Today, we'll cover our remaining topics in elder law, and then begin our final push on policymaking, leading up to presentation of your legislative proposals next week.

Today, we will cover policy issues affecting the elderly. Many areas are encompassed, including health, long-term care, age discrimination, and grandparent visitation rights (see my Texas Tech lecture notes).

We'll probably spend the most time in class discussing Social Security, however, as it's an intergenerational program that affects workers and retirees of all ages. One student has already commented to me about the rules governing divorced spouses of Social Security recipients (described in the Polikoff book). Here are some helpful links:

How much money is coming into the federal government's Social Security Trust Fund each year and how much is going out to pay benefits to retirees
(a key distinction to keep in mind is that between each year's incoming and outgoing money, and the cumulative surplus that has built up at any one time)

How much money is deducted from each of your paychecks under "FICA" (Social Security and Medicare) payroll tax

Article on projected trends regarding Social Security's long-term solvency

Polikoff's book cites a report (p. 206, footnote 37; p. 240) by Favreault and Steuerle on ideas for changes to Social Security; I was able to find a PowerPoint slide show by these authors.

UPDATE: This is the article on long-term care that we discovered during today's class (see also p. 100 of the Bogenschneider book).

For the first half of class today, we'll finish up Welfare Reform. Then, for the second half, we'll cover the Family and Medical Leave Act, a federal law enacted in 1993.

In the Bogenschneider book, she discusses Welfare Reform within the broader context of family poverty. Specifically, on pp. 103-104, she talks about the role of economic mobility. If a family is poor, what are the prospects of the children, through education, hard work, and creativity, moving up the economic ladder? This document (particularly Figure 4) provides some useful information.

Regarding the Family and Medical Leave Act, states are permitted to enact more generous leave policies than available in the FMLA, but not ones that are less generous. Here are a couple of web links for further information:

List of states with FMLA provisions more generous than federal version (this list pre-dates the passage of paid leave by a few states)

Wisconsin version of FMLA

Today's agenda:

1. Our quiz on last week's material.

2. Our guest lecture from Dr. Berger (as described in the previous posting).

3. Beginning the topic of Welfare Reform.

UPDATE AFTER DR. BERGER'S PRESENTATION

I made a graphic of the diagram I wrote on the board during Dr. Berger's presentation, putting his lecture notes into pictorial form.


Again, the key point is that there inevitably will be error in human judgment, and the red areas illustrate the two types of error. The two types of error work in the fashion of a trade-off -- lowering one will raise the other. Policymakers must craft regulations to achieve the trade-off they want, within Constitutional parameters (see Section 15.4, p. 198 of Krause and Meyer's Family Law book).

Today, we'll begin covering various issues under the heading of "Children and the Law." These include parental responsibility/authority, child maltreatment, adoption/foster care, and early cognitive/behavioral enrichment programs (e.g., Head Start). On Monday, Dr. Lawrence (Lonnie) Berger of UW-Madison's School of Social Work will come in to give a guest presentation on child maltreatment, so we'll largely leave that topic until Monday.

Today, we'll be continuing with our topic of divorce. Our focus now, however, will shift to how courts decide issues involving children (e.g., child support, custody).

This June 13, 2008 article on the finalization of Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe's divorce describes how a case can be separated into the divorce itself (i.e., the ending of the marriage) and the often more complex issues involving children and other matters. Quoting from the article:

Back in October, 2007, the pair were divorced (both became legally single again) - but the court reserved all other issues in the case for future ruling. This meant that there was no finalization of child custody, child support, spousal support or division of property. This is a process called bifurcation - used sometimes when financial and other issues are complex.

Today we'll be covering the law of divorce. One of the key issues -- if not the key issue -- is the evolution from the 1960s through the 1980s from a fault-based divorce system to a no-fault one. Some observers argue that we've gone from a system where divorce was too difficult to obtain, to one where it's too easy to obtain. However, attempts to come up with new policies, such as covenant marriage, have not proven very popular.

Family policy students often have interesting ideas for possible new ways to handle divorce. I look forward to hearing them in class or in the online comments!

SOME TUESDAY NIGHT UPDATES ON ISSUES THAT WERE RAISED IN TODAY'S CLASS

Similar to Erin's idea about requiring marital counseling during the divorce waiting period to ensure that the waiting time is actually used to try to repair the relationship, here's a proposal I found on the web.

Another topic of discussion was whether courts could restrict the behavior of parties going through a divorce during any waiting periods that may exist. I found two potentially relevant documents in this area. The first document, from a Wisconsin county's family court, talks about automatic restrictions on conduct such as harassment, and concealing and destroying property. These seem to be consistent with common sense. The second document, from a divorce attorneys' organization, goes over which states have waiting periods to remarry after a divorce (and if so, how long). Relatively few states have remarriage waiting periods.

Lastly, a question came up about whether states that have longer waiting periods have lower divorce rates (perhaps because some couples may reconcile during the waiting period or a waiting period could be a deterrent to divorce). Also as I said in class, lacking a tightly controlled experiment, any correlation (potentially) obtained between states' having long waiting periods and low divorce rates would be open to different possible interpretations. Perhaps waiting periods do affect divorce rates. However, it could be that citizens' highly valuing marriage (which could help keep divorce rates low) could also lead to the legislature passing laws implementing waiting periods (as an aside, I also maintain a blog on correlation and causality). Anyway, the following article (available via the UW-Madison library website) presents a pretty rigorous examination of factors that might lead to divorce.

Sweezy, K. & Tiefenthaler, J. (1996). Do state-level variables affect divorce rates? Review of Social Economy, 44, 47-65.

These authors' conclusion: "Both the state waiting period and the type of state property distribution laws are insignificant in determining the probability of divorce" (p. 63).