A Way to Walk a Mile in a Noncustodial Parent's Moccasins
We WON Court of Appeals No. 58250-0!! Reported at 142 Wash. App. 291, 174 P. 3d 1198. Further details at the bottom of Writ of Prohibition Against Contempt Prosecution web page!
A tribute to a hero, my father. He was always my ally.
Some Practical Advice for Support Contemnors in the State of Washington.
Please check out the litigation listed toward the bottom of the web page Knight v. State Writ of Prohibition Against Contempt Prosecution where I was forced to file a Motion to Modify Commissioner's Decision citing Antipeonage Act because the State of Washington imposed a court order that is a direct violation of the Antipeonage Act, requiring me to maintain at least 30 hours of work per week or make 3 job contacts. Therefore, I display my Brief of Appellant because this is an issue of extreme public importance for which the public should be aware.
My latest Reply Brief of Appellant provides the answers to California's Moss v. Superior Court, the Ninth Circuit's Ballek, and Hawaii's new Child Support Enforcement Agency v. Doe, No. 24457, (Hawaii, December 27, 2005) 109 Hawaii 240, 125 P. 3d. 461, each an obscenity against the Rule of Law.
Petition for Writ of Certiorari to the United States Supreme Court is considered filed as of the date I mailed it, August 8, 2007, within 90 days of June 6, 2007. It is docketed as No. 07-184.
One analogy to illustrate the absurdity of the proposition that choice of employer avoids finding of involuntary servitude is with Washington's Death Penalty statute, RCW 10.95.180(1) grants the condemned a choice: lethal injection or hanging. No one seriously argues that merely because the condemned has a choice in his demise, there is no death penalty. However, California's Moss v. Superior Court, the Ninth Circuit's Ballek, and Hawaii's Doe uses this precise logic: if the peon has a choice of employer, there is no involuntary servitude!
Patently absurd, of course!
For their sponsorship of Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox Sucker's www.paykids.com his Paykids Foundation, boycott the listed sponsors, including Art Van Furniture, Meijer Stores, Michigan State Medical Society (warning, the MSMS website does not like to let you out when you click the back button), SBC Communications, and Michigan Health and Hospital Association and tell them why you are boycotting them! Go to the Michigan Enemies of Freedom Page and read letters by Stan Rains and Terry Lear for more information as to why, and read Domino's Pizza, Inc.'s letter to me in response to my concerns about PayKid's use of Domino's Pizza gift certificates as a prize in their loathsome Billboard contest, which was CANCELLED!!
Not to be outdone, we are announcing our own billboard contest!
C Level Enterprises is to be commended for their courage, unlike Borders, in distributing father Kevin Thompson's book, "Exposing the Corruption in the Massachusetts Family Courts" in the face of Judge Mary McCauley Manzi's court order prohibiting its distribution. More on this at the Massachusetts Enemies of Freedom webpage. FathersUnite.org has a link to this page.
Restraining order overturned on appeal. Book is now available at Lulu.
The women themselves admit it's slavery: Click here for their Yahoo! Group Ex Husband Now My Slave.
I should have done this a long time ago. At least I am doing it right now. There is an EASY way to at least pretend to walk a mile in our moccasins. If you do this, you will have a better understanding of what we noncustodial parents are going through and a better understanding of how we feel about things. There is a saying that one can never judge a man unless he has walked a mile in his moccasins.
The first thing you can do is go to the Web Site for the State of Washington's appellate courts:
When you get there, you can click on the link to Court Forms, which is
This page has been changed. Now you should be able to access the form you want here.
All sorts of standardized forms for legal pleadings in the state courts of Washington are listed here. Notice how most of them are for anti-harassment orders and for family law. There are now eight forms under the category Child Support. First, you can click "Child Support Worksheets" it downloads to you a big pdf form of 3.48 megabytes:
www.courts.wa.gov/forms/documents/CSWorksheet.pdf
A bit awesome for those of you with dial-up modems. As in, please be patient. I strongly suggest that you upgrade to Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 or Adobe Acrobat 7.0 in either Professional or Standard format. The Reader is free and you can find it at www.adobe.com. I have found that Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0 sometimes runs the processor at 100% during a big pdf form download over a dial up modem. Not a problem if you have it properly cooled, but well, it seems quite unnecessary during the download.
Save each pdf form you download from the state's websites to your hard drive if you have less than a T1 broadband connection. Yes, I would say Comcast cable and DSL broadband are pretty fast, but they're not T1. You will want to print out several copies.
The Economic Table is set forth in RCW 26.19.020. It works a lot like the Tax Table included in your IRS Booklet (big 1.31 megabyte download in .pdf) you got along with with your income tax 1040 forms.
I will hereby cut through the gobbledygook and give the short version of the instructions:
First, you figure your after tax income. That is what you have left in your paycheck after the tax withholding. You then figure your spouse's after tax income.
Say you take home $2,000 and your spouse takes home $1,000 each month. That is $3,000 per month in combined take home income. How many kids? Are they all under 12? Lets say you have three children and they are all under 12 years old. You go to the Support Schedule and look for the combined income of $3,000. According to it, your Basic Child Support Obligation is, TA-TA!, $364 per month per child!
That's not so bad. Well, wait a minute! There's three children, that is $364 X 3 = $1,092 per month in total child support obligation. Hey, if they are over 12 years old, it is $449 per child per month, or $1,347 per month in total Basic Child Support Obligation.
But, you might say, to console yourself, this is based on a combined income of $3,000 per month, surely you don't have to pay ALL of that!
Well, that is true enough. Your $2,000 per month is about 2/3 of the total take home pay upon which the Basic Child Support Obligation is calculated, you get 2/3 of that obligation as your responsibility.
Therefore, if you lose custody of all three children, your support order, without deviation up or down, will be 2/3 of $1,092 per month which is $686 per month, 2/3 of $1,347 per month which is $898 per month if they are over 12.
The Division of Child Support web page now has a Child Support Calculator link. You should get the same results as doing it the way herein above.
Now as the spouse gets custody of the children, you don't, does that mean she or he has to account for how she spends all of your money for the benefit of the children? To God, maybe, if he or she believes in Him. Maybe the angels at the Pearly Gates will quiz him or her on that. But, incredible as this may seem, the law and the courts will not hold him or her to such account. Many a noncustodial has complained about his or her money being misspent, but hey, just because the noncustodial parent is PAYING for the rearing of his or her child, the LOSS OF CUSTODY MEANS HE HAS NO SAY IN THE REARING OF HIS CHILD!!! Even when the custodial parent is hauled off to the Department of Corrections for spending the child support money on illegal drugs, the noncustodial parent often does not get custody as the remaining fit parent.
That is why it is only CALLED child support. Without the accounting, we cannot say whether it IS child support.
Considering that the purpose of this exercise is to walk a mile in our moccasins, it is "cheating" if you presume you can win a deviation downward.
Now that you have calculated what your support order would be if you lost custody of all of your children in a divorce, would you like to calculate your federal income tax? First the FICA tax is 7.65% of the first $97,500 for 2007 and the first $102,000 for 2008 you earn in gross wages and 1.45% on all your earnings above these maximum amounts each year. Of course, if you are earning that much, again, you are defeating the purpose of this exercise, which is to walk a mile in our moccasins. Noncustodial parents with that level of income do not have their licenses suspended and are not thrown in jail.
Unless they LOSE that income, which, incidentally, CAN HAPPEN AND DOES HAPPEN!
That FICA tax is assessed on your entire gross income regardless of what you spend the money on, including child support.
Ahh, but with income taxes you can take all sorts of deductions from your taxable income! Right?
Well, not if you are the noncustodial parent. We all know what happens in divorce:
The spouse gets the gold mine you get the shaft. After all, if the spouse is going to have the children, he or she needs the house! Please see RCW 26.09.080. There goes the mortgage interest deduction!
Personal exemptions for the children? Goes to the custodial parent unless he or she signs a piece of paper granting you, the noncustodial parent, those exemptions. Even if the STATE court ordered her or him to sign such a FEDERAL document, that person can string you along with false promises and hints (Oh, don't worry, I'll get that to you). If on April 14 you are told: "No I'm not giving you that, I took the personal exemptions and I've already filed my tax return!" there is as much you can do about that as you can about the clouds dropping rain! On April 16, the state court will most likely dismiss any motion for contempt because of futility. On April 16, the custodial parent CANNOT assign the personal exemptions over to the noncustodial parent for the previous year in time for a timely filing of the income tax return.
Please see 26 U.S.C. §152(e) for further details.
So no personal exemptions for the children. You only get the personal exemption for yourself.
"But I'm paying 2/3 of the Child Support Obligation!" You might scream.
So.
That hasn't mattered since President Reagan signed something called a Deficit Reduction Act back in 1984. And no, it did not reduce the deficit.
Yeah, I admired him too. Then I found out about this. As Governor he signed the bill creating "no-fault" divorce in California.
If you are the noncustodial parent, all of the politicians you supported because of your political preferences, WHATEVER your political preferences, will seriously disappoint you, when you find out their participation is passing the odious legislation and establishing the odious apparatus detailed on the Enemies Page and the State Enemies of Freedom pages listed thereon.
So you go ahead and prepare your 1040 Form. You might as well use the simpler 1040A Form or even the 1040EZ Form. Even though you are paying a shitload of money in child support, you cannot claim them as dependents! I personally recommend the 1040A or the regular 1040 anyway, you will be using the slash mark or "N/A" a lot on the line items that just do not apply to you.
You just list your gross income. That is all of the money you earned and cost your employer in wages, before all of the deductions for FICA tax, income tax, and child support. You take the personal exemption for yourself. That is ONE personal exemption, $3,200 in 2005. You take the Standard Deduction, $5,000 in 2005.
YOU DON'T DEDUCT ANY AMOUNT FROM YOUR TAXABLE INCOME FOR CHILD SUPPORT PAID!!
What do you think this is? Alimony? 26 U.S.C. §71 and 26 U.S.C. §215 lay it all out. 26 U.S.C. §71(c) specifically excludes child support from the alimony deduction.
What? You thought the Constitution was the Supreme Law of the Land? Where'd you get that idea?
Then you go to the tax table and calculate your tax.
Now to complete this exercise in pretending to walk a mile in our moccasins, you do one final mathematical calculation:
Gross Income - FICA tax - Income Tax - (12 X Child Support Obligation) = What the federal and Washington state governments deem, by legislation, to be reasonable for you to live on when you are the noncustodial parent!
Next time you want to criticize "deadbeat dads" please perform this exercise.
What do the judges think of this? I will let you read In re Marriage of Glass, (1992) 67 Wash. App. 378, 387, 835 P.2d 1054 and let you draw your own conclusions.
If the back button does not take you there, click Home to go to the Index page of this Antipeonage Act Website, click Enemies for the main Enemies page, and click Letters for the Letters page. Or you can use the Antipeonage Act Site Map.