Doing the rounds on the web the other day, I came across this article on Garth Turners blog in which a letter writer pleads with Garth to address “the unfair taxation to which working parents are subjected.”
Sounds good so far. I think the majority of Canadians could get behind something being done about the tax burden carried by middle and lower income Canadians, commonly referred to as “working families” since this seems to be the most common living arrangement in our society.
But the writer starts to lose me when he laments, “Canada is one of the only developed countries in the world that does not encourage larger families by offering substantial tax deductions for children…..Ottawa needs to go further…..For our family, the cost of daycare is the main deterrent to having a third child…..The Harper government’s child benefits were a step in the right direction, but are wholly ineffective at convincing a family with two children to have a third.”
Please enlighten me, why should we encourage a third child? The writer seems to feel that it would benefit our society to have families with three or more children. Indeed, he thinks this is required by our economy, and that encouragement of this should be official government policy.
Garth responds, talking about his plan for income splitting that he has been pushing for so long and also talking about the many ways that our government is against the middle class family. The post is even titled “War on the family.” I did note, however, that Garth never responds directly to the underlying premise that the government should/must change the rules in order to encourage larger families.
As I’ve written before here and here, I disagree with Garth about income splitting, particularly the scheme promoted by Garth Turner designed to “encourage child-bearing.”
I’ve stated many times that our economy requires a growing population in order to function. On this point the letter writer and I will agree. But that is where we part ways.
His view is that we must do more to encourage larger families. Mine is that we must change this economic requirement.
This requirement for a growing population is the problem that must be addressed. We do NOT need some half baked, short sighted plan to encourage population growth so that we can keep pushing the inevitable reality of unsustainability further into the future.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about population control or any sort of limitation on people’s right to choose the family life. If you choose to have children or not, that’s your personal choice and I support your right to make it. But I do believe that it is unfair to penalize those who choose not to have children by having a tax system that favours those that do. And I also believe that our government should be addressing the underlying problem of this economic requirement, not just slapping on the band-aid of increasing our population of taxpayers, either through encouraging more kids or through immigration.
Global over-population is at the heart of many of our modern problems, including resource depletion and climate change. It’s time we stopped avoiding the inconvenient truth.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I also do not endorse the argument that Turner uses to promote having babies. But I support income splitting, not forced but as a tax option. In the US you can declare as single, married but taxed separately, married and taxed jointly, or head of household (Single parent). The range is what matters and also having tax brackets within that so the rich do end up paying their fair share.
Our conference on income splitting addressed some of the issues you mention. See website above.
I think that we don’t need to favor those who have children but right now we penalize them because raising a child costs about $190,000 to age 19 and reduces ability to pay tax. Yet we have nearly no tax recognition of that cost. To level the playing field would recognize the fact that it does cost money to raise a future citizen and we all benefit from there being future citizens to perpetuate society.
I also do not feel that free daycare motivates anyone to have babies. The decision to have a baby is usually based on money (can we afford it) and lifestyle (How will we provide care). Free daycare prejudices the options unless the funding flows with the child. Other wise the state is saying it only values parents who are not taking are of their own kids – which is a lifestyle bias the state has no right to make