rahvin quote:
<< Athanasius, the answer is quite simple. There is a major difference between taxing someone to support something that benefits all of society (a public school system) and REWARDING someone by taxing them LESS for having a child. >>
Your answer is quite simple, and it is the same general rule that I would apply in sorting through tax issues. But its implications are not so simple. Who decides whether something benefits all of society or not? I guess Locke's capitalistic "theorems" of "life, liberty, and the possession of personal property" are (or were) the guidelines for this society.
Does the society itself determine its own "financial/taxation ethics"?
Apparently, such a concept was a major cause of our own war for independence. You obviously believe that a government sponsored public school system benefits all of society. I tend to agree, with reservations. Should any government be responsible for educating the children? Or should that be the parents' prime responsibility. Encouraging both parents to leave the home and work (when a significant percentage don't really need to) because an entrenched public school system provides easy day care isn't necessarily the best solution either. Is that really the government's responsibility?Incidently, I am not anti-public schools. After leaving the private sector, my wife became a certified public school teacher with a masters in education. As I mentioned before, she now chooses to saty home and focus on us as parents raisng our own children.
So, if I understand your reasoning, our tax policy should be based on supporting those institutions that benefit all of society. But I think it is self-evident that encouraging one parent to stay at home and providing a stable home environment that requires less tax-assisted day care, less tax-assisted before school and after school care is a good thing. How is it rewarding some one to take less of their taxes to support an institution (the dual-parent, single-income family) that is almost certainly the best domestic environment for raising children who will grow up responsible, family-oriented, tax-paying contributors to society? Probably, my kids' income taxes will be paying for your Medicare (or whatever form of socialized medicine we adopt) and Social Security.
Doesn't the "prototype" family concept I defined above benefit all of society? If so, then where does the government decide which instituions to support with tax money and which ones to ignore? An "income tax break" for someone who has no income (a stay at home parent) is probably an oxymoron, but the concept of "society wins when a parent can be 'tax-encouraged' to stay home" is sound. If my wife stays out of the work force for ten or fifteen years, and raises four honest, hard working, tax-paying contributors to society who work a forty or fifty year "career" (minus some time taken to possibly raise their own children), hasn't the government more than recovered its "investment" in letting such families keep a little bit more of their income taxes? Keep in mind that larger families do support this economy by consuming more. They need more food, more housing, more cars, more clothes, more of everything. So, even while supposedly not contributing in "income tax", in consumption based issues, larger families are contributing. And, as I said above, they will eventually contribute tremendously in income taxes and everything else.
BTW, I am not a die-hard liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat, libertarian, or other political philosophy.
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