple has children, child support payments have always been very rare, rising from about 25 percent of cases in the 1960s to about 10 percent today, said Judith McMullen, a law professor at the Marquette University. In a study of Wisconsin cases, she found it was just 8.6 percent.
As women pay child support more often, they are committed to change.
“It’s unfair for men to pay it and unfair for women to pay it. But women are far more outraged by this,” said Ken Neumann, founder of the Academy of Professional Family Mediators.
A check to the death
Tanya Williams, who has been sending her ex-husband checks for 13 years, is among those who don’t understand the concept of “permanent” alimony – when one spouse pays the other indefinitely – and has joined the cause against it.
“There is no other contract where liability continues after the contract ends,” said the 52-year-old dentist, who divorced in Florida but now resides in North Carolina. “You can’t quit your job and say, ‘I still have needs, so you have to keep paying me.’ “
To counteract this problem, states like Massachusetts, Texas, and Kansas limit themselves in most cases to helping lower-income spouses get back on their feet or get further education. The general consensus is that everyone should work, and the only people likely to receive a longer-term award are those who are disabled or retired.
“We’re not a post-gender society,” said Mary Kay Kisthardt, law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. But she said the usual argument against alimony is that anyone can earn something, so there’s no need for it.
In New York, for example, new rules taking effect in January 2016 further restrict alimony based on marriage length. The rules also limit how you can forecast the future earnings of professionals like doctors, said Caroline Knauss-Browne, a partner at Blank, Rome in New York.
NEGOTIATE IT OUT
Child support payments are often negotiated before they end up in court, as 90 to 95 percent of cases are resolved.
“There’s less legal support for it, less social support for it, and it’s not a great negotiation tool,” said McMullen, who envisions child support payments becoming less frequent and only being granted if there is an actual disability.
For the 400,000 already in the system, there are always opportunities to request a change or attempt renegotiation, but the odds are slim. “Essentially you have to wait until they die,” Neumann said.
(Corrects the spelling of Caroline Knauss-Browne in the 15th paragraph)
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