Should parenting be more heavily subsided?

Up until a point it's roughly financial equivalent to being single ?

Kids benefits everyone once you reach to older age. If you don't have kids, it's the kids of your neighbor that pay for your retirement.

People like to think that their own monthly payments when they work finance their retirement. That is not how retirement funds work. You are just paying for the retirement of the previous generation and the following generation will do the same for you.

If parents are using most of their resources and time to rise kids, they are effectively creating your caretakers.

It makes sense to have a tax system that takes that in to consideration.

Parenting should be a licensed activity, then you can reward the licensed parent with subsidies. No one is benefiting from single mothers with 8 kids all from different fathers, who end up unemployed as a family tradition.

I don't think they should get payments, but I do feel the "infrastructure" concerning children--all children--should be improved. Things like free childcare, a better K-12 education system that turns agile young minds into caring and conscious adults, access to two or three healthy and nutritious meals at schools, and things like that.

And no, it doesn't have to be a socialist utopia/capitalist nightmare to do that.

If you just do payments, all you do is incentivize having offspring, not raising people.

No. Unless the person was forced to become a parent then it's their choice and they should have to live with the consequences and expense.

@fenriz275: then should the benefits of retirement be exclusive to those that had children only ?

Being childless is also a choice with consequences.

there are already child tax credits. it would be nice though if the dependent care FSA limits were raised beyond 5K. childcare is expensive af

I can get behind a lot of this. These are low hanging fruit that should have been implemented years ago.

@mrbojangles25: I am the father of three kids and I agree with you on this. There should be more effort to make raising kids easier. Some people may claim that it’s a waste of taxpayers money, but have they forgotten that the children being born today will become taxpayers of the future when they get older?

No. You need that money to bomb children and rescue banks.

Yeah, people talking about trickle-down economics (which history shows is bullshit) when really it is the exact opposite that we need to do; we need to view it less as "expenses" and more as "investment". Spend more earlier, save even more later.

When you buy stocks, you're not "spending" money, you're investing it to reap rewards down the line.

Likewise, when you invest in children and education, you will reap rewards down the line.

Spend early, spend what needs to be spent...a penny spent now to cultivate intelligent young minds and healthy bodies is a dime saved later when these people get older.

And militarize the police! Don't forget that!

Sounds nice until you try to think of the taxes needed to finance that. Also, society benefits from single people being around. Something happens at work and you have to find someone to do extra shifts, who you gonna call? Parents? Good luck with that. Sure parents should have some tax benefits over single people, but it should be a fair balance.

Probably not, but poverty should be more heavily assisted, including child poverty.

rofl yeah, lots of new parents at my job where we all work shifts (hourly). The amount of preference the parents get compared to the single people is, frankly, disgusting.

And I get it, they have kids. They need to take care of their kids if they're sick, especially with childcare being so strict in this post-COVID world.

But at the same time, it'd be nice if the single folks got some perks, too. Like how are we going to make a family of our own when we're always getting called into work 6-7 days a week and can't meet a nice lady and have some kids 😋