Getting married is a choice. Having children is a choice. There should not be tax benefits for either.
I read in one of the comments that government promotes marriage and having children because they lead to less crime and a “healthier” lifestyle. I do not want my government making those kinds of judgment calls.
Yes its a choice, but governments can have a vested interest in encouraging people to have children as they need future tax payers. Thus tax benefits for having kids.
And we think tax is too complicated over here…
When I got married it made no difference to my or my wife’s tax as the then government had decided that everyone should be treated equally and took away the married man’s (note man’s) allowance.
Back in 2009 a report said “that where a lone mother earned £10,000 a year, and her partner earned £25,000, they were £5,473 worse off if they decided to live together. If the lone mother did not work, they were £4,522 worse off for cohabiting.”
The current government, which is a party that has always had a stated support for families, has now re-introduced a [small] allowance aimed at helping married couples. It is yet to be seen if this will influence peoples decisions about whether to ‘tie the knot’.
They have also (and this is a benefit for me personally) introduced a transfer arrangement whereby my wife (who pays no tax) can give me her tax allowance.
Lots of things which are choices attract a tax deduction - buying a house on mortgage, charitable donations, union dues, fees paid to tax preparers, many unreimbursed work-related expenses, etc, etc.
To a large extent, in fact, there’s no need to offer tax deductions for any activity unless the activity concerned in a choice. There’s no need to incentivise behaviour which is mandatory anyway.
As regards marriage and children, the question of choice is irrelevant. Being married and having children mean that there are people other than yourself who have a legal claim on your resources for their support. To the extent that tax rates and amounts are supposed to be related to ability to pay, the existence of dependents with a legal claim is plainly a circumstance which should be taken into account in assessing the tax to be demanded from anyone. The only reason you would deny any recognition in the tax system for people marrying and/or having children would be if you wished to discourage these behaviours.
Children are people, not pets. They get the same “credit” every other person gets, and that “credit” goes toward the taxes of the person supporting them. It’s exactly the same as if your grandmother lives with you and you support her, or if you are supporting your adult sister, or, hell, your adult BFF. Every human being gets a deduction.
No. While it is true that all these people may qualify for a dependent exemption, children are the only ones who, in addition to the exemption, qualify for the Child Tax Credit, the Additional Child Tax Credit, and for increased payments from the Earned Income Tax Credit. And I’m sure there are other credits that are not coming to mind.
Children have a very special place in the tax code. Much more special than any other dependents. In fact, it’s much easier for a child to qualify as your dependent than your BFF.
And none of this is because of some great love for children and the American family. It’s because advocates for the poor, the working class, and the upper middle class lobby Congress to get more breaks for families with children. And Congresspersons from both ends of the political spectrum have, at one time or the other, enjoyed having news conferences where they extoll the virtues of saving the family, whether it is a poor family or the struggling middle class.
Government is us, or at least it should be. Let’s decide this issue for our own reasons.
The reason the married filing jointly tax status was added was the different treatment between citizens of community property states and the rest of the states. The basic idea was to treat all married couples as if they lived in the more advantageous community property states which had you divide your income between the couple and pay lower taxes due to progressivity. Once many wives began not only working but earning comparable incomes, we got a series of marriage tax penalties then corrections.
http://www.taxanalysts.com/www/features.nsf/Articles/C552B8F3C0C04828852578A300542E59?OpenDocument
Yes, woken up three years later we still know children drain money from taxpayers? Wow, if there’s anything America likes more than bragging about its guns, it’s finding another reason their taxes are unfair. 
But I clicked about the following.
I don’t want to play junior Mod and the infraction was three years ago but …
Isn’t it against Board policy to advocate illegal acts? 
What a load of BS. Dracoi had some of it right, but not all. What happened was that in community property states in the SW, income splitting came automatically. All income was split. I assume a married couple had to file two tax returns. This was manifestly unfair and, as Dracoi mentioned the government decided to extend it to everybody. But it was an option of no particular advantage if both spouses worked and their earnings were similar. In fact, it was a disadvantage if they used the standard deduction. So a few filed separately, taking two standard deductions. Or one would itemize and the other a standard deduction. So they put in the status of married filing separately and you could take only half the standard deduction.
As for kids and age and blindness deductions, these were put in as part of being progressive. These things reduced discretionary income which, as a matter of social policy, was what they wanted to tax. But what about other severe handicaps? That is an argument for a different day.
Finally, let me say a word about the mortgage interest deductibility. At first, your home was considered, among other things, an investment in real estate. If you borrow money to buy stock, the interest on that money is deductible. Originally, the capital gains when you sold your home had to be counted as income. Then–and this was the thing that was manifestly unfair–they made the capital gains tax-free if you were past 65 when you sold your home. I really don’t see any public policy argument for that. My father died at age 63 and, when I filled out his final tax return, I “forgot” to include the accumulated capital gains on his house. Had he lived another two years, there would have been no gains to report. Eventually, the law was changed to eliminate much of the capital gains and the privilege was extended to everybody. So now the deductibility of mortgage interest is just a benefit to homeowners (to the detriment of apartment-dwellers, hence highly regressive). But then the whole thing of allowing you to invest your money in your house and live rent-free is also such a subsidy. Again a different argument.
Not sure I understand this line.
Why not? Promoting things that lead to less crime & healthy lifestyles seems like a good thing for the government to do.
Tell me about it! The adoption people freaked out when I showed up with a pet carrier and leash for the new baby. Then they started yelling at me about the litter box. I had the softest litter I could find, don’t know what their problem was.
Yeah, me neither.
The mortgage interest deduction is an interesting discussion subject, though. I don’t see much need for it.
It’s one of the few tax breaks that primarily benefits the middle class. All the others are for broke people or rich people.
Everything on a tax return is a choice. You choose to work, have a business, save money, sell stock, make donations, etc. Heck, you choose not to commit suicide too. If the tax code had to ignore all of your choices, there would be nothing left to tax.
Anyway, aside from marriage being a choice, it is also a legally binding financial arrangement. Especially in community property states, they are now a joint legal entity, not unlike a simplified partnership or corporation in some ways. Lawmakers have some choices about how this is taxed, but they can’t pretend it’s not there.
I agree that this is also one of the reasons for it. In fact, one of the states (Ohio?) briefly made itself community property primarily for the federal tax advantage it passed on to citizens. After federal laws changed, it went back to separate.
On the other hand, the fact that MFJ status took so long to come around, and the timing of when it did come around, makes me think it was more/also motivated by the influx of women into the workforce that happened during and following WWII. At that point, a joint filing status simplified tax filings for all community property couples and for all double-income families.
Being born is not a choice.
The government has a responsibility to be fair to all citizens, even those who are three years old. Not accounting for their needs in their income - and a child’s income is their parents’ income - is simply unfair.
So people get a break on their taxes now, in exchange for creating more people to pay taxes later. Wow, I’d never thought of procreation as a form of pyramid scheme before, but there you fucking have it.
I will now begin to refer to my kids as my “downlines.” 
Kind of a hijack of a zombie but this, too, is a tax break for the wealthy. I live in a pretty modest home ($200,000 thereabouts–pretty close to the bottom end of the Denver real-estate market) and there is very little benefit to me itemizing and capturing my mortgage interest & associated goodies vs. just taking a standard deduction. The difference to my taxable income is consistently only a thousand bucks one way or the other which has a nominal impact on my actual tax burden. Now if I were living in one of the “nicer” 'hoods it would be a no brainer to itemize because the benefit would be much better for me.
The incentive does one thing consistently: encourages people to borrow money from banks, or more specifically, encourages people to participate in a massive government subsidy of the banking industry. Little People with little homes, benefit no more than the renters of the world–take your standard deduction, peasant, and be grateful for it.
This is commonly claimed but not necessarily true. The owner of the apartment building (or house if a house is rented) can deduct the mortgage expense. If it could not be deducted, then rental rates would be higher. Some have argued to deny the deduction to the owner require the mortgage deduction be passed through to the tenants. But this would be counter productive. The owner’s expenses would go up by the amount of tax now paid. If the rent was raised by the same amount, the tenant, who is often in a lower tax bracket, would typically come out behind as the mortgage deduction would be worth less to them than the increased rental.