Morning Must-Read: Matt Bruenig: Fertility Rates and Government Intervention
Matt Bruenig: Fertility Rates and Government Intervention: ” I have been writing on the weird conservative tax plan…
…to give money to every parent who isn’t poor (I, II, III). This is not how it was initially sold of course. My favorite in the genre of extreme deception about the plan came from Reihan Salam who wrote an entire piece… as if he wants to assist all parents: it’s costly to raise kids, kids are important for the future, etc. He never lets on that his actual plan is not a natalist policy… but a policy to give more money to all parents who aren’t poor. The exclusion of the poor from this massive welfare state expansion is curious on a number of grounds. The US has the highest child poverty rates in the developed world precisely because we have pathetic levels of family benefits. Excluding the poor from an expansion in family welfare benefits seems particularly cruel in that context….
The argument is that the government distorts incentives to have children by intervening in the economy via creating Social Security and Medicare. And so this plan to give money to every parent except the poor ones will correct that… hold all else equal in society, but then tick SS and Medicare off and guess as to how many more kids that ticking off would result in. But that does not tell us how many children there would be without government intervention. We should hold all else equal in society and then tick off property law, contract law, securities law, corporate law, commercial law, patent law, copyright law, and every single government economic institution. I’d guess that ticking off all of those institutions, and thereby bringing us to the world ‘without government intervention’… would cause national income to plummet and birth rates to massively spike, maybe to seven children per woman…. It’s such an out-of-left-field argument here that it is extremely difficult to imagine anyone started with ‘let’s end child-having distortions’ and then worked their way to this proposal. What’s more likely is they started with this proposal and then worked backwards towards some argument for it…