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Unpopular opinion I've held since before I became a parent: childless people should pay more taxes.

• esoterica 7y ago
  They already do pay more taxes, you get extra exemptions for each kid.
  • deleted 7y ago
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• save_ferris 7y ago
  Dependent tax exemptions?
• kaesar14 7y ago
  But...we do?
  • raducu 7y ago
    I guess not enough? I don't want to sound like an asshole, I only have one child myself and I'm seriously considering stopping at one, I don't think childless people should be punished, but taxes should be steadily increased over time and incentivise child rearing until birthrates become sustainable again. I realy think the situation described in the article is somewhat akin to colonialism/slave trade where you have poor regions of high birth rate providing meat for the big-city grinders.
    • antisthenes 7y ago
      > taxes should be steadily increased over time and incentivise child rearing until birthrates become sustainable again. How exactly do you define sustainable here? Sustainable what?
      • raducu 7y ago
        Sustainable as in 2.x births per woman if you want to keep a population steady, or a lower number at first, but eventually you will want that 2.x births per woman because otherwise we go extinct as a species.
        • antisthenes 7y ago
          What's the purpose of keeping our current population steady? Is the goal just to never drop below a certain amount of people since we already reached that number? Is there some sort of universal duty to have a certain amount of people alive at the same time? And if so, is it based on any sort of science?
          • raducu 7y ago
            Maybe my english is not that great, but I thought I clearly exained that you will EVENTUALY need 2.X children per women, otherwise we will go extinct as a species, do you dispute that? Wether it's 20 years from now or 100 years it's irrelevant. Is there an universal duty to keep your weight constant at all times? No, loosing or gaining a couple of pounds is ok, but dieting by cutting of your hand is not ok.
            • fzeroracer 7y ago
              For one, that's just wrong. You need to be only above 1.0 children per couple on average in order to maintain population growth. You don't need 2 children per woman and mandating that sort of thing would be absurd, not to mention sexist (in the way that it reduces the autonomy of women and removes the choice of having children). For two, humanity has no innate value that makes maintaining infinite population growth somehow good or even sustainable. We're more likely to go extinct as a result of unsustainable population growth and resource exploitation than a result of reversing population growth globally. And finally even if that was the case, this is something that would be literally hundreds of years away barring some sort of global extinction event.
    • fzeroracer 7y ago
      Okay, how does this work realistically? What about people that are sterile? Or people who choose to not have children due to their genetic history? Or what if they literally cannot afford to have children? And what does sustainable mean in this context? Is every nation supposed to have a positive growth of population into perpetuity?
    • kaesar14 7y ago
      I don't see why the government should be levying increasing taxes on something as personal as having a child.
    • JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
      This sounds like a poor idea for environmental conservation. There's already enough people reproducing, beyond the replacement rate (that is to say, faster than the rate of people dying). Maybe not the in the USA, but elsewhere in the world. The global population is growing.
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• greenshackle2 7y ago
  How much taxes do they pay at the moment? What is the fair amount of taxes they should pay, in your opinion?
  • raducu 7y ago
    Where I live everybody pays the same % of their income as taxes. I am not a government, I don't know how much more childless people should pay, you could start with a low,arbitrary number percentage wise(say 2% more if you are childless) -- and alocate those taxes to free childcare or other baby services.
    • mehrdadn 7y ago
      > Where I live everybody pays the same % of their income as taxes. Do you not live in the US? The article is about the US so that's what everyone is assuming from your previous comment, which is really confusing because it's already the way you want it to be.
• benjohnson 7y ago
  When you consider that propagating the species goes hand in hand with future social security payments, this isn't that radical of an idea.
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• sdinsn 7y ago
  So you support the current system?
• leetcrew 7y ago
  I can think of several arguments for or against this, but the two important (and somewhat independent) questions to ask first are "is our target population larger than present?" and "what do we want our age distribution to look like?". making childfree adults pay more taxes is essentially a subsidy towards having children. in general when you apply a subsidy to something, you get more of it. in the west, we already face significant sacrifices to our standard of living over the next couple decades if we want to even approach a sustainable usage of our planet's resources. if we actually grow the population, we have to make even larger sacrifices. from this perspective, your tax proposal seems like a bad idea. on the other hand, we also have a looming demographic crisis as the ratio of retired to working adults increases. if nothing changes, the working population will bear a much greater burden in the future to support retirees, or we will have to drastically cut retirement benefits. from this perspective, it does seem beneficial to increase the incentive to have children (or at least blunt the disincentive a bit more). yet another perspective: childless people (in the US, at least) already pay more taxes than parents. they are ineligible to take the per-child tax deduction that you probably take every year. they also pay for services like schools which their (nonexistent) children will never consume or benefit from. there is also a negative correlation between number of children and income. because of this correlation, people with few or no children are more likely to already pay more into the system than they receive in services/benefits. they are also more likely to have adequate savings for retirement and depend less heavily on government retirement benefits. I think in an ideal world, some well-meaning experts would convene and establish a target population and age distribution for a country (or the world, but I'm trying to keep at least one foot grounded in reality). then if we're on track to meet the target, no special benefit for parents. if we're below target, a proportional tax advantage for parents. if above, a proportional penalty tax. the the tax benefit/penalty would be locked in for the next twenty years so that parents wouldn't have the rug pulled out from under them. actually maybe the penalty could be removed, seems unnecessarily punitive otherwise.
• tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  My wife is sterile due to having cervical cancer. This isn't my or her fault. Why should I pay more taxes in this situation to support your offspring?
  • raducu 7y ago
    Not my offspring since I'm quite well of myself in my country, but you should support others rearing their children in your country since the economy that will pay your pensions relies on younger people you did not raise.
• Kalium 7y ago
  It might be worth considering that there are non-punitive ways to encourage having children - universal provision of child care seems to work. Carrots tend to be more popular than sticks.
  • raducu 7y ago
    Sure, but realistically that money has to come from somewhere, I never considered that explicitly calling it a childless tax would be thought as punitive. Free childcare is why I don't think tax exemptions for parents actully work or are fair -- because low income people don't really benefit from it, the costs of raising children are pretty much fixed at a given age.
    • Kalium 7y ago
      https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704187604576288434073169462 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704187604576288... Fairness aside, the question of if it works seems reasonably well-studied. Among other things it can really decrease the disruption to someone's professional life from becoming a parent, which is something that leads a lot of people to delay or avoid doing so.
      • raducu 7y ago
        I'm all for free child care/free education, I was not saying that doesn't work, I know it helps a lot. I was making the point that tax deductions don't work because poor people don't pay a lot of taxes and their tax deductions won't cover the costs of day care. If we want to promote upwards mobility, free education is a must.
        • Kalium 7y ago
          I believe the goal in the current discussion is fertility, rather than upwards mobility. Perhaps I've misunderstood?
• JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  They already do. The EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit) applies primarily to filers who are head of household -- which, by definition, requires having at least 1 dependent. Childless people are filing single.
• n4kana 7y ago
  I agree, and I'd like to pile on with a more specific proposal. The child tax credit is $2000/child in 2019, which is laughable. I spend more than $12,000/child/yr for childcare alone for two kids (ages 8mos and 3yrs). These early years are terrifying to potential parents - it's gauntlet to reach public school age where property taxes disproportionately taxes the childless. I think that there should be a deduction for 100% of tuition for children under age 5 (not to exceed $20,000/yr/child). I.e., in the 24% tax bracket, $24,000 in tuition for two children would reduce my tax burden by $6,000. Those in higher brackets would receive a greater refund. In lower brackets, AGI would become negative and not function as a credit. In effect, the more you make, the more you get back. I think this is an elegant incentive to encourage well-earning people to make babies and continue working. There's no risk of gaming the deduction either: money will by definition go toward childcare tuition. (If there's a risk, it's that childcare will go up. I assume it would, but not 24%.) We want tax-paying parents to put more future taxpayers into the system so that we don't become Japan. The parents benefitting from a policy like this are making a significant contribution to the economy. Consider their earnings, their patronage of the childcare facility, and the promise of a preschool-educated person to become a future taxpayer. If all that sounds too convoluted, it could be more straightforward. Let's extend public education down to 3-month-olds. Or we can give parents five years paid leave from work to raise their children to public school age. Every idea I can imagine is polarizing.
  • jquery 7y ago
    Good ideas but too high minded. Any policy that actually gets implemented will be “progressive” and favor the lowest common denominator individuals. Well off people need to figure out smarter workarounds like remote work, etc.
• d1zzy 7y ago
  What's the argument for it? Here are some counter arguments: - having children means you will likely receive support in your older age that childless couples won't, how will you account for that? - having children gives you purpose, realization and satisfaction and forcibly links you with younger generations, which childless people must try to find in other places (making it easier for the childless to be depressed, become disconnected from modern technology and society, etc) - there's the ecological argument of course: as we increased in numbers the number of species has decreased, pollution, carbon output, destruction of habitats, etc has increased, it rather seems that having children should be taxed to account for these externalities (but arguably that's already done so through the additional costs associated with it) And last but not least: it is very unlikely that you were forced to have children. As an adult you made a decision knowing fully well what it carries with it (and if you didn't know there's no excuse in the Internet age to not have been able to research it). You are fully responsible for the decision and it seems unfair to me that now after having committed to it, you want to change the game rules so it goes against those that have decided different from you.
• snickerbockers 7y ago
  That's a regressive tax that punishes people who are unable to have children due to health problems, sexual identity, living conditions, or even failure to get laid. People who do have children should be taxed more instead because they're more successful, and they're the ones who benefit from higher taxes anyways due to publicly-funded education and social programs.
  • quickthrower2 7y ago
    Virgins would be exempt of course.
  • leetcrew 7y ago
    it's probably a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but it's not a "regressive" tax. lower income families tend to have more children, so this tax setup would shift tax burden higher up the income ladder. it would hurt some low income individuals, but it would help low income families as a group.
• quickthrower2 7y ago
  Can you expand on that? Because it comes off as "since I have become a parent I want other people to pay more taxes so I can pay less", because y'know more money for me is good.
• jquery 7y ago
  They do. Look at who is paying taxes in America vs who is having more kids.