To think women with 3+ kids should pay less taxes

[WhatTodoALL]

All parties will have to deal with the increasing number of old people and low fertility rate. They use this fact to justify big numbers of net migration. I was wondering if we as a country should actively provide economical benefits for women to have more than one child? In some countries like Singapore there are a lot of economic incentives to have more than 2 kids. I have 3 kids myself and I don't know anyone in my friendship group who would have more than 2. In fact, most don't want to have even one child citing economical reasons.

AIBU?

In the short term, yes. In five, ten, fifteen years time when she's either returning to full time employment with a full set of years on her employers' pension, or restarting the job hunt from scratch with an empty cv, not so much.

One thing that needs addressing for parents though is the child support system. Too many absent parents are getting away with not paying their full share of child support, or not paying it at all).

The issue then is the failure of society and employers to value the job of child rearing. Many transferable skills, and as other people often get paid to do it (childcare) why shouldn't it count as work experience?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62892596
I will have a wild guess that raising birth rates may not be solely attributed to taxes

The world is not over populated because families in the UK have 1.8 children. It's overpopulated because some countries have families with 5 children and many women there have no rights and no contraception - having one child per family in the UK won't stop global population increases.

Indeed @fitzwilliamdarcy

I read somewhere just recently that in the UK, most people do not pay enough tax over their lifetimes to become nett contributors. The threshold for becoming a nett contributor is to earn over £65k (in 2024 figures). So some of us have been nett contributors for over half of our working lives - I think we've paid AND some for our care in old age ...

Exactly! Maybe you should be paying more taxes, not less.

That would be interesting to know.
People on MN also write outraged posts when someone suggests childcare should be free/ heavily subsidised (“It was your decision to have kids!!”), yet many other countries are doing exactly that.

And I'll still be paying quite a bit of income tax when I retire.

@Againname I partially agree with you. But that is what happened in the seventies and eighties. It lead to lots of single mothers never working again.

while I understand the economic argument that more kids=more tax collected, I think the environmental reasons not to encourage lots of children are very strong

I agree. I think all public services would have to be better though. It would annoy me to see well off middle class people getting free childcare and paying school fees and for private medical care, when I can't even get a dentist.

As a single, childfree woman should I pay more tax @WhatTodoALL ?

There are no holes in my argument. It’s a pressing issue for most developed countries who are all scratching their heads over the impending demographic crisis.

Without most women choosing to birth tiny future taxpayers, we don’t have a taxpayer base and so in the future we no longer can afford to live in a society where we enjoy healthcare, state pensions, police, schools and other basic social benefits.

I apparently pay more tax than a very very significant percentage of the population; doesn’t mean I can’t see that we need people to raise children to protect our way of life.

And while you are at it, also look up the correlation between Nicholas Cage movies and deaths from drowning in swimming pools...

This is the problem.

As soon as you start a dialogue about this, people think you're some sort of murderer who wants to compulsorily bump off the over-80s.

Although that's not what anyone sane or compassionate would be advocating, there's no doubt that a large part of the problem we face is that not only are we living longer, but a lot of us are living longer in expensive, miserable ill-health.

I'm not sure we will necessarily reach this equilibrium because I think smaller families are here to stay. If there are less children, and then they have fewer or no children, the population will continue to decline. Although with the death of the baby boomers, the pyramid will become less inverted.

I think if anything you should pay less. If we were to go down a super individualistic road, which isn't good for society cohesion. You definitely shouldn't have to pay more though.

@PeachHedgehog That was a problem, true. There would need to be a change in society and employers attitudes. Parenting should be more valued and if someone's taken time out to be a SAHP (by choice, as it shouldn't be forced) society and employers should recognise their transferable skills, and welcome and support them back to the workplace.

Noooooo

I believe better investment in childcare and elderly care would be more beneficial. Make it financially make sense for women to return to work thus more money from taxation. Use the extra to fund adult and elderly social care. The elderly are living longer with chronic conditions. Create more community hospitals as a go between from hospital back into the community stopping city hospital bed blocking and allow more beds for surgery and acute patients

Very generalised view but I don't think allowing the rich and well off more tax breaks is the answer

I think the way to combat paying for an increasingly elderly population to is drastically increase the retirement age. Current levels no longer make sense.

When the state retirement age was introduced in 1908 it was set at 70 when the average life expectancy was 50. It was reduced to 65 (men) and 60 (women) in 1940 when the life expectancy was 60.

Life expectancy is now around 80 yet state retirement age is only 67.

That together with the dawn of the digital revolution therefore people are more than capable of working beyond 67 as most are not working physically demanding jobs means that the only answer is to increase retirement age to closer to 80.

Why should my kids have to slog their guts out and pay more tax so that I can retire from my desk job at 67 and lounge around for 20 years?

Yes please! Backdated of course

I saw poster get lots of support a few weeks ago for complaining about the money we spend on maternity wards.

I am looking at causation, not correlation hun

@Pookerrod

I agree. If you are saying working from 16-67 (51 years) why then are we funding state retirement for potentially half of that on top for the majority of the population if the life expectancy is 80?

In this tech era where we can work much later why should the retirement age be so low?

I actually think we should embrace a falling birth rate. The economy is more than just a giant Ponzi scheme crating more and more people to pay for the generation above. People should be rewarding people for have less than 3 children, gradually reducing the population. This will, I accept, cause problems for the generation which is top heavy and I don’t doubt there will be challenges but in 100 years the population will thank us on behalf of overcrowdedness plus the environmental benefits of a smaller population.