11 and 12. Yes, they make income - capital gains, dividends - and have since they were toddlers, and make enough that their tax on those gains exceed their exemption.
Of course, my tax this year was probably more than most people on this board made last year. My husband, children and I are VERY busy subsidizing people who are less fortunate than we are with our tax dollars.
Are your children TV stars or did you redistribute money to them?
Both my sisters and I spent most of our elementary and secondary years in private schools, so my parents not only paid the same property tax as someone with no children, they also paid out of their pocket to NOT send us to public schools.
And of course there were all those years my mother didn’t work outside the home. Why should she have gotten the same tax break for the years she didn’t work as for the years she did?
I’m also subsidizing many people less fortunate than I am, and really have no problem with that. What was your point in bringing it up?
Are they also subsidizing families that are supporting Grandma, or a non-working spouse? I don’t understand why an exemption for dependent children is any different than any other dependent exemption.
Manda Jo got it in one. Why kids? Why not anyone who pays less taxes than you or is currently getting more out of our government than they put in.
Most of my kid’s income is theirs. The original principal was gifts. They have investment accounts.
I don’t think you understand the point that money is fungible.
It doesn’t matter that tax credits “go to the parents”. The net effect is that parents pay less in taxes than non-parents.
Why is this fair? Because it is progressive. Parents have higher costs than non-parents, because they have dependents. Their income must support more individuals, who have certain irreducable basic needs for food, shelter, and the like.
It is the same reason that individuals have deductions - the government, in its infinite wisdom, has determined that average tax rates be lower for poor folk; one way of doing this, of making the tax system somewhat progressive, is to have a basic deduction for each individual (another way is to increase marginal tax rates for folks earning more money). Thus, the government will not dip into the bare pittance needed by the individual to survive.
In the case of adults with dependants, they get to count this deduction as well as their own - because they are responsible for feeding, sheltering and clothing other humans.
The fact is that the childless are better-off at this basic, subsistence level than those with kids: their incomes may be the same, but their basic, irreducable expenses for absolute necessities such as food and shelter are not.
I suppose some sort of fairness argument can be made that progressive taxation is, in some cosmic sense, “unfair” - and that a flat tax be imposed, no deductions and no increase in marginal tax rate for high earners. Certainly this would have the effect of greatly increasing the tax burden on low earners, and decrease the burden on high earners (as it is, high earners"subsidize" a great many folk).
Most people, at some point in their life, have children.
Basically, we decided it makes sense to pay slightly higher taxes during the periods that we do not have children dependent on us so that we can pay slightly lower taxes during the periods that we do.
The fact that those who do not ever have children never get the benefit of this restructuring is unfortunate, but does not mean that "those who do not have children subsidize those who do. Mostly, it’s those that do not currently have children are subsidizing those that currently do, and when it’s all averaged out, mostly people are subsidizing themselves during their childrearing years.
I think the question is fundamentally misconceived. Generally, basic taxation is not based on some notion of user fees, but on ability to pay. Usually, taxation has progressive features, so that those who are poor (low income) or otherwise impaired in ability to pay (have dependants) pay less as an overall percentage.
This has nothing to do with “fairness” in terms of payment-for-use, as very often the poor and those with dependants use more in tax money-funded government resources than the not-poor and those without dependants.
In short, it is not a bug, it’s a feature - and one that most, the extreme right wing aside, agree with.
Hey, I have kids, and I qualified for the EIC for most of their childhoods. But, as a responsible parent, I made sure I could afford to feed and clothe them before I had them, so my tax credit didn’t go toward any basic necessities - it was basically extra spending money for frivolous items (or money to put into savings). Most people I knew who got the credit used it similarly. I’m sure some parents use it for food and clothing, but it was never my experience.
You are not getting the point … again, money is fungible. It doesn’t matter whether you specifically spend your tax credit on necessities, or on frivolous items. What matters is the total amount of money. Additionally, the way a personal or dependant deduction works, it is not offered only to the utterly destitute, but to everyone - so that it insulates a certain amount of cash from taxation. Naturally, this will be of greater significance to the truly destitute.
Moreover, it is completely irrelevant how “responsible” you are. Such value judgments play no part in this. Should a tax system not be progressive, because “responsible” people get good jobs and are not poor?
The fungibility of money doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be spent responsibly. I didn’t need that credit money, and would rather it had been spent on social programs where it was needed. I’m all for giving tax credits to the destitute.
Nothing stopping you donating money to a charity if you don’t need it.
Point here is, this isn’t about some individual’s situation. Sure, you are all responsible and stuff, and “don’t need” progressive taxation … but the average person with kids having the same income as the average person without kids is more likely, on average, all things being equal, to be needy - their ability to pay for necessities and tax is eroded by the mere fact of having kids.
Seems that if a tax system can be jigged into not forcing people onto social programs, that would be better than paying more for social programs.
Saying ‘I had enough money, didn’t need progressive taxation’ is about as useful as me saying ‘I went to law school, I’m a high earner, we don’t need progressive taxation - anyone driven into total destitution can have tax breaks and social assistance’.
Can’t do that… donations are tax deductible. I know I wouldn’t donate money unless I could afford to, deducting that money just gives me an undeserved credit subsidized by non-donaters. Why should we subsidize people who give their money away?
WSBB, if you didn’t have children, you would still have your same income, and far fewer expenses, wouldn’t that “extra” money go to frivolous items as well?
You can choose not to deduct the donations, and give yourself your very own “flat tax”
That’s true. I’m not sure what bearing it has on my point, though. You could also point out that farming is something you do outdoors and raising children takes place mainly indoors. But that doesn’t matter either.
A generation? Without food and fuel our society wouldn’t last a month.
I’m not saying that producing food is more important than raising children. I’m saying that both are necessary actions. We absolutely have to do both, so assigning priorities to one over the other, in a vacuum, is nonsensical. There will be times in which the most pressing need for society is procreation, and times in which it is producing food, and times when fuel is of utmost importance. But we’ve got to have them all (and some other stuff). Claiming that one is more important than the others, all the time, categorically, based on some irrelevant classification, is foolish.
Oh I see we didn’t have enough labour to fill the job vacancies.
Might be worth mentioning that to the many unemployed natives of the U.K. who lost their jobs to East Europeans working at minimum, or even below minimum wage.
And who then take their accrued money back to their homelands which have a much cheaper cost of living.
And while they’re working in the U.K. claim tax breaks on alleged children back in for example , Poland.
Also we have the old chestnut about all of these kids who are going to pay the taxes that are going to support the old age pensioners when they stop working.
As science and technology advance labour intensive industries are mostly a thing of the past, and relative employment will go down, not up.
Not only will these people being born now not support the elderly in their majority, but they’ll be in competition for the available taxdollars/pounds/Euros etc. because many of them will be unemployed for most, if not all of their adult lives.
A proportion of them will be working in tax funded "Make work "jobs.
And the strains on infrastructure, public health,public education, policing will grow and grow, just as the population grows and grows.
The U.N. recently said that after a demographic study the world needs to actively REDUCE its population by having less then replacement reproduction.
Only my guess, but I would suppose that this is because of the accelerated using up of resources,loss of habitat, pollution and the increased incidence of war, crime and poverty.
Rather then giving financial incentives to the person in the street to have larger families we should be doing the opposite.
Have one child you get a tax break, have two you don’t, have more then two then you get increased taxation.
Waits while the accusations of being a child hater and against family life enter the forum.
They are not incentives to have children; they are incentives to provide for children (as, for example, a divorced or separated couple – only the parent who provided 50% or more of the child’s support may claim him/her). If it truly incentivizes anything, it would be adoptions – not that they are one for financial reasons, but they dp function to give adoptive parents exemptions they were not entitled to before adopting.
The logic behind deductions and exemptions is, in a nutshell, that income needed to live at poverty level is not taxed. Every legal household (whether an unmarried person living alone or a couple with ten kids) gets one standard deduction (or may itemize the deductions that would equate to it, if they so choose). Each individual supported by that household’s income gets an exemption. Together they sum to a figure equal to the average expenditure needed to keep wolf from door and avoid neglect. The number may be too high for some areas and too low for others, but it does average to that. Taxable income is AGI less deductions and exemptions.
All this shifting around of get now, pay later, etc. is nonsense. I went to private school, paid for in cold hard American cash by my parents who reasoned and prepared beforehand that children might … GASP! … cost money.
The fact is that people CAN and SHOULD fund the education of their own offspring but we can’t count on them to do this so we have to have a crazy system of pay now, draw later, draw now, pay later … It should be straighforward. You have kids, you pay to education children BUT because people all willy nilly “accidentally” have kids on $20K/year we have to uphold this crazy system where allegedly everyone has POTENTIAL to draw from something they are REQUIRED to pay in to.
My education, primary, secondary, collegiate was all funded privately. What now? I’m 32, single, and pay higher taxes to help raise my neighbor’s children because they can’t be relied on to fully fund the education of the products of their own loins?
You contend this is fair … Excuse me, but I can’t let you get away with that. The reality is that the ONLY reason education is publicly funded is b/c the general pop cannot be relied upon to prepare financially BEFORE they have children to spend one cent on their educaiton. All this “accidental” parenteeism is what’s ruined personal responsibility for decades. It’s 100% possible to NOT have children you are not financially prepared to educate, feed, and clothe, yet so many people miss the mark every day. They call it “the most important job” then accidentally take on the role … BUT not to worry! 30 somethings like myself can put in all those xtra hours at the office and earn that money to pay those taxes for services we will never use so ignorant drools like my neighbors can leave work early b/c “I gotta get my kid from school!”
Gee today I accidentally became a BRAIN SURGEON, I hope I’m good at it.
I see what you did there!