Unpopular opinion I've held since before I became a parent: childless people should pay more taxes.
When you consider that propagating the species goes hand in hand with future social security payments, this isn't that radical of an idea.
America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
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Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#32Unpopular opinion I've held since before I became a parent: childless people should pay more taxes.
How much taxes do they pay at the moment? What is the fair amount of taxes they should pay, in your opinion?
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.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the argument that dual-income households becoming necessities for home ownership and raising a family is plausible, if unsupported. "Elizabeth Warren’s book, The Two-Income Trap, explained Before she was a politician, Warren wrote a controversial book about family life and economics. The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families hav…
As a Northern European it does seem a bit of a bad deal that women are expected to work but there isn't much of a guarantee for parental leave, affordable child care or even vacation. But I guess there isn't that much precedent for such things.
That expectation is rather cruel. For decades, women who make motherhood their "careers" have been looked down on as somehow inferior to women who pursue careers. Even the terminology used to describe such women is disparaging and loaded with shame and disappointment, as if the woman in question had chosen or had been forced to choose an inferior option. That she is in some sense a failure for prioritizing her children over her career.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think this is entirely true. Keep in mind that while earners have increased, households used to be much bigger, with more children and more extended relatives living together. And children and even young unmarried women used to work. So purely single income households weren’t a particularly long time. A bigger issue is that a lot of formerly big housing, at least in New York, has now been subdivided, since th…
Roommates are mostly a side-effect of banning SROs. If the NIMBYs had their way they'd be illegal too. Urban singles needing housing isn't new.
It's also no longer socially taboo for single roommates of mixed genders to live together. And of course people are staying single longer, meaning that there are now more urban singles.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#35Unpopular opinion I've held since before I became a parent: childless people should pay more taxes.
But...we do?
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.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#36Unpopular opinion I've held since before I became a parent: childless people should pay more taxes.
So you support the current system?
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#37See that column of "white college grad, no kids" -what do you think happens demographically to that column in 10/15 years time? Sure, some people move on. But, also, some people stay and have kids.
Come back in 50 years and say if this was a glitch in a trend or not Demographics is sometimes a story which is only really told in hindsight.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#38I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside. Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions w…
And eliminate US style separate zoning. European mixed use zoning is much more "social" allowing shorter commutes to work and shorter trips to retail.
I think the places your parent comment was characterizing are the ones with mixed use zoning. Think Manhattan, shops on the first floor, office and housing space above. All of the parent's points stand.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much taxes do they pay at the moment? What is the fair amount of taxes they should pay, in your opinion?
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.
> 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.
Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births
#40Unpopular opinion I've held since before I became a parent: childless people should pay more taxes.
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.