I took a sociology class in college, and the only thing I remember from that class (besides the fact that white upper-middle-class Midwestern kids think education fixes everything) is that the largest growing group of welfare recipients are divorced women. Divorced women with children.
I've seen a couple TV shows lately that have dramatized the plight of poor women with children. Left with few employment-worthy skills, they try to subsist on minimum-wage jobs at places like Walmart, where the corporation stays immensely profitable by fucking their employees (and by being the largest importer of foreign goods in the world... this from a company founded on the promise of "All American Goods" ... but that's another blog).
So they end up either living in their cars, basically homeless, or on welfare because they simply cannot support themselves and their children on a minimum-wage job. Wages simply aren't high enough... and we won't get into the lack of affordable housing caused by the "gentrification" of the cities. Or what to do with those children when you have to go to work, since decent day care costs as much as you earn at a minimum wage job. Or an examination of how Clinton fucked the welfare system in '96 and made it nearly impossible for those who truly are trying to better themselves to actually do so.
I could quote all kinds of statistics here, because I was curious enough about this to do a lot of research, but it amounts to this: women get screwed by divorce. Oh, sure, divorce courts are still biased against fathers when it comes to custody of children. But for every father who wants to take responsibility for his children, and who despairs he cannot spend more time with them, there are three fathers who divorce their children along with the children's mother. Only slightly above a third of women who are awarded child support actually regularly receive the full amount awarded.
So, you're a father, and you love your kids, and you pay child support. Good for you. I have a friend who pays his child support *before* his mortgage payment. I know there are fathers like that out there. But a lot aren't.
It's sad that men don't take responsibility for their children. And it's sad that women don't have the skills to be independent without a male primary wage-earner. And it's sad that, in the end, it's the children, living on the streets, who suffer the most.
