Turns Out Trump's Misogynist Federal Reserve Pick Is Also a Deadbeat Ex-Husband [UPDATED]

By Esther Wang  |  May 2, 2019 | 2:45pm
Politics
Turns Out Trump's Misogynist Federal Reserve Pick Is Also a Deadbeat Ex-Husband [UPDATED]
Screenshot: (CNBC)

Stephen Moore, Donald Trump’s pick for the Federal Reserve Board, has some lovely opinions about women—like how they should be banned from refereeing or announcing men’s college basketball games and how they don’t deserve equal pay in sports. He also believes that feminism and Women’s Studies have turned white men into the “new oppressed minority” on college campuses, and that the gender pay gap is a myth. (“The crisis in America today isn’t about women’s wages; it’s about men’s wages,” he wrote.)

If you can believe it, a man who seems to have a pretty contemptuous view of women also treated his former wife like shit—in this case, refusing to pay alimony, according to a new report in the Guardian. Moore has apparently “underpaid his ex-wife’s alimony bills for years, leaving her out of pocket by tens of thousands of dollars.”

The two divorced in 2011, and since then, Moore has repeatedly tried to stiff his ex-wife Allison, at one point owing her more than $300,000. Per the Guardian:

Court records reopened to the public, following legal action from the Guardian and other news organizations, state that Moore agreed in 2011 to pay Allison Moore $18,698 per month in spousal support and $1,572 per month in support for their youngest child, who is finishing high school.
But Moore soon began failing to pay, according to court records, and was found in contempt of court in November 2012 with an outstanding bill of more than $300,000. Moore continued failing to pay his ex-wife, and the sum he owed grew to $330,000.

Moore’s refusal to pay led to a judge demanding that his home be sold to pay the alimony he owed his ex-wife, to the point that, according to the Guardian, “a court official accompanied by four police officers broke into the property to prepare it for sale.” Allison, who clearly is a much less vindictive person than I am, called off the sale of Moore’s house when he finally paid her some, but apparently not all, of what he owed her.

But since then, Moore has continued to underpay the alimony he legally owes his ex-wife, to the tune of $8,000 each month. And it’s not for lack of money—in 2015, he bought a house worth $1.3 million, and based on statements he made about the pay cut he would take if he were to be on the Federal Reserve Board, he currently makes at least $570,000 per year.

And it should come as no surprise that Moore has regularly pontificated about the ways that divorce can lead to economic instability, blaming single-parent households for the persistence of poverty, while being a total deadbeat fucker in his own life.

Here’s what he wrote in a 2014 column titled “Marriage, the surest economic stimulus:”

[T]he best anti-poverty program in America may not be tax cuts, debt reduction or regulatory relief, but rather that old-fashioned institution called marriage. It turns out that poverty rates are very low among intact families and prevalent among homes without a father. Children who grow up in single-parent households are much more likely to face economic trouble as adults.
Those who cheer divorce as a form of women’s liberation, or who say that stigmatizing out-of-wedlock births is just right-wing sermonizing, just don’t get this intertwined connection between two-parent households and economic success. Sociocultural factors like the decline of marriage are leading causes of the wealth gap and the stubborn poverty trap in many low-income neighborhoods.

And in another 2014 column in which he bemoaned that “the real wage crisis has to do with men,” he warned that “divorce rates go up when men lose their jobs.” (I might add that divorce rates might also go up when men complain about their partners in columns they write for conservative magazines, as Moore did in 2000, writing about his then-wife voting for Democrats like Al Gore: “Women are sooo malleable! No wonder there’s a gender gap.”)

Moore, in his 2014 column about marriage, also suggested that “to save our economy from a path of decline, we need to start with a personal and national commitment to sturdy families, strong parents and a re-emergence of the Protestant work ethic.”

Nothing says family values more than not paying alimony!

Update (12:41 p.m.): Bye!

 
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