Currently the cost of raising children is privatized while the benefits are socialized.
The most astute observation I've seen on the topic is that in a capitalistic system in which monetary value is assigned to everything, the value of children is deeply negative and therefore they are not desirable. By having children, most couples are putting their stability, wellbeing, and long-term prospects on the line. The opportunity cost is staggering. If more children is the desired outcome, that tradeoff must cease to exist, and a lousy $2k isn't anything remotely close to that.
There's not really a solution that doesn't involve heavy restructuring in one place or another.
$2K or even $20K is meaningless for a parent making $100K or more.
Kids have a negative value to a professional class member.
If you engage in agriculture or some similar activity, a child as old as 10 can be a helping hand in some way or the other. No surprises that Amish farmers have a high birth rate.
I think for many the desire is there, but sufficient de-risking is required for them to be comfortable with acting upon it.
They might. Or they might not.
There is always a $1M home, $10M home, $100M personal jet + yacht ...
The surrogacy market charges $200K, and that too just for ~12 months (9-months of pregnancy + fertilization).
At that rate, to produce 1 million children, you have to pay $200 Billion.
So, ~ one trillion a year to produce 4 million babies in the US to maintain the population. Who will fund it?
How's everyone enjoying their tariff rebate checks? Any servicemembers care to share how they spent their warrior dividend?
CRA is even pretty careful about letting a spouse claim capital gains income; it's always attributed back to whoever earned the original principal (outside of inheritance). I think the only way around this is to formally "loan" the spouse their investment money, but you have to charge them interest and the interest is of course income to you.
A couple each home earns x, each gets taxed on x. Each gets the tax free allowance on the fist £12.5k of the annual income. Each gets the full basic rate slice before they hit higher bands etc.
If one of the couple earns 2x and the other zero, then only one can use their tax free allowance and they get one slice of the basic rate band etc.
They still have the same pre-tax income for the same household.
Personally I think people should be allowed to opt in to sharing taxable income.
What fraud?
> You will then get the argument of "why should I be taxed more because I'm single"?
You might, but its a dishonest argument. You are taxing households together. You are giving each individual the same amount of tax free income and the same amount in the lower bands.
It is already possible for self employed people to do this by making their spouses a partner or shareholder in the business or similar. This is just extending the same rights to employed people.
And as for not seeing how a tax cut based on 2 people living together could not be abused, you must be very short sighted.
Taxation is a strange, mixed-up world.
Are you in a funky state with bad tax policy?
The main benefit of filing jointly is when one spouse earns more than other, so filing jointly distributes their combined AGI evenly between the two spouses and together they fall in the lowest tax bracket possible for that amount of income, whereas if they file separately the one earning more has their income taxed at higher rates not offset by amount that the the lesser-earning spouse "saves" in their lower bracket. This is especially pronounced if one spouse earns so little that it comes in under the standard deduction or simply doesn't work at all. (That's almost $16,000 of tax-free income.)
Due to progressive taxation, we tax two people who make $50,000 less than someone who makes $100,000 which is where the tax savings come from.
At a broad level, offering benefits for marriage solves political problem, married people tend to vote so need to be catered to. It also solves societal one, marriage tends to be better at extremely broad strokes for society. Married Couples live longer, commit less crime, kids in married households generally have better outcomes and so forth. So politicians in United States decided to incentive it.
Because married couples form a household and it allows them to share child care and work as they see fit.
If you tax individuals, you're encouraging both to earn the same amount of money.
If you tax couples, it encourages the higher earner to keep working, thus you have a higher overall productivity.
Thus you have freedom and higher overall productivity in favor of shared tax burden.
I’d like solid numbers of how much I’m overpaying to do the work the government refuses to (sheltering folks, ensuring nutritious foodstuffs).
If people find this interesting, I will open-source and allow contributions to support other country's tax systems.
Switching tax brackets is a categorical change which needs to occur before there is a difference.
I just found the idea of the ring being paid for by the IRS funny.
wkaisertexas•2h ago
bell-cot•2h ago
wkaisertexas•1h ago
toast0•1h ago
Hard to value that though.