Hi Erick! The 2+2=4 on this one, for me, is that if we lived in a society with actual Gender Equality, no one would pay alimony to anyone. In the same sense that if you have a roommate and they decide to move out, you don't go to court to figure out who should pay what to whom. You go your way, I go my way, goodbye. Period.
You can't make the genders equal in these areas. Men pay alimony to women disproportionately because most women are less well equipped to provide for themselves than are men. The easiest way to disprove that thesis is by eliminating alimony. If the Genders were Equal, alimony would be an insult. "How dare you imply that I can't provide for myself!" The genders aren't equal which is why alimony exists and involves such astronomical sums of money going from "male" to "female".
Child support is a different thing: each jurisdiction needs, I think, to have a legal fixed cost established of what is needed to rear a child and that needs to be paid. But, it needs to be a FIXED cost, otherwise you're enabling a class system that establishes that Child A gets $30,000 a month and Child B gets $4,000 a month. "This is how much it costs to rear a child". That's how much gets paid.
The exception, to me, would be alimony paid to wives and mothers. If she was your wife and the mother of your children and that was WHO she was and WHAT she did, 24/7, then, yes, alimony needs to be paid and in a sufficient amount to maintain the life that she had, even if it impoverishes the divorcing husband and father. Whatever flexibility you attached to that would, I think, have to be considerably (considerably!) less flexible based on the wife and mother's age. The older she is, the less likely she is going to be able to provide for herself and the less likely she is to remarry. So, yes, in that case alimony should, in my opinion, be "for life".
You can't make the genders equal in these areas. Men pay alimony to women disproportionately because most women are less well equipped to provide for themselves than are men. The easiest way to disprove that thesis is by eliminating alimony. If the Genders were Equal, alimony would be an insult. "How dare you imply that I can't provide for myself!" The genders aren't equal which is why alimony exists and involves such astronomical sums of money going from "male" to "female".
Child support is a different thing: each jurisdiction needs, I think, to have a legal fixed cost established of what is needed to rear a child and that needs to be paid. But, it needs to be a FIXED cost, otherwise you're enabling a class system that establishes that Child A gets $30,000 a month and Child B gets $4,000 a month. "This is how much it costs to rear a child". That's how much gets paid.
The exception, to me, would be alimony paid to wives and mothers. If she was your wife and the mother of your children and that was WHO she was and WHAT she did, 24/7, then, yes, alimony needs to be paid and in a sufficient amount to maintain the life that she had, even if it impoverishes the divorcing husband and father. Whatever flexibility you attached to that would, I think, have to be considerably (considerably!) less flexible based on the wife and mother's age. The older she is, the less likely she is going to be able to provide for herself and the less likely she is to remarry. So, yes, in that case alimony should, in my opinion, be "for life".