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Comment by ectoplasm | Hacker News Reader

He's unable to borrow money from friends / family / bank / mortagage / credit card to pay the child support?

People who don't have thousands lying around tend to have friends and family in similar financial situations, may not have a bank account, probably don't have a mortgage, and little credit.

It was an honest question. GP did say "his house". The fact that not everyone conforms to "tend to" stereotypes is exactly why it's worth asking these questions. Plenty of poor people in America have buckets of debt. Also, there's always pawn shops and the mob. Unpalatable, but still better than not being able to work.

It's an honest question that appears to illustrate the lack of understanding of what it's like to be poor. "There's always the mob" is just tone-deaf IMO.

I was speaking from personal experience. Borrowing from illegal sources is not out of the question. For example, one of my friends is always borrowing money from the mob so he can buy more coke. He's currently about $20K in debt. Another one of my friends was tied up and threatened with a blowtorch amputation unless he paid back his loan. Another one was dragged into a bush and beaten up outside his apartment at 3am because he was overdue.

If "understanding the poor" is your goal, you'd do well to dispense with the condescending generalizations.

The example consequences you lay out seem significantly worse than being unable to renew a drivers license, so I'm not sure why you're presenting them as viable options.

As long as you pay them back, the mob won't give you a hard time. If you just want the money to get a job, and you're not using it for drugs, you'll be fine.

But, mostly this was just me refuting your claim that I don't understand what it's like to be poor (and desperate). I could go on, in ways that don't have anything to do with organized crime, but I have to go now. It's really infuriating being told by someone that doesn't understand your experience that you don't understand your own experience.

The amount owed is about half his yearly gross income. If he goes to work, it's entirely to pay money to his ex, not keep it for his kids. He can't pay it back in any logical sense before he dies.

Although now she owes him child support every month. But any payment she makes goes right back to her, to be deducted against what he owes her.[1]

Friends and family have given him a place to live where he acts as a stay-at-home dad, since for now working is useless (and the child require 24/7 monitoring by adults). If friends and family were to give him the money to pay off the debt, it would just give the money to his ex, and there is no guarantee that she would then start paying her side of the debt.[1] I guess she would then be the one unable to get a driver's license and go to work and pay child support, which is "justice" only in a weird warped sense of the word in that they each have suffered the same kind of injustice, and doesn't really help the kids.

[1] The ideal situation is to just have both debts neutralize each other and disappear, but it's not clear that this would be binding even if you could get the two angry ex'es to agree to it -- parents have signed off on child support in the past only to have the courts put it in place anyway, since the kids couldn't sign it away.

Just like this... http://www.occupy.com/article/jpay-scam-prison-bankers-cash-...

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