Family Courts are Failing Our Children!
The Institute for American Values, a conservative group with a mission to “study and strengthen civil society,” added up the public’s cost of supporting divorcing and unmarried households. Using figures from 2008, it looked at the justice system’s cost of dissolving a typical marriage, and the average amount of a custodial parent’s reliance on government programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, Head Start, housing assistance and cash payments. Over the course of the previous decade, the institute concluded, taxpayers shelled out more than $1 trillion.
The institute found the biggest annual bite was the $19.3 billion that went to operate our justice system. What is happening in family court to rack up this kind of a bill? Well, first, understand that since the mid-1970s about half of all marriages fail. At any given moment, there are millions of Americans in the court system fighting their partner for divorce, custody or a change in a previous order. Read more on this story here.
