Although I'm a keen supporter of means testing for pensions, I don't see what's wrong with a little subsiding of the upper-middle classes when it comes to having children, especially since they tend to have so few of them.
Therefore it's disappointing to see Australia's new Labor government restricting the state-funded baby bonus by making it means tested. Getting the rich to have more kids is one of today's most pressing demographic problems, so an across the board subsidy which includes an incentive for the wealthy, as opposed to just low income earners, makes sense from a eugenic perspective.
Apparently the bonus has been criticised by economists as being a very expensive way to encourage people to have more children, and perhaps other types of fiscal incentives could be used, but at least it sends out the right message, and the results have been promising - the bonus was first introduced in 2004 and by 2006, the number of births reached 265,922 - the highest level for 30 years.
Sadly though, it now appears that Peter Costello's audaciously conservative initiative must be sacrificed for transgressing the reigning equalitarian orthodoxy that EVERYONE HAS EQUAL POTENTIAL.
I was however, pleasantly surprised by this rather un-pc quote from Liberal politician Wilson Tuckey, regarding Labor's watering down of the bonus:
"I've been in the racing business for many, many years and we tend to look at the high achievers as those that should have foals.
"When you start discouraging people who are high achievers, even if it's a limited discouragement, then I think that's not wise."
As another prominent Aussie might have put it :"That one's going straight to the pool room!"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Closing the wealth gap. This is putatively the raison d'etre of many on the left, yet more effective than wealth transfers or progressive tax rates are tactics that encourage wealthy people to have more children and poor people to have fewer children. If the Rich's, worth $1 million, have one child and the Modest's, worth $100,000, have five children, upon passing the Rich scamp gets $1 million and each Modest urchin gets $20,000. Now flip the fecundity. The Rich's have five kids, the Modest's a single child. At death, each Rich kid gets $200,000 and the Modest kid gets $100,000. Isn't the latter situation the more palatable of the two, without even considering eugenic consequences?
Audacious, good point, differences in family size between low and high income earners greatly compound economic inequality, yet there are few policies to discourage it.
Interesting, in the 1970s the centre left did encourage poor people to have fewer children, by promoting family planning etc, but unfortunately its egalitarian ethos didn't extent to encouraging the rich to have more children.
Another point in favour of incentives for high earners to have children is that it's only high income earners who can realistically afford to live off one income.
Giving a one income 100k a year family a 5k tax incentive for example may actually have more effect than giving the same incentive to a dual income 100k family ( say with one partner earing 60k and the other earning 40k )since the extra 5k is less likely to encourage the female earner to give up her job to have a baby.
Post a Comment