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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

There's two things I think you've overlooked. One thing is that politically it's easier for benefits to remain sticky if everyone benefits from it vs a subpopulation. That's why universal income has stronger support than welfare benefits. Additionally, when you don't have means testing, the bureaucracy is a lot more straightforward and politicians can't mess with it by effectively cutting the program by increasing the administrative burden.

> We are lucky that we can afford to do this.

This is the second piece. What about people who are on the margin who aren't wealthy enough to do this and the subsidy would hep them achieve this? The subsidy could help the mom stay home and maybe do part-time work from home even. The thing that's easiest to miss when you're well on one side of a boundary is only looking at the other side of the boundary instead of also looking at where that boundary is drawn.

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I addressed your second point in another comment. If voters thought there was a societal advantage to financially encourage stay-at-home parenthood with a subsidy, I'd be open to listen to the pros and cons of that, too, but that's kind of a separate issue. This one is about easing the burden for those who already pay for professional childcare, including those on the margin.

The first point is just unfortunate humanity crab bucket mentality. "Others shouldn't benefit if I don't." I don't think there's anything we can do about that :(

It's not a crab bucket mentality. Subsidizing one group that competes in the same markets (e.g. only dual income families, who compete with single income families for housing in desirable areas to raise kids) actually increases costs for the unsubsidized group. It doesn't just make them relatively worse off, but absolutely worse off. It shifts the margin of who can afford a single family lifestyle, all else equal.

Since it's subsidizing specific behavior and not merely being poor or whatever, people will naturally look at whether they think that behavior ought to be incentivized, or whether the government should stay neutral.

My wife is also a stay at home mom, and I've argued before that an increase in the child tax credit with a phase out for high income (so we might not qualify) makes more sense than a childcare credit/deduction for this reason. Then you're just subsidizing having kids, which seems fine to me (assuming we're subsidizing anything) since that's sort of necessary to sustain society.

Yea, more dual-income families means:

- Bidding up the price of housing

- Fewer parents active in overseeing the schools, volunteering to fix up the community, etc.

- Less general slack for parents to help each other out

- Fewer mom friends around during the day, less social life for existing stay-at-home moms

- Peer pressure and implicit societal pressure to work a career

- Parents sending their kids to camps and aftercare, rather than having kids free-range around the neighborhood and play with friends, so fewer playmates for the non-camp/non-daycare kids.

The number of people in this thread workshopping their libertarian edge cases on an item of immediate importance strongly suggests the crab bucket. The comments don't reflect an understanding of the situation people are in or a grasp of the dynamics that led to it.

How is advocating for a larger unconditional child credit libertarian? As someone else in the thread pointed out, it's effectively UBI for children. It's literally advocating for more people to receive government subsidies. It's not even a crazy proposal since we already have a refundable child tax credit, so it's a matter of making it bigger.

Anything that might lead more towards decentralizing societal structure away from the state and quasi-state subsidized institutions back towards family units is considered "libertarian" on HN. Truly universal childcare "UBI" puts the power back into the hands of parents, rather than society taxing then lording over the head of parents as to which people are allowed to care for their children with it, just not funded in a libertarian manner. This is seen as a reduction in the power of the state which is a libertarian aim.

So we've come to a crossroads where something profoundly un-libertarian is viewed by the anti-libertarians as libertarian because it incidentally achieves some of its aims.

> One thing is that politically it's easier for benefits to remain sticky if everyone benefits from it vs a subpopulation. That's why universal income has stronger support than welfare benefits.

It is funny to say this in this specific conversation. The exact logic you are using to support rebates for stay at home parents applies to childless people. So why are you drawing the line exactly where you are drawing it and why is that a better place than where this policy is currently drawing it?

If the logic was applied even more generally, it would read: "If any Group X gets Benefit Y, then everyone must also get Benefit Y." Applied universally, it totally defeats the point of subsidies.

Yes, but that should be the point. Public goods are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable. Subsidies fail these conditions. On what grounds should we delegate nonpublic goods/services be provided by the government and not the private sector?

The argument is that producing children has massive positive externalities; there is value created for society that is not captured by the parent. In economics terms, all gains-from-trade for the child's future labor is a positive for society that the parent will not capture. Or for illustration, imagine nobody had any children. You would get to retirement age and find you could not buy food because there was no one to farm, you could not get healthcare because there were no more doctors and nurses or construction workers to build hospitals.

Of course the tricky thing is that not all children produce positive externalities, some have massively negative externalities and a naive subsidy might encourage the wrong kind of reproduction ...

Anyways, if you don't want any subsidies, one policy change is to eliminate general social security and simply have each retiree get the social security money paid only from their own children. Social security is not a savings plan or insurance, what it actually is is a socialized version of the current generation of children paying for their parents retirement. The non-socialized version is just the parents getting money of the kids that they raised themselves, and if you did not put in the work of raising kids, you don't get social security.

Yes.

I’m unable to get the electric car tax credit for this year because my income is too high. However I’m likely to be laid off next year. Seems like I should get the benefit as my group status will change.

This is a great point, and the obvious answer is the government should provide zero subsidies or welfare programs. Every single program creates moral hazard and deadweight loss. Iterate your question to conclusion, and you will arrive there.

What the government should encourage is charitable donations, and when I say that, I mean the mere act of it. There should be no tax incentive for doing so.

Where children are concerned, if anything, perhaps make the sales tax on child-related services zero, and increase sales tax on luxury goods associated with sink or dink households. At least that methodology provides the opportunity to forgo the penalties.

Childless people are free to start businesses to provide services that can take advantage of those rebates.

The argument you’re making in general is a valid one about subsidies, it’s a weird argument to make regarding children since having children is the only way society survives. Unless your claim is that we’re overpopulated but generally people in developed countries are not reproducing, and a meaningful part of that does appear to be the cost.

So the answer is that this specific subsidy is net beneficial as we want to make it easier for people to have and raise kids, not least of which because it produces better adults when those kids grow up and makes society healthier.

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