Court Opinion

ID: 9728277
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 14:03:46.971346+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:47.374423
License: Public Domain

DAY, J.
I dissent. I would affirm the court of appeals and uphold the award of $50 per child per month for the four children of the parties. I would hold that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in ordering the defendant to pay this amount. The trial court and this court can take judicial notice of the fact that it costs more than $50 each month to support each of these children. It should not take an elaborate “fact finding” procedure to reach a conclusion as obvious as this. The plaintiff, Diane M. Edwards, mother of four of his children, was receiving $529 in Aid to Families with De*122pendent Children (A.F.D.C.) per month in Brown county for the support of herself and the children.1 Since the children in this case are not eligible for A.F.D.C. as long as there is an able-bodied father in the home, the couple in this case, with the stipulated consent of the mother, made the children eligible for A.F.D.C. through a divorce action.
This action was brought in her name by Brown county. The father was shown to be an able-bodied man, a high school graduate who graduated from Barber school with a master barber and shop manager’s license. The majority says there was no “proof” that defendant could earn more than the $3,200 per year he claimed he had earned in each of the preceding three years running his own barber shop in Milwaukee.
The obligation to support one’s children, however, is a basic one. Therefore, the burden of proof should be on the father in a case such as this to show he cannot pay the court ordered child support obligation.
This modest burden was not met by this defendant. All this record shows is a stubborn refusal on the part of this man to face up to his responsibilities; a refusal to even consider looking for more remunerative work to support his family. He was twenty-seven years of age at the time of the divorce and certainly it is hardly an “abuse of discretion” on the part of the trial court to order him to pay child support of $200 per month for four children. In my judgment, the rule should be “if you sire, you support” unless one can show a physical or mental inability to provide financial support or an absence of any employment opportunities. The defendant’s four children by this woman were ages seven (born to the parties out of wedlock), six, four and one. The court *123also found that the defendant was “guardian and custodian” of a fifth child, age nine.2 This accounts for the confusion by the trial court as to whether four or five children were to be involved in the support order. The mother testified:
“Q. . . . And I would ask that you tell the Court what acts of your husband you consider to be cruel and inhuman?
“A. Well, after we were married Bobby showed a lot of signs of immaturity. I guess you would call it. He come from a family that had pretty good money. And he couldn’t accept the fact that when the children started coming, the money just wasn’t there. And it bothered him, that he couldn’t afford to support the family.”
Despite the court’s allowance of time to find other employment, this man has made no effort to try and get additional work or change jobs to meet the modest support obligation imposed by the court.
He has no compunction about leaving his children at the low support level afforded by the public assistance they are currently receiving and shows no willingness or desire to improve his own economic position in order to help his family. He is willing to let his children be added to the burden borne by the taxpayers to support the ever-increasing number of offspring whose fathers refuse and neglect to support them.
The defendant’s arrogance in his insistence upon shirking his responsibility is no where better shown than in this exchange with the court at the time of the trial:
“Mr. Edwards: I would have to pay $250.00 per month?
“Court: $200.00 per month.
“Mr. Edwards: Well, I can’t do it.
*124“Court: Well, it may be that you will have to get another job, managing someone else’s shop for a salary, or something like that. That is why we’re setting it for September 1st, to allow you to have several months to make some adjustment.
“Mr. Edwards: I’m going to stick to what I’m doing.
“Court: That’s your decision to make. Now you can pay that once a month, or twice a month, however, you wish to pay it.
“Mr. Edwards: I can’t pay it at all. And that isn’t what he said. He said $50.00 per month. But then he just thought it over, then he came up with the per child.
“Court: Well, we’ll review it at the time. If you have made a sincere effort, and you can’t make it, we’ll consider that.
“Mr. Edwards: There’s no possible way. I don’t see it, there’s no way, that I could see that.
“Court: Well, let’s see what happens.”
The trial court showed extreme patience under the circumstances.
The case of Balaam v. Balaam, 52 Wis.2d 20, 187 N.W.2d 867 (1971), relied on by the majority can be distinguished. In that case, support and alimony was set by the trial court based on what the husband had previously earned working on a mink ranch for his parents. His wages had been cut from an earning capacity of $725 per month to $400 per month plus $175 worth of room and board. This court found from the record that the mink business had gone through a nation-wide slump, that pelts were selling for less than the cost of production, that the business had been losing $20,000 per year and that the brother, who also worked on the mink ranch, had a similar salary cut. This court concluded that the trial court should have based its order on the father’s actual earnings at the time. The facts before us are a far cry from those in Balaam. Here we have, not a temporary set back due to outside economic forces in a going business, but the insistence on the part of the defendant that he will do nothing to increase his income *125to meet even the obviously inadequate support ordered by the trial court.
One of the most egregious, glaring inequities in our social structure today is the determination and enforcement of child support obligations. The system is inequitable to the custodial parent — the mother in ninety-five percent of the cases. It is inequitable to the taxpayer who as divorce and illegitimacy rates soar pays for the support of children on the burgeoning A.F.D.C. rolls. And above all, it is inequitable to the thousands of children who often are forced to spend their entire childhood in homes supported at poverty level maintenance.
Among the multiple causes of the inequities in the child support system is the primary cause — a pervasive and gross irresponsibility on the part of fathers for the economic support of the children they have sired. According to a speech delivered on March 7, 1980, by Bernard Stumbras, administrator of the Division of Economic Assistance in the Wisconsin Department of Health and Social Services, before an audience of family court judges and family court commissioners attending the 1980 Family Law Seminar here in Madison, approximately one-quarter of the mothers on A.F.D.C. in Wisconsin are working and contributing $83.2 million per year to the support of their children. On the other hand, the fathers of these children on A.F.D.C. — all of the fathers —are contributing a total of only $28 million per year toward the support of their children. This means that one-fourth of the A.F.D.C. mothers in Wisconsin are contributing three times more per year than all of the absent fathers. If the fathers of A.F.D.C. children were contributing a sum equal to what the working A.F.D.C. mothers are currently contributing, from income earned at a rate of $3.45 per hour, the state would collect $333 million this year in child support. The A.F.D.C. annual cost in Wisconsin is $290 million. These are sobering figures, and offer clear evidence that neither the mothers *126nor the Wisconsin taxpayers are being fairly treated, and that A.F.D.C. children are getting only crumbs from the presumed primary breadwinners — their fathers.
Mr. Stumbras pointed out that the A.F.D.C. mothers in Wisconsin who are working and contributing to the support of their children earn an average of $488 per month. These mothers contribute $222 more per month than the defendant admits to earning (based on a yearly income of $3,200). The court’s award in this case requires the defendant to increase his earnings to an amount that is $22 less than working A.F.D.C. mothers contribute to the support of their children!
It is hardly an “abuse of discretion” for the court to ask the defendant to earn less than the average working A.F.D.C. mother earns and contributes to the support of her children. As this Court said in Balaam, 52 Wis.2d at 28:
“A divorced husband should be allowed a fair choice of a means of livelihood. . . . This rule is, of course, subject to reasonableness commensurate with his obligations to his children....”
Perhaps the majority opinion will cause the legislature to consider taking the matter of child support and determination of ability to pay away from the divorce courts. Some courts are notorious for the inadequacies and wide-range of support orders. The legislature may decide to place the determination of support in the hands of an agency better versed in domestic economics than our over-worked trial courts and thus achieve greater uniformity, greater equity, and a concomitant decrease in the burden placed on the shoulders of Wisconsin taxpayers.
I am authorized to state that Mr. Justice William Callow and Mr. Justice John Coffey join in this dissent.

 It is not clear from the record if this amount was for the four children or also included another child of his that apparently lived with her.

 According- to the majority opinion at footnote two, page 113, that child is also the defendant’s and the plaintiff in this ease was planning to adopt that child.