America's Parent Trap: Robert J. Samuelson

in the Washington Post:

Among the government's most interesting reports is one -- published by the Agriculture Department -- that estimates what parents spend on their children. The latest version finds, not surprisingly, that the costs are steep. For a middle-class husband-wife family (average pretax income in 2009: $76,250), spending per child is about $12,000 a year. Assuming modest annual inflation (2.8 percent), the report estimates that the family's spending on a child born in 2009 would total $286,050 by age 17. A two-child family would cost about $600,000. All these estimates may be understated because they do not include college costs.

These dry statistics ought to inform the deficit debate, because a budget is not just a catalogue of programs and taxes. It reflects a society's priorities and values. Our society does not -- despite rhetoric to the contrary -- put much value on raising children. Present budget policies punish parents, who are taxed heavily to support the elderly. Meanwhile, tax breaks for children are modest. If deficit reduction aggravates these biases, more Americans may choose not to have children or to have fewer children. Down that path lies economic decline.

Societies that cannot replace their populations discourage investment and innovation. They have stagnant or shrinking markets for goods and services. With older populations, they resist change. For a country to stabilize its population -- discounting immigration -- women must have an average of about two children. That's a "fertility rate" of two. Many countries with struggling economies are well below that. Japan's fertility rate is 1.2. Italy's is 1.3, as is Spain's. These countries are having about one child for every two adults. ...

We need to avoid Western Europe's mix of high taxes, low birth rates and feeble economic growth. Young Americans already face a bleak labor market that cannot instill confidence about having children. Piling on higher taxes won't help. "If higher taxes make it more expensive to raise children," says demographer Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, "people will think more about having another child." That seems common sense, despite the multiple influences on becoming parents.

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Labels: children, culture, demographics, economics, tax policy

posted by Imapp Staff at 9:31 PM VOTE

CONSERVATIVE THINKERS TOUT THREE INNOVATIVE AND CONTROVERSIAL PROPOSALS: The Washington Post

PostPolitics:

...Robert Stein, a conservative economist who served as deputy assistant secretary for macroeconomic analysis in George W. Bush's administration, says the tax code is unfair to one particular group of Americans: parents.

He argues that parents invest thousands of dollars in raising members of society who eventually fund programs such as Social Security and Medicare, but retirees who chose not to raise children get the same old-age benefits as those who did. ...

Stein would replace this system with a $4,000-per-child tax credit. That parental tax credit would be funded in part through Stein's other big idea: Simplify the personal income tax to two brackets -- one that taxes 15 percent of income and the other 35 percent. He estimates that few people now in the 10 percent bracket would pay more if they move to 15 percent, because of the child exemption. ...

Much of the energy from conservatives went to promoting marriage as a cultural virtue. But Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, argues that it is important to highlight the economic benefits of marriage. ...

"We need to appreciate that marriage is more than an emotional connection between two people," Wilcox said. "There are kids; it's a kind of economic cooperation, a form of social insurance."

Wilcox says churches, the entertainment industry and other cultural institutions would have to embrace this view of marriage, not just the government. He proposes federal funding for public-service announcements and other social marketing to promote marriage, modeled on anti-smoking campaigns.

And to discourage divorce, he says, states should change marriage laws so spouses who are being divorced against their will and have not engaged in abuse or adultery would be given preferential treatment by family courts in determining alimony, child support and custody of children.

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Labels: culture, demographics, divorce, divorce reform, government interest in marriage, Marriage, tax policy, W. Bradford Wilcox

posted by Eve at 4:14 PM VOTE

MEET THE UNEMPLOYABLE MAN: The Wall Street Journal

reports:

The betting is that the Labor Department's Friday snapshot of the job market will show that employers added workers in April, perhaps even that the unemployment rate fell.

That would be good news, but not good enough. It's hard to exaggerate how bad the job market is. Here's one arresting fact: One of every five men 25 to 54 isn't working.

Even more alarming, the jobs that many of these men, or those like them, once had in construction, factories and offices aren't coming back. "A good guess…is that when the economy recovers five years from now, one in six men who are 25 to 54 will not be working," Lawrence Summers, the president's economic adviser, said the other day. ...

For 50 years, the fraction of men with jobs in what once were prime earning years has been trending down. Over the same decades, the share of women who work has been rising, a significant social change that lately has cushioned the blow of Dad's unemployment for many couples.

Women have suffered less in this recession. They were more likely to be in health care and other jobs that weren't hit as hard as construction and manufacturing. They are increasingly likely to have the education so often required to get or keep a good job these days.

That's good for their families. But will there be good-paying jobs in the future for prime-age men, particularly the ones who don't go to college?

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Labels: culture, economics, gender differences, men, poverty, tax policy, women

posted by Eve at 3:57 PM VOTE

MARRIAGE CRISIS IS BIPARTISAN IMPERATIVE: Sam Brownback and Linda Malone-Colon

in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A war over the family divided liberals and conservatives in the last several decades. Now is the time to end that war and come together for a nationally urgent and common cause. With 40 percent of children born to unwed mothers today, and a growing marriage gap between wealthy and poor, we can’t afford to go on pretending that strengthening marriage is a conservative or liberal cause. ...

Research shows that there is a growing class-based marriage gap: College-educated persons are getting married at a greater rate — and enjoying longer-lasting marriages — than noncollege-educated persons. As University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox reported in a recent essay for National Affairs, since 1980 the divorce rate for college-educated persons actually dropped by 30 percent, while rising 6 percent among the noncollege-educated. Further, as a 2007 Child Trends study reported, only 7 percent of mothers with a college degree have had a child outside marriage, compared to more than 50 percent of mothers who had not gone to college.

Consequently, as Wilcox notes, “children on the lower end of the economic spectrum [are] doubly disadvantaged by the material and marital circumstances of their parents.” And as family scholar Paul Amato and economist Rebecca Maynard point out, many scholars now believe that “a major cause of the rise in child poverty in the United States during the second half of the 20th century is the decline in married-couple households.”

Thus, one of the most important actions we can take to ensure greater equality of opportunity is to strengthen marriage. While it’s a tall order, we can do it. If marriage stabilized among one segment of the population — the college-educated — it can happen in other segments as well.

Any turnaround, however, will require a national, bipartisan movement built around the principles of cultural competence — mobilizing together as a nation to reverse the decline of an institution so central to our welfare. What might that movement look like?

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Labels: culture, economics, family policy, Marriage, marriage penalty, out-of-wedlock births, tax policy

posted by Eve at 1:45 AM VOTE

MARRIED COUPLES PAY MORE THAN UNMARRIED UNDER HEALTH BILL: The Wall Street Journal

reports:

Some married couples would pay thousands of dollars more for the same health insurance coverage as unmarried people living together, under the health insurance overhaul plan pending in Congress.

The built-in "marriage penalty" in both House and Senate healthcare bills has received scant attention. But for scores of low-income and middle-income couples, it could mean a hike of $2,000 or more in annual insurance premiums the moment they say "I do."

The disparity comes about in part because subsidies for purchasing health insurance under the plan from congressional Democrats are pegged to federal poverty guidelines. That has the effect of limiting subsidies for married couples with a combined income, compared to if the individuals are single. ...

For an unmarried couple with income of $25,000 each, combined premiums would be capped at $3,076 per year, under the House bill. If the couple gets married, with a combined income of $50,000, their annual premium cap jumps to $5,160 -- a "penalty" of $2,084. Those figures were included in a memo prepared by House Republican staff. ...

Democratic staff who helped to write the bill confirmed the existence of the penalty, but said it cannot be remedied without creating other inequities.

For instance, they said making the subsidies neutral towards marriage would lead to a married couple with only one bread-winner getting a more generous subsidy than a single parent at the same income-level.

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Labels: cohabitation, Marriage, poverty, tax policy

posted by Eve at 2:32 PM VOTE

MARRIED COUPLES FACE TAX IN SENATE HEALTH CARE BILL: The Washington Times

reports:

Senate Democrats' health care bill would create a new marriage penalty by imposing a tax on individuals who make $200,000 annually but hitting married couples making just $50,000 more. ...

Democrats said the bill will offer lower health care costs for small businesses and families, and said the new taxes are aimed at upper-income earners, so costs would not go up for the middle class. They said that makes good on President Obama's campaign pledge not to increase taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year, which explains the reason for the new marriage penalty.

"We wanted to make this provision consistent with the president's pledge not to increase taxes on singles making under $200,000 and married couples making under $250,000," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who wrote the Senate bill.

"Yes, this structure can create a 'marriage penalty' for some couples. It also creates a 'marriage bonus' for others," he said. "A married couple with one wage earner can earn up to $250,000 without facing this higher tax, whereas a single person in the same job with the same pay would be hit by it."

But a married couple in which each earner makes $150,000 would be hit with the tax, whereas an unmarried couple living together with the same incomes would not.

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Labels: cohabitation, Marriage, marriage penalty, poverty, tax policy

posted by Eve at 3:30 PM VOTE

UK TORIES PERSIST WITH PLAN TO RECOGNIZE MARRIAGE IN THE TAX SYSTEM: The Guardian

reports:

The Tories are to go ahead with their plans to recognise marriage in the tax system, the shadow minister for families said today.

Maria Miller said the Conservative party "unashamedly supports families and unashamedly supports marriage", rallying around the tax pledge, a policy that has come in for criticism from liberal members of the Tory party and opposition parties but remains one of David Cameron's highest profile promises.

The Conservative leader is known to regard the policy highly but senior Tories and pressure groups are uncertain that the best way of supporting families is necessarily through recognising marriage because unmarried couples would also receive the tax break under Conservative proposals.

Speaking at the Tory conference in Manchester, Miller indicated no weakening of resolve. This afternoon she said: "It is not because we want to go back to any 1950s ideals of family life. It's because it's empirically proven that marriage provides a stable framework for our lives. With the evidence right in front of us, it's madness not to support marriage. That's why we're committed to introducing the recognition of marriage in the tax and benefit system.

"In turbulent times, it's our family who we turn to. The family, not the state, is our best support system."

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Labels: cohabitation, family policy, government interest in marriage, Marriage, tax policy, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 10:16 AM VOTE

MARRIAGE PENALTY? I DON'T THINK SO: Bella DePaulo

blogs:

Before I started studying singlism, I thought I knew what the "marriage penalty" was: On the same taxable income, married people pay more taxes than single people do. What I wondered was just how much more the married couples paid. So I used the handy tax calculator at the Money Chimp website to see. (Here, I'll use the most recent tax figures, for 2008, so they will differ from the numbers on p. 227 of Singled Out.)

What if I had a taxable income of $50,000 and a married couple filing jointly had the same $50,000 of taxable income? I'd pay $8,844. How much more would the married couple pay? Their tax bill would be $6,698. Hey, that's less! $2,146 less!

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Labels: Marriage, tax policy

posted by Eve at 12:15 AM VOTE

IS FEMINISM THE NEW NATALISM?: Ross Douthat

replies to Michelle Goldberg:
...I'll be curious to hear what Goldberg has to say about the United States, because one could argue that the threat of population decline is also a reasonable argument for a more flexible, freewheeling labor market, and other dreamy American-style policies. That was one of the takeaways from Russell Shorto's big Times Magazine piece last year on fertility in the developed world, for instance. Like Goldberg, Shorto argued that the combination of a modern economy and a patriarchal social model leaves you with the worst of both worlds where fertility is concerned: Women are expected to be workers and full-time caregivers (to both children and to aging parents, in many cases), men aren't expected to pick up the slack, and so women end up too overwhelmed to contemplate having a second or a third kid, or even a first. But he also noted that while the Scandinavian combination of liberal social attitudes and generous day care and family-leave provisions produce higher birth rates than Spain and Italy, if you're really looking for replacement-level fertility, you need to turn to the United States:

"Europeans say to me, How does the U.S. do it in this day and age?" says Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. According to Haub and others, there is no single explanation for the relatively high U.S. fertility rate. The old conservative argument -- that a traditional, working-husband-and-stay-at-home-wife family structure produces a healthy, growing population -- doesn't apply, either in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world today. Indeed, the societies most wedded to maintaining that traditional family structure seem to be those with the lowest birthrates. The antidote, in Western Europe, has been the welfare-state model, in which the state provides comprehensive support to couples that want to have children. But the U.S. runs counter to this. Some commentators explain its healthy birthrate in terms of the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourages larger families. It's also true that mores have evolved in the U.S. to the point where not only is it socially acceptable for fathers to be active participants in raising children, but it's also often socially unacceptable for them to do otherwise.

But one other factor affecting the higher U.S. birthrate stands out in the minds of many observers. "There's much less flexibility in the European system," Haub says. "In Europe, both the society and the job market are more rigid." There may be little state subsidy for child care in the U.S., and there is certainly nothing like the warm governmental nest that Norway feathers for fledgling families, but the American system seems to make up for it in other ways. As Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania writes: "In general, women are deterred from having children when the economic cost -- in the form of lower lifetime wages -- is too high. Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then re-enter the labor force." An American woman might choose to suspend her career for three or five years to raise a family, expecting to be able to resume working; that happens far less easily in Europe.

Incidentally, this is a point that the Willetts report (PDF) makes as well, though Goldberg doesn't mention it: The intersection of traditional gender roles and a modern economy may be driving down the birth rate in Italy, but that explanation doesn't hold up for Germany, where social attitudes are more liberal, and so Willetts spends a lot of time talking about ... the impact of Germany's labor market regulations on family formation.

In other words, saying that "feminism is the new natalism" doesn't necessarily mean that statism is the new natalism. If you're a "choice feminist," interested in maximizing female (and male, for that matter) freedom to choose to work or to choose not to, you may find more to like about the American way of parenting. (And you might be looking for reforms - like, ahem, a more pro-family tax structure - that would increase the flexibility that our model currently affords to parents.) If you're more of a Linda Hirshman-style feminist, on the other hand, you'll probably prefer the Scandinavian model, where after the guaranteed family leave runs its course, the socialized day care effectively incentivizes parents to get (back) to work whether they want to or not.

On the question of whether the latter model is really as empowering as its advocates assume, it's worth quoting Sandra Tsing Loh:

The debate about mothers and work: it always ends--doesn't it?--with Sweden. Oh, if America could only be like Sweden--such a humane society, with its free day care for working mothers and its government subsidies of up to $11,900 per child per year. The problem? One hates to be Mrs. Red-State Republican Bringdown, but yes ... the taxes. Currently, the top marginal income-tax rate in Sweden is nearly 60 percent (down from its peak in 1979 of 87 percent). Government spending amounts to more than half of Sweden's GDP ... On the upside, government spending creates jobs: from 1970 to 1990, a whopping 75 percent of Swedish jobs created were in the public sector ... providing social welfare services ... almost all of which were filled by women. Uh-oh. In short, as Gilbert points out, because of the 40 percent tax rate on her husband's job, a new mother may be forced to take that second, highly taxed job to supplement the family's finances; in other words, she leaves her toddlers behind from eight to five (in that convenient universal day care) so she can go take care of other people's toddlers or empty the bedpans of elderly strangers. (As Alan Wolfe has pointed out, "the Scandinavian welfare states which express so well a sense of obligation to distant strangers, are beginning to make it more difficult to express a sense of obligation to those with whom one shares family ties.")

That's from Tsing Loh's review of Neil Gilbert's fascinating A Mother's Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life. If you're interested in this topic, you should read the whole thing, and the whole thing.
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Labels: demographics, Europe, tax policy, work/family policy

posted by Eve at 3:43 PM VOTE

DEALING WITH THE "MARRIAGE PENALTY" AND TAXES: Wall Street Journal

column:

...There’s no question that the marriage penalty pains many dual-earner couples. Although Congress has taken steps to reduce it, many middle- and upper-income married couples still pay more than they would if each partner filed separately as a single person. For example, for a couple who each earn about $75,000 and take only a standard deduction, the marriage penalty is about $500, says Mark Steber, vice president of tax resources for Jackson Hewitt. The penalty goes up as incomes rise, to about $787 for a couple making $200,000, for example. The marriage penalty disappears for married couples filing jointly who make roughly equal incomes totaling $132,000 or less, Jackson Hewitt says.

But marriage also conveys many offsetting financial benefits that will endure long after April 15, Mr. Steber says.

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Labels: marriage penalty, tax policy

posted by Eve at 1:11 PM " target="display" style="text-decoration:none;color: rgb(204,0,0);"> " target="display" style="text-decoration:none;color: rgb(204,0,0);"> VOTE

BABY BUST: HOW THE RIGHT'S BABY LOVE IS UNDERMINING CONSERVATISM: Phoebe Maltz

at Doublethink:

In recent years, American conservatism has morphed from a smoke-filled room of martini-swilling adults into nothing short of a nursery. The Right, once known for its emphasis on individual accomplishment and personal responsibility, once a haven for those keen on adults making their own decisions, has linked arms with the stroller moms of Park Slope and put babies at the center of its universe.

The most sensational recent case of this may have been Sarah Palin’s “Seventh Heaven”-esque family, which pitted those inspired by such fruitfulness against those repulsed by it. But even before the Palin brood hit the national scene, conservative intellectuals far from Wasilla had been celebrating babies at all costs. City Journal contributing editor Kay Hymowitz argues that the fight against teen pregnancy is based on a middle-class bias that misapprehends “adolescent baby lust.” Traditionally, conservatives discussing teen birthrates do not accept any lust as worth reckoning with, so this makes for a change. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s recent book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (2008), proposes family-friendly policies, a two-step approach intended first to gain the support of parents with many children (a traditionalist-leaning bloc), and, in turn, to see those same policies encourage all Americans to have larger families, and thus to shift, for the sake of the children, towards social conservatism.

What ties these authors together is the belief that social ills come not from unwanted pregnancy, but from the fact that we think a pregnancy could possibly be undesirable. In other words, for Hymowitz, the problem is not that very young women want children, but that our society frowns on early marriage. For Douthat and Salam, the concern is not that those who can’t afford to have babies have them anyway, but that the state fails to make childrearing affordable. These writers, along with columnist David Brooks, do not merely want to correct what they see as a stigma surrounding procreation. The purpose of the movement is to encourage Americans—even arugula-eating sophisticates—to have more babies.

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Labels: babies, demographics, fertility, natalism, tax policy

posted by Eve at 1:03 PM VOTE