Government Vs. Child Support

I read this article talking about child support awhile ago and decided not to post about it, but I have thought about it quite a bit this week and so. The article notes that:

The collection of child support from absent fathers is failing to help many of the poorest families, in part because the government uses fathers’ payments largely to recoup welfare costs rather than passing on the money to mothers and children.

Close to half the states pass along none of collected child support to families on welfare, while most others pay only $50 a month to a custodial parent, usually the mother, even though the father may be paying hundreds of dollars each month.

I can see why some of the fathers don’t want to pay child support if none of the money they pay actually goes to the child. The system causes problems for the father, mother, child, and society:

Young fathers with little education or job prospects find themselves in arrears and facing jail time or the loss of their driver’s licenses as a result, making it all the harder to start earning and paying, said David J. Pate Jr., an assistant professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

…

Studies of the Wisconsin experiment showed that when support payments were fully passed along to mothers, more fathers came forward and paid more of the support they owed, said Maria Cancian, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As families receive more support money, they are less apt to require public assistance, she and other experts say, making up for any short-term loss of revenues. And fathers are more likely to establish lasting patterns of payment and connection with their children, Ms. Cancian said.

Everyone now seems to think more money should actually should go to the children:

Reflecting a growing, bipartisan sense that diverting child support money to government coffers is counterproductive, Congress, in the Deficit Reduction Act passed in early 2006, took a modest step toward change. Beginning in 2009, states will be permitted to pass along up to $100 for one child and $200 for two or more children, with the state and federal governments giving up a share of welfare repayments they have received in the past.

The Bush administration has set a goal of increasing the share of collections distributed to families and reducing the amount retained by the government. But the drive to reduce the budget deficit has gotten in the way. As part of last-minute budget crunching, the Republican-controlled Congress in that same act reduced by 20 percent the child-support enforcement money it gives to the states, starting this fall. Many states say the effort to force them to pay more of the enforcement costs will impede collections and prevent them from passing more money on to needy families.

“There was a real groundswell toward the idea of giving more of the money, or even all of it, to the families,” said Vicki Turetsky, an expert on child support at the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington. But that momentum has been stopped short, she said, by the financing change.

Yes, let’s balance the budget on the backs of poor children.

Let’s Torture

Gee, I wonder why the CIA destroyed tapes of their interrogation of when:

The tapes were destroyed at a time of national debate over interrogation practices involving suspected terrorists. Not long after, Congress passed legislation that prohibits torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of all U.S. detainees, including those in CIA custody.

Also at that time, the Senate committee was trying to determine if CIA interrogators were complying with interrogation guidelines. The CIA refused twice in 2005 to provide the committee with its general counsel’s report on the tapes, according to the current chairman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

even though pretty much everyone told them not to destroy tapes? Is this the reason:

Hayden told agency employees Thursday that the recordings were destroyed out of fear the tapes would leak and reveal the identities of interrogators.

or is it more likely this:

Current and former intelligence officials say the videotapes showed severe interrogation techniques used on two Qaeda operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were among the first three terror suspects to be detained and interrogated by the C.I.A. in secret prisons after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Hmm, since even I can alter tapes to disguise someone’s identity (ok, maybe not me but it’s not difficult), maybe I’ll go with the latter. After all, they went against most of the power structures, lied to Congress and judges and jeopardized trials of terror members, which probably will get some in trouble. This makes sense if the alternative is people going to jail for a long time for torture. I didn’t even have to read Larry Johnson or Kevin Drum to figure it out, although they do a better job of it.

There is also one nice piece here:

That assertion was repeated on Thursday by General Hayden. His statement said that to force a recalcitrant Mr. Zubaydah to give up information, the C.I.A. devised “specific, appropriate interrogation procedures” which, he added, were “lawful, safe and effective.” He said all of the techniques used by the C.I.A. had been reviewed and approved before their use by the Justice Department and other executive branch agencies.

But other government officials have long disputed some aspects of the C.I.A.’s version of events. These officials said Mr. Zubaydah, who had been taken to a secret location in Thailand, cooperated with interviewers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. who used a nonconfrontational approach, until C.I.A. interrogators took over the questioning.

…

Government officials said that during Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation sessions, his C.I.A. questioners used a number of tactics: noise, stress positions, freezing temperatures, isolation and waterboarding, in which a subject is made to believe he is being drowned. Mr. Zubaydah is the first person known to be subjected to waterboarding by the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks.

What kind of person was Zudaydah (via the KD link above)?

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries “in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3″ — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, then the FBI’s top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes.

so why was he tortured?

“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

See this is how torture works in the real world–people are tortured because someone ‘knows’ they know something, people are tortured by people covering themselves, people are tortured because someone tells them to and they don’t want to push it, people are tortured to see if it works, and the answers they get not only don’t help, they send you in the wrong direction.