Tax the Childless
slate.com
slate.com
It's easy to be in a painful situation and come to a conclusion "Things should work this way because that would benefit me". There are other things the government should do, such as tax breaks for students, and people with student loans - fostering growth and a successful youthful population is very nice. Tax breaks for people with a highschool education and better grades. Tax breaks for people who do community service, etc, etc...
Because having kids benefits everyone. It's an integral societal good with a staggeringly high individual cost. There's a reason western European countries give such generous benefits to parents like lengthy maternity/paternity leaves.
This is where economies are built. There is a premise that growth is dependent on population expansion. I think that assumption needs looking at in terms of standards of living and the future.
People are living longer but not contributing as much to society. As automation continues to take away low end jobs, we are going to have more people doing less.
We are moving from the r to the K side of r/K selection theory [1]. Our economies need to shift from quantity to quality. This is naturally happening but governments are trying to pump up growth with immigration and benefits for parents.
It's my choice to remain a student, and to do well. It's my choice to do community service, etc. etc... what's your point?
There are few things, if any, as existentially important as creating the next generation.
Some people might say that this is a puritanical and unacceptable meddling of the state in deeply personal choices, but I say fuck them! If we play our cards right we can evolve into being social insects in less than one century.
And for those who can't...? Just keep penalising them to teach them a lesson?
For 30 years I had no intimate or sexual relations with anyone. Not my choice by any means, but this proposal would have financially punished me because no-one else wanted to have a relationship with me. Thanks! A double-whammy of unhappiness.
And what about the gay community?
What about sterile people?
I am in a relationship now, with children, but strongly oppose this idea.
Is it tied into the general western notion that growth of any kind is always good? That more children will raise the GDP?
Are people afraid of what happens when the Social Security pyramid begins to crumble?
The author only gives us this unsatisfying snippet: > a steady stream of barely postpubescent brainiacs writes catchy tunes and invents breakthrough technologies that keep us entertained and make us more productive
That's easy to answer. Imagine you own a factory. The factory has two doors. In one door comes customers. In the other door comes workers.
* If you can get more customers competing for limited products in your showroom, you can raise prices and become richer.
* If you can get more workers competing for limited positions on your factory floor, you can reduce wages and become richer.
* In every way, population increase enriches the owners of (a) capital, and (b) means of production.
So, exactly why would you not argue for a higher population? And why would you not fight birth control, contraception and abortion, education, voting rights and gender equality for women, and sex education in the schools?
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the conservative agenda just happens to fight for unlimited population growth, both here and abroad.
I chose not to breed - I have bad genetic stock, I don't think its wise for me to contribute my portion forward.
If not through taxes, then how?
the author also assumes more children are a good thing. i think in the future people who look at china's one child policy as barbarism will change their mind.
- They get a deduction for each child (since they're dependents). This came to $3800 per child on the 2012 tax form (that amount is exempt from taxes).
- If your filing status is "head of household" (e.g., you have dependents), you pay lower tax rates than a single person.
Plus, there are similar benefits on state income taxes.
This is exactly the problem. People are choosing, quite wisely, to not have kids, so our birth rates are sub-replacement. That's bad, so we need to incentivize people to have more of them. Raising children is a pretty classic externality: benefits accrue to society because we all benefit from continued human existence, but the costs are borne by individual parents.
maybe for your chosen social group, but global population growth is about 1.2% per year.
As well as their common sense (for those who choose not to have children). :)
The Chinese have the right idea -- they encourage one child per family (an idea that works better in cities than in the countryside), against substantial public ignorance and resistance. If we adopted the opposite policy, we would once again show ourselves to be far behind the times.
it is my impression that the specific form that "works better" takes is that it's extremely difficult to enforce in the countryside.
Citation needed.
Quote: "Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five - 3.1 million children each year."
I invite anyone to try to dismiss the fact that 3.1 million children starve to death each year.
http://www.wfp.org/hunger/causes
100 billion seems like it would be a challenge.
"842 million people in the world do not have enough to eat. This number has fallen by 17 percent since 1990."
We have 1.9 billion more people today than we had in 1990, and we are failing to feed fewer individuals. We're not just feeding more people. We're not even just leaving a smaller percentage starving. We have many more people, and fewer people are starving. "There are too many people, relative to how much food we can produce" is not the dominant effect here.
Bullshit. We'd need over 100 billion people on Earth for that to be anywhere near a sane thought. See, e.g.: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2006/09/overp...
You know, it can't hurt to get in touch with reality from time to time:
http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
Quote: "Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five - 3.1 million children each year."
We have seven billion people on the planet, and according to the UN, almost one billion of those people aren't being fed adequately. So we should have 100 billion people? By what cockeyed reasoning?
Can we say two? Would still lead to a population decrease over time, and given the risks my brothers and I took growing up I'd want some redundancy...