Dominic has an excellent post about J. D. Vance’s argument that childless adults should pay a higher tax rate than those with children. He is correct that Vance seems ignorant about our current tax code and its implications: The tax code already taxes people without kids more heavily than it taxes those with kids. It does so not just with the child tax credit but also with the earned-income tax credit, the larger head of household deduction, dependent-care credit, and numerous other items in the tax code.
Dominic could have used this opportunity to ask the political Left that is using this video to mock Vance what all the pouncing is about. They too seem quite ignorant. They are also hypocritical, since the Left is always trying to expand the child tax credit into a universal basic income for children (with all the work disincentives that we know UBI programs have), as well as to further subsidize child care at the expense of childless adults.
I take tiny issue with one point that Dominic makes. He writes that “it’s not the content of Vance’s comments that hurt him. It’s the way in which he says them.”
My disagreement with Vance, and many others, is with the content. One of my main issues with our tax code is precisely that it punishes some taxpayers and favors others with tax credits, deductions, exemptions, and preferential tax rates. For example, renters pay more for the same amount of housing than do homeowners with mortgages; households where no one attends college pay higher taxes; and people who don’t own electric vehicles pay more than do EV owners. And, of course, the child tax credit causes adults without children to pay more in taxes than parents do. It should bother us, especially as advocates suggest expanding the child tax credit dramatically.
Call me weird, but I believe that ideally, people earning the same income should pay the same amount in taxes. I don’t believe that people making the same amount should pay more taxes simply because, in the case of the child tax credit, some of them made different family decisions than did others or faced different life circumstances (not everyone who is childless is childless by choice). I say this as someone who believes that Julian Simon was correct that people are our ultimate resource. I wish that people would have lots of children, and I find the decline in fertility troublesome.
So why not subsidize parents?
First, there is a lot of evidence that government policies don’t in fact do much to encourage having more children. But in truth, because I put a real premium on the government treating people as equally as possible, it would bother me either way.
I’ll add that, unlike Dominic, I find unpersuasive the argument that parents deserve a subsidy because kids are expensive. Lots of things we find valuable are expensive; that doesn’t justify subsidies.
It’s worth mentioning here that despite the common misconception, the cost of raising a child in the U.S. has steadily decreased since the 1960s and continues to fall. Moreover, if cost is truly an issue, our focus must be on getting the government out of the way of families. The first step should always be to remove existing government barriers.
There is a lot to do there. Vanessa Brown Calder and Chelsea Follett have a good study with suggestions about how to free American families. In the study, they propose “reforms to labor laws, child safety policies, tax and trade policy, and health policies that may affect birth and conception, in addition to education, housing, and safety policy changes that would reduce the cost of raising children.”
Once we get the government out of the way of parents, let’s reassess and decide what to do next.