Tax childless adults

[Acidburn]

Hi all

Just saw the below article on LBC news:

www.lbc.co.uk/news/childless-tax-birthrate-uk-cost-of-living-paul-morland/

AIBU to think that this insane?

Do you get how absolutely heartless and unempathetic your comment was to someone who clearly absolutely wanted children and couldn't have them.

I don't understand why immigration isn't more widely accepted as the obvious answer to an aging population. I live in Malaysia and they have a specific visa for domestic workers from specified lower income countries, you can sponsor a domestic worker if you've got young kids or are elderly.

Exactly! We’ve spent £50k on IVF, soon to be £60k. It’s not for want of fvckkng trying that we don’t have kids!

IT’S NOT A CHOICE TO BE CHILDLESS!

I think it’s really interesting idea to encourage our society to think very differently about children.

Not everyone is childless by choice.

Some people can't have children. Others may have lost their child/ children - this is just cruel.

Surely this would disproportionately affect gay couples and is therefore discriminatory?

It's a bonkers idea to penalise those who don't have children, whatever the reason they are childless.

I think they need to improve things for working parents, so better maternity/paternity pay, parental leave and of course cheaper childcare. I've no idea where this money would come from though? Taxing people who don't have children isn't the the answer, could you imagine the outcry if someone was gay and paying more tax because they dont have children, can't see it going down well!

What crap - there are all kinds of reasons why people don't have kids. My DiL has brittle diabetes and is certainly not well enough to get pregnant. So I'll have no grandchildren, to have children for her would be extremely irresponsible.
What about those who cannot have children?

Erm - immigration can be used to fill the gap!

Yes it will. There may be a couple of messy decades where we have more elderly than young, but with the climate emergency we are going to have that anyway.

None of my group of friends have kids, not because they can't or don't want them, its because none of us can afford our own homes, none of us earn enough, and none of us have jobs that would let us be able to actually parent a child. And most importantly, they know that if they broke up with the childs father they would be completely fucked over with child support and wouldn't be able to feed the kid. Fix housing, fix the cost of living, fix the work until you die culture, and fix how you support single parents, and then you'll get more babies.

Do you get how absolutely heartless and unempathetic your comment was to someone who clearly absolutely wanted children and couldn't have them.

I have been where you are. It's easy and natural to take every last utterance people with children make completely personally. But there was nothing that the poster you quoted said that isn't true - having children costs a fortune. People who say "all they need is love" are wrong.

@Dancingwithhyenas and would taxing disabled people more also not be an ‘interesting idea’? They cost society. The elderly have assets (as a class) are expensive and economically useless, let’s tax them too. Do need an ‘interesting rethink’ about our elderly as they are at the other end of our demographic bulge?

FGS, it is terrifying that anyone is taking this even remotely seriously.

Would you also think it was an interesting idea to ban abortion to raise child birth rates

Would you also think it was an interesting idea to enforce arranged marriages to raise child birth rates

Would you also think it was an interesting idea to stop women from working to raise child birth rates

Would you also think it was an interesting idea to ban contraception to raise child birth rates

Would you also think it was an interesting idea to ban homosexuality to raise child birth rates (plenty of children before have been born to women who would not otherwise have had them because they had no choice but to marry)

Would you also think it was an interesting idea if parents were forced to adopt children who were abandoned because of some of the above practices?

Would you think it was an interesting idea if fertile poor women were forced to become surrogates for rich childless couples to avoid this tax?

Or is it just when it only impacts childless people and not the rest of the population its an interesting idea?

Possibly because we don't want to exploit people from low income countries and try to control immigration by ensuring its for legitimate reasons?

@Ducksinthebath quite. People with no children don’t use lots of services but still end up paying for them indirectly

I have had 2 failed rounds of IVF so would l get discount, as l have tried quite hard to have children?!

That reply to that comment was horrific.

That comment was personal. It was a comment to a poster who said they were desperately sad they couldn't have children. To which another poster replied to them specifically and personally that at least they would be richer.

If it had been a general comment on the thread then that's one thing. But to a person directly, no thats heartless and unempathetic and very very personal.

my SIL in Israel is renting and she is pregnant with her first DC. Indeed the housing crisis in Israel is even more serious than in the UK (it is much more expensive and private renting is also precarious; you need a 30% deposit to buy in israel etc). Indeed the birth rate in israel is the highest in the OECD; its quite common for secular israeli women with careers to have children. Childcare provision is much better and the child benefits are better, but life is still expensive so I would not say that it is child friendly esp from a finances perspective.

my DH and I live in London and own our flat and probably on a higher household income, but we are still waiting despite being happily married for 8 years (I am 30 this year) cos I plan to upgrade in the next few years and want to do so without a child being factored in the affordability criteria.

I think the reason why my SIL is pregnant and I am not has less to do with our individual financial situations. Its because Israel is a much more tribal society and they celebrate families and children. The UK is much more individualistic and this influences our decisions.

This is an excerpt from an article:

'But while elsewhere in the West, middle-class families might limit the number of children they have because of the cost of raising them, in Israel that rationale is heard less frequently.
Ron Ganot, who was selling collapsible, lightweight wagons for children at the BabyLand event, says he and his wife are expecting their third child. Family is central to his life, he says, and he gets together every week with relatives.
“We definitely need more money, and we have rising expenses,” he says, “but I want a large family and the cost of living won’t stop us.”

childless adults don't have the costs involved in raising a child so don't need the benefit.
Not receiving a benefit is nothing like a 'reverse tax'.

*quite common for secular israeli women to have 3 children...

It would take ages and be really very grim until it does.

So taxing people who are infertile?
Taxing those who know they should not have children and so do not?
Sounds a very poorly thought out idea.

Exactly, if anything we want to discourage birth rates long term (and that’s what’s predicted) because the forecasts are that we don’t have the environment to support this many people at this level of resource consumption. That’s also the reason a childless tax is highly unlikely.

You’ll get short termist politicians trying to prop it up with less overt taxes and policies but if they were after a quick solution to the population burden they’d be looking at reducing the bulge before they hit retirement not the bottom.

https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2022/07/why-the-birth-rate-is-falling

But there’s something more specific to the UK happening, too. For the last few years, the number of women who don’t have kids by their 30th birthday has climbed steadily. But the number who don’t have them by 45 — the point at which the ONS says, in a phrase unnervingly reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, women “complete childbearing” — has remained fairly flat since the early 2000s. The obvious reading of this data is that women are leaving it later to have children; having fewer kids and a lower national fertility rate are the inevitable results.

Why would they be doing this? This is where we get to the easy question I mentioned: because having a child requires both money and stability, and for more than a decade now the entire world seems to have been conspiring to deny the under-40s either. Since 2007 this country and its economy has rolled from crisis to crisis: the crash, the recession, austerity, the next recession brought about by austerity, Brexit, the pandemic, another recession (a really big one this time) exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. Anyone under 35 has never known the good times.

What they have known, though, is an economy in which wages barely rise, a huge pile of debt if they’re a graduate and a housing market in which the only way to attain secure housing is to buy but the only way of buying is to inherit money, move a long way from the best jobs markets or, preferably, both. Throw in the cost of childcare, often compared to a second mortgage — which, given the size of mortgages these days, is no small deal — and the whole venture seems prohibitively, terrifyingly expensive.

Basically this ^^ and nothing will be done as it's too big and hard.

We're a decade older but got hit badly in 2007 and had been struggling before then due to getting on housing ladder by ourselves no inheritance and having kids relatively young DH was 30. We had our last just before and it was mainly dire and dangerous maternity care that put us off more a lack of job security and housing played a role as well.