When I was judge in family court, I told people virtually the same words as Thom Hartman writes below. I once told Bill Richardson to stop using the label "deadbeat dad" because all but a few dads who were behind in child support were really only dead broke dads because they weren't paid a living wage. I reckoned years ago that it took a $15/hour job before there could be a scrap of discretionary income available for child support. Then, as now, $15/hour jobs in New Mexico are not easy to come by. (The federal government spends millions, maybe billions, of dollars on a child support enforcement apparatus. This agency relies heavily on computers which lets the agency funnel money to giant data collection corporations one of which skimmed a ton of federal grant money meant to help NM's child support enforcement agency create a computer program that never did work. Of course, a good deal of the agency's money also goes to pay lawyers to hound parents who are behind on support. We'd all be better off if the agency used its money to support children directly.) Among other travesties of justice in the US, our policies and laws demonize poor parents, each of whom demonizes the other in turn, for making his/her life so miserable--one by seeing child support as too high; the other seeing it as too little--when the villains are employers who pay inadequate wages. It seems to me that many among us fail to recognize what a livable wage actually looks like, and Hartman is right that for a parent and two children, $24/hour is bare bones. Anne