I've been doing a lot of child support contempt hearings recently- i.e. "pay your child support or you're going to jail!"

What I'm realizing is that the huge numbers you see these days for child support left unpaid these days by "deadbeat dads" are mostly illusionary. What they consist of is child support that wasn't calculated correctly in the first place.

This morning I was talking to a typical mope in this position. I'm going over the original order with him:

"This says you earned a gross of $5000 per month at the time, making your child support $1250 per month. That right?"

"Naw, I never earned $5000 a month in my life."

"Why the #@%$ did you sign this off saying you did, then?"

"I wanted the divorce over and I figured she would settle down once it was done with."

Four years later, she's asking for him to go to jail because he's not paying $1250 per month support out of a take-home of $1200.

Now, obviously he bears most of the blame for signing off on the $1250 per month support in the first place. My point, though, is that his ex was never actually entitled to that; his correct support amount should have been around $350- which he actually could pay. The $900 per month difference is an illusion that he never earned or should have owed.

That probably makes him stupid. It doesn't make him a deadbeat, and shouldn't be counted as part of the huge backlog of unpaid child support you hear so much about.