> I think the incentives could be fixed in a simple (not easy) way, by not letting childless people benefit from the safety net spanned by children of other people.
Yeah this is the only serious fix, but once childless people become a large % of the electorate (aka it's a real problem), they can vote against assuming responsibility for the problem they created... and your country is basically in an inescapable doom loop.
> I will discount your opinions to zero on anything else of consequence
I’d settle for a much higher tax rate for the voluntarily childless to very inadequately offset the lack of contributing to the next generation. Probably the best way to implement this is that the child tax credit should be much bigger.
> In the long run the best way to balance the books is to borrow money and spend it on childcare and child tax credits to encourage having children, spending it on nurse training, et cetera.
I do not know that this is possible without sufficiently high taxes and policies such that a life without kids is seen as undesirable relative to a life with kids. And that is going to be very, very politically unpopular because it is a lot of pain in the short term for long term gains unattributable to the individual.
Quite an interesting problem, and I have no idea how this shakes out for my kids and their potential kids.
> Are you suggesting we make their parents "pay" somehow? Or a program to prevent the parents from having 5+ kids when they don't have the resources?
Due to the way government assistance is structured it encourages parents to 1) not get married, 2) have more kids, 3) not begin working if they don't already work.
If we changed government assistance to encourage parents getting married that would help reduce fatherlessness and all of the negatives that come with that.
If we changed government assistance to encourage parents to have less children they would be better able to take care of the ones they have.
If we changed government assistance to encourage parents to work it would reduce the number of people who grow up on government assistance and live on it their whole lives. This would have long term positive consequences.
At least in the US, we provide a credit for each child someone claims as a dependent on a tax return.
> The second idea is vile and destructive. Someone elects to have more than one child, and you come in storming to deduct from their payrolls and tax their income as if you deliberately want to wage a war of attrition against the parents' standard of living for raising a child.
Uhh, that's how tax policy works. You tax things you don't want people to do, and provide deductions or credits for things you do want them to do.
One way to give them more money and not incentivize single parenthood (which is the issue, not divorce, and treating them as equivalent has always been wrong and is increasingly so as marriage rates drops) is to go to UBI instead of means-tested aid, or, if using means testing, use a means-testing formula which doesn't punish two-parent families.
> Children being raised by single mothers is not a good outcome.
Its a lot better than children being raised by two parents together, one of which is abusing them and/or the other parent, which any change which does more to avoid incentivizing divorce or single-parenthood more than eliminating any two-parent penalty would incentivize, especially for the poor.
> We already heavily subsidise child-rearing through taxes and other benefits.
The US and most other Western countries run huge budget deficits at essentially zero interest costs. This is only possible because creditors have full faith in the ability of future tax payers to meet debt obligations.
In light of that, I’d say the overall balance is that those with children are massively subsidizing the childless.
> We should work towards counteracting those systemic incentives, by making it easier for middle class, educated people to have kids (an example would be % tax breaks for each child, which would be more money for middle class people).
Yes, and we should also reduce poverty as well, no? So that we can make it easier for currently-poor to have kids as well?
> that will incentivize some people to have more kids simply to get more money.
This sounds like the edge case a non-parent would bring up. People who make poor life choices make them for far less insightful reasons that time-value calculus.
It would take an unbelievable amount of money for me to have another kid. It would be cheaper to buy my retirement.
> Extremely unlikely there will ever be a will to do this considering the long term value to be compensated (hundreds of thousands of dollars per child, if not $1MM).
Parent here. You don’t need $1mm to raise a kid. You don’t need anywhere close to that, actually.
Kids aren’t free, obviously, but this internet meme that they’ll bankrupt you is getting out of control.
Honestly, how do you think people making the median US household income are affording kids? Multiple kids, even? I hope it’s obvious that households with two kids earning <$100K per year (a common situation) aren’t spending $1mm on each of them.
> This would lead to more social care towards people with children. How would you recommend solving that?
I'm sorry, what's the issue? If we need children and need to incentivize it, it's what we'll do. And by definition, you're talking about advantages only to counterbalance new disadvantages. So we need to solve what?
> Myself and many of my friends who have decided to have zero children or only one child rather late in life ... So, how do you address that issue? Telling people to just suck it up and accept childbearing as their duty isn’t going to work.
What I predict will happen:
Government will reduce pension and social security payments to those that did not support the system by having 2 or more well-raised children.
I would also accept "pay people to not have kids", similar to how some countries pay people to have kids [1] [2] [3] [4]. Not having kids has value, and hence those who choose not to should be compensated appropriately.
EDIT: @EForEndeavour: People who have children receive tax credits and benefits simply for having them (US centric) and their future impacts are externalities.
> Wait until you have kids about to go to college or, if you are unlucky, alimony and child-support obligations.
From both my studies of the tax code and comparison with people who have between one to four dependents, it seems to me the US tax code mitigates these factors with exemptions (~$4k per dependent?) and various deductions/credits ($2k and up). It's also easy to see how the expenses of having a child could outstrip that, of course, but the point is that (a) it's not as if people making policy decisions have particularly decided to ignore this factor and (b) as if we couldn't visit this issue as long as we're dreaming about how we structure things.
Heck, a guaranteed income might well apply to the kids we're talking about.
> Or major medical not covered by insurance.
Yeah, the US system kindof sucks. We've socialized the costs of most expensive phase of people's lives, we privatize the "market"* for the healthiest and most productive, and we pay from the public treasury more than any other civilized nation per capita for the privilege of having inadequate coverage for major and minor events. You can also deduct a lot of this from your tax burden, though.
> I am against one-year parental leaves. My wife and I want ten children. That means ten years off work?
You are an outlier in terms of how many children you want. This sort of benefit is intended to help with people who have the median number of children (1.9 in the US today) [1].
The way to deal with outlying cases like yours is to rapidly phase out the benefit as you move far above the median, so you only get the benefit for the first N children.
We already do this today with income-based tax-credit phaseouts for tax mechanisms like the investment and education tax credits.
That's not at all to say that you shouldn't have that many children, but rather that after a certain number of children, it's only in your personal interest to have them, and not in society's.
Not getting dependent/child tax credits already does this.
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