With a few exceptions, spousal support should not be required as a result of divorce.

"What if the circumstances were that the person from the lower class really could not survive because they have been used to the life they have been leading, and therefore struggle even more after the divorce to live." Here you are falsely supposing that because something has gone on for a particular length of time, it must continue to or an injustice has been committed. That is like saying if someone has been receiving free government checks for 10 years, he is entitled to continue receiving them merely because he might struggle without them. When in reality, he should be thankful for the 10 years and move on. An honest person may even look for ways to repay it. "Yes, maybe they are entitled to 50% of everything, in the marriage" So now you are succumbing to the same faulty logic you condemned at the beginning of the debate-- where judges ordered spousal support "just because" it was the law. Now you can see the motives that would convince courts to abandon what is truly right in principle in exchange for what promotes a desirable outcome. This is their logic: "We don't want anyone to struggle, so make someone else pay even if it is not their responsibility." This is how liberals get away with all sorts of the unfair policies they promote-- taking one man's earnings to give it to one who did not earn it in the interest of doing something "good." Courts should not be do-gooders with other peoples money. "but what if [50%] would not be enough? Enough for what? Enough so the lower-income spouse does not have to face life like a responsible adult and get a job? If the spouse were able to secure more than 50% of the pre-marital total income, then the other (the one supposedly earning more) would be left with less than 50% and would obviously have to face even greater challenges-- since his current employment would take up most of the time needed to earn additional income. But I would not put this type of injustice past any divorce judge. "But how exactly do you know that they did not simply start saying that was the law because of so many cases previously of divorces gone bad and it turned out to be more often than not that in that instance, one person was left off worse than what they started because the other spouse decided to be a total butt-head and not give the other fair share of what they were supposed to have." Here again you are now defending what we both considered absurd at the beginning of this debate: A blanket arbitrary law that says one must pay spousal support, even though in fairness it would need to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. And again, the trick here is deciding what is meant by "fair share" or what on is one is "supposed to have." If you support a slacker roommate for 3 years simply because you like her, and then later you decide you want to move out, should you be forced by a court to pay your roommate her "fair share" of what you voluntarily gave her in the past? Is she "supposed to have" that money or assistance simply because she had received it in the past? The objective and logical way to determine what one "should have" is to say one should have that to which he is rightly entitled. In the U.S., that has typically come to mean that which one has earned, been freely given, or inherited. And again, as I mentioned in my opening argument, there are some cases for spousal support where and argument can be made that the spouse "earned" a cut of his/her spouses future earnings if it can be proved that he/she invested greatly in the earning spouses career or education.