As lawyers are fond of saying, “circumstances alter cases.” Alimony may be called for in some instances, but not in others.
One thing I see over and over is the assumption that alimony has something to do with earning power over the course of a relationship. In my view, that’s what property settlements are about. Alimony, by contrast, relates to a future lack of earning power based on the time necessary to develop marketable job skills, especially with consideration to a potentially decreased number of earning years over which to amortize the cost of same.
Fundamentally, then, alimony is about impairment. As such, it suffers from the same problems as disability payments and workers’ compensation — there are many incentives to game the system.
There is no question, however, that some spouses’ ability to make their way in the world is truly impaired. This burden, however, works in a way almost directly opposite the way traditional alimony works.
For instance, take a 65-year-old who has had a 45-year marriage. After the property settlement, which evens out the effects of past sacrifices, there should be no alimony because there is effectively no future earnings potential to impair. Accordingly, alimony shouldn’t extend past retirement.
Society expects its members to graduate high school as a blank slate, and then go on to be well on their way to a chosen career within five years of graduating college. It is arguable, then, that alimony should have a definite limit of ten years or less, in that nobody should be able to claim impairment beyond that of being a blank slate.
Because impairment is measured from a theoretical ideal earnings potential for the paid party, it shouldn’t directly depend on the ex-spouse’s earnings potential. If someone gave up working as help in a restaurant to marry a partner in an investment banking firm, there is nothing to support alimony beyond the standard of living that the waitperson could reasonably have attained by continuing that career path.
Unfortunately, the converse doesn’t really hold. If someone gave up an investment banking position to be a stay-at-home spouse for a waitperson, then discovered that salaries for a 30-year-old that had sat out five years were $200K less than the go-getters who stayed in the game, there is no reasonable method to have the waitperson make up any part of the difference on a $30K/year wage. Accordingly, the ex-spouse’s compensation would set the ceiling for alimony, and not the floor.
Of course, the distinction between property settlements, child support, and alimony have all become largely moot, in that they have been “divorced” from any intellectual or ethical basis, and instead suborned to the greater good of governmental wealth redistribution. Family court has largely become a microcosm of socialism, with aggrieved parties tearing down those better off to provide themselves bread and circuses.
