Shit. Apparently I need someone else to do my taxes. I have a two year old and got a $300 tax credit for daycare last year. Thanks Uncle Sam, that’d cover a week and a half. I don’t recall the other ‘benefits’ being stellar either.
I’ve got no objection at all to the goal of reducing birthrates and population, but I think it would be madness to attempt that by eliminating public funding for educating children who already exist.
Surely the logical place to start is by making it easier to avoid producing children who don’t yet exist and whose existence isn’t desired. That is, improve access to reliable sex education, contraception, and abortion.
I disapprove of social policies that involve using parenthood as a punishment for carelessness or stupidity, whether it be withholding contraceptives from teens who won’t practice abstinence, denying abortions to women who weren’t careful about birth control, or condemning working-class families to poverty because a couple didn’t factor tuition costs into their family planning. “Punitive parenthood” may provide smug Schadenfreudisch satisfaction to some of those who’ve escaped it, but AFAICT it does no good to anybody else.
I just did the math and having two kids up here in Soviet Canuckistan got me
789.30
That’s a total of monies I got back for both kids (so, 384.65 each). For us, it would make zero difference to our lives to not have that money.
For someone who was making minimum wage? That could be huge. Maybe we should only give the deductions to people under a certain wage threshold? Kids are expensive and if we can give their caretakers more money to take care of them maybe there would be money left over after rent and utilities to pay for decent food.
By raising children you have expanded the chances that humanity will have a major breakthrough like ending world hunger or perhaps a cure for some disease, as well as many much more minor stuff, so yes a net benefit for humanity to have children, and also those children are expected by the state to become tax paying citizens so a net benefit to them, you will also presumably have to spend more money on necessities so you are stimulating the economy which is a net benefit for the state and the public.
all and all a few bucks knocked off your taxes seems like a small payback.
In other words: we subsidize parents. It has nothing to go with education being good for society or whatever (we could require all parents to pay for their children’s education). It has to do with:
- Most people are not responsible enough to allocate enough money to pay for all the costs costs of their children.
- Most people couldn’t afford children anyway, at least not without taking out a loan. The idea of a “child mortgage” amuses me.
There is another way of looking at it which works for fairly stable populations where most use government services: you are not subsidizing other people’s kids; you are paying for your own costs. I won’t be having kids, but I did go to public schools, and so for fairness I should at least pay back my own costs.
Of course, this starts to smell like indentured servitude. No one ever asked me if I wanted to pay for my education for the rest of my life, and I was legally obligated to attend school.
At any rate, there’s no other way. Nations without a stable population have a serious problem, so children are a necessary evil. I’m not happy about it but the alternatives are worse. I just wish parents wouldn’t pretend otherwise.
It has everything to do with education being good for society.
The presumption that education is good for society is why we legally require parents to keep children in school until age 16, and to some extent also why we prohibit child labor.
Hell, if we weren’t trying to enforce compliance with the principle that education is good for society, we could just go back to letting parents hire out their kids as wage earners as soon as they were old enough to earn anything, and not worry whether they got any systematic education at all.
As long as we as a society legally require all parents to maintain their children for a decade or more as full-time learners rather than earners because we hold that that’s beneficial to society as a whole, it’s our responsibility to ensure that that requirement doesn’t become an impossible burden for low-income families.
Your second claim doesn’t follow from the first. It may well be a good idea–in fact, it is a good idea–but there’s no logical connection between legally requiring all parents to educate their children and ensuring that the requirement doesn’t become an impossible burden.
What would happen if we simply allowed that impossible burden? The same thing that happens where, for instance, housing is extremely expensive: the birth rate goes down. Most people have at least some idea of whether they can afford a kid or not.
Of course, some people would have kids despite being destitute, and we’d want them educated, so we’d have to account for that. The cost of these services would be much less than those for the population as a whole. It is the equivalent of uninsured motorist insurance.
One might posit a different argument: people should have the right to have children, and the presence of a law that obligates them to pay a cost they might not otherwise pay is a heavy restriction on their freedom. This is a somewhat reasonable argument but it’s not like we don’t do the same thing in other areas.
So I stand by the claim. Forcing parents to pay the real costs of their children–including education–would result in a massive decrease in birth rate. Western nations need to do all they can do to keep the birth rate at least at replacement levels, so we spread the costs around.
And many people live in overcrowded slums. I think you’re kidding yourself if you imagine that the typical reaction to education becoming too expensive for most non-wealthy people would be to avoid having kids. Many people would simply settle for substandard education, the way that many people nowadays settle for substandard housing.
Slums exist because of a lack of reproductive control and economic conditions that favor large families. I’m speaking of developed countries here. Do you think it’s a coincidence that fertility is lower in (high cost of living) cities as compared to relatively lower suburban or rural areas?
Also, this is not a binary thing. People already make decisions like “we’d like a third child, but then we’d need a bigger house, and we just can’t afford that right now.” If children were more expensive, the same decisions would be made, but at an earlier point.
It wouldn’t require much of a change to cause serious problems in the future. The US is only barely above a fertility rate of 2–ignoring immigration, any less and we’ll start shrinking. A number of nations will be facing very serious demographic problems in the coming decades due to replacement rates well under 2, and approaching 1.
As for substandard education, that is again simply a legal matter. As is already the case, schools are required to meet certain minimum standards. Same as housing.
Sorry but the population GROWTH was slowing down, while the standard of living was going up.
Now there are huge numbers of economic migrants, who are prepared to work for illegally low wages, and in illegal working conditions ie. little or no Health and Safety .
While it may be everyones “right” to have children, its not everyones right to have other people pay for them.
The odds are that if you have a large family today, many of them will grow up not only to NOT pay for your pension but will actually be in competition for what money is available from taxes to pay their welfare cheques.
And if there isn’t enough welfare money to go around, then the younger stronger unemployed will often turn to crime to make/supplement their income.
The fact is the world is rapidly overpopulating, not losing population.
And the old chestnut that populations automatically achieve lower population growth when they become better off is confusing cause with effect.
Labour intensive industries are rapidly becoming as extinct as the Dodo, the technology for that is available worldwide.
But if you’re paying out for a large population then you can’t afford the tech as well.
The choice summed up in simple terms is have large families OR a good quality of life.
Cite?
The lag between a population becoming wealthy and their birth rate dropping is extremely well documented.
Actually I think that Really Not to Bright, is just having his little joke.
His family, originally from a Third World country, and who have twice emigrated to First World countries (The first to the U.K. and then on to the U.S.) have done well financially from a business that in the U.S. is notorius for employing Third World emigrants on very low wages .
ie. the hotel business (in Orlando ).
So, I may be wrong, it may well be that it is a subject very close to his heart, rather then a lame mb. joke .
But I digress.
Yes populations DO reduce their birthrate when they become wealthy, but this is not a case of yes we will inevitably become rich because of scientific progress, and then we’ll start having less children.
It is not an automatic process, reducing population growth is a very important component of the wealth gaining process itself.
ie. you don’t get one without the other.
If over the years the First World nations HADN’T done so then they wouldn’t have become First World nations in the first place.
If the U.K. had kept having the same size families that it had had in the 19th c today it would be on a par with any Third World nation you care to mention .
Automation and I.T. have reduced the need for large labour forces generally, and not only the quality of life of the population , but the EXPECTATIONS, of the population has increased .
There is no labour shortage.
What there is, is a reduction of profit for companies having to pay a reasonable wage with reasonable employment benefits, and enforcing reasonable Health and Safety provisions for their employees.
We don’t need to sustain at our current rate, let alone increase our populations any more.
One mechanical digger on a construction site does more work, more quickly and safely then twenty men equipped with shovels.
One person sitting at a P.C. will do more work, and more quickly then a large office full of people using paper and individuals delivering the paper between locations.
An automated factory line can work 24/7, without holidays or rest breaks, or going sick, and at a lot less risk to people then a production line manned by large numbers of people who’s quality of life while at work isn’t that pleasant.
If we actively encouraged our populace to reduce in numbers, rather then financially encouraging the opposite as we do at present, our standard of living, and our quality of life would go up.
Production would still in all probability go up.
There would in all probability be less unemployment, less poverty and less crime.
Less people , less Sweat Shops !
Forget taxes - why bother to “replace” at all? Why have another generation? Why continue the human race? You mean that we have a responsibility to the next generation because we decide to create another generation?
I accept that many (perhaps most) people have a desire to have offspring, that there are biological imperatives behind this, and that it would be unethical and impossible for governments to control births absolutely. But is that all it is to it? Given all the misery and torment in the world, along with some joy and happiness, isn’t it better that we just abandon the charade, better that people decide to give up procreation as a principle?
After all, we’ll be dead. While we can enjoy having children and grandchildren, we can never profit from the untold numbers of generations to come. Is continuing the race just a kind of selfishness? Is it selfish to have children for your own reasons, even though they may well be unhappy? Though the rest of the world’s ecosystem will have to pay for their existence? Though you will be gifting them death and the fear of death? Is it selfishness that we may lie on our deathbeds consoled with the thought that humanity continues, though it has huge costs and we won’t see the future humans?
Not having children - at all - is a very small price to pay for the end of suffering and the end of pointless lives. If you had never existed, would you care? Of course, there would be no “you” in the first place.
For the most part, I am happy and enjoy life, but if I had never existed… well, what would it matter? What would it matter if mankind had never existed?
I saw the post above and expected the join date to be Sept 2012.
Virgil, I honestly do not see how this is a reply to my post, or what it has to do with tax policy.
Actually, my family did very well in medicine and accounting and has just about broken even in the hotel business (and they aren’t in Orlando), and hasn’t employed any migrants I know of. And I was genuinely asking for a citation.
Yes really !
Want to carry this on ?
Cos if you’tre bluff calling I’m up for it.
And here is where we diverge and never “the tween shall meet.” You refer to allowing parents to take full responsibility for the children they knowingly or unwittingly produce as “punishment” and I refer to it as common sense.
Not only do I think it’s possible, but I live the very principle I tout. I refuse to bear children unless I can provide for them in every sense of the word without any handouts at all. I think it’s a shame that some think that is a “radical idea” and somehow a “punishment.”
I see people decrying the national debt. I have to think of many of them as hpocrites for being aghast that China owns 80% of America when a bank owns 90% of their own home… You want an “ownership society,” live the example and save up and pay cash for things so you can actually own them.
Our government and it’s policies are the result of mass psychology. If you have an ownership society at the incremental level, you will have an ownership society at the National level. Live the principles you vote?
I see people demanding to know why America won’t cash flow. I see these same people accepting a “free” $120 eduction for each little darling they produce while ALSO demanding 24/7 police and fire, roads, parks, etc … Some are collecting 10 times more SS over their lifetime then they ever contributed to it, and are accumulating zero savings… Could anyone make that cash flow? Is it even possible?
If you are critizing national policy and debt, and taxes and cash flow, I want to know what your individual account with the public coffers looks like. How can so many people personally in the negative, demand the collective to net out?? It’s madness.
When I see a staunch conservative on a soap box complaing about taxes, debt, and overspending. I wonder if their own home is debt free, cash flowing, and how responsibly they save their own money?
My personal principles are:
I live below my means, save up, pay cash for things.
I have ZERO revolving debt, no credit cards, no car notes, no mortgage.
I take home nearly $4K/month but live in an efficiency at $600/month, drive a paid for no-glamour car, don’t have cable, and put around $500/month in my 401K because I refuse to rely on “the system” to take care of me in my old age.
People commend me for my regimen, but they shouldn’t. No one should get congrats for something they “should” be doing.
If you include in your definition of “handout” every possible tax break or social benefit that our laws provide for, then hell yes, it’s a VERY “radical idea” to argue that everybody is ethically obligated to live without accepting any such advantages. It’s not only radical but highly inefficient; see below.
And some, like my own late father, pay into Social Security for decades and then never live long enough to collect the benefits. I’m sad about that, but it’s not an injustice; that’s just how the SS system works. Some put in more than they take out, and vice versa.
Nothing to worry about unless we have a net long-term imbalance in the whole system, in which case we have to tweak things like minimum retirement ages and benefit amounts and payroll-tax income caps to get the overall income vs. outgo zeroed out again.
So what? I’m just as debt-free (and child-free) as you are, and follow the same principles about saving and living within one’s income. (I don’t even own a car, so I think I win the smug-frugality bragging contest here.)
But I’m realistic enough to recognize that it would be highly inefficient for society as a whole to demand that everybody should always limit all their activities to what they can accomplish without incurring any debt or using any tax-funded benefits.
If you and I personally like to live that way, we’re perfectly entitled to. On the societal level, though, that kind of financial rigidity creates a sort of social “liquidity trap”, in which we waste valuable opportunities for lack of immediate funding.
Society-wide endeavors like health care and child-rearing are more efficiently supported by widespread “cost pooling” than by unyielding requirements that every expense be handled on an individual pay-as-you-go basis.
Consider, for instance, the case of child-rearing expenses. When are couples (or single people, for that matter) best fitted to become parents? Generally speaking, when they’re relatively young. It could take a non-wealthy couple well into their 40’s or 50’s to save up enough money to be able to pay for everything required for even one or two children. And by then, of course, they’re likely to be, if not too old to have kids at all, too old to supply the energy and longevity in parenting that would best benefit their children (and by extension, society as a whole).
Looking at the big picture, it makes way more sense to provide some taxpayer-funded support to parents while they’re young, and then continue taxing them when they’re older to provide the same support to new young parents. Just as it’s much more efficient to have a big risk pool of healthcare consumers who all chip in moderate amounts of money that individual consumers will use as needed, rather than expecting that any individual who can’t immediately afford to cover their medical bills will just have to stay sick and broke (or possibly dead).
Your self-satisfied puritanical extremism about zero-tolerance debt avoidance may be fine as a personal lifestyle choice, but as an approach to national social and economic policy, it’s shortsighted and dumb.