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A well-intentioned social welfare system that rewarded unwed, impoverished girls and women for having babies was Part One of a two-pronged assault on families unwittingly staged by government at all levels.

The second part of that strategy was raising all kinds of taxes on the middle class through decades of taxflation (bracket creep) and increased spending.

We can have spirited and honest disagreements about the value of social programs, but it is undeniable that the $600 per child federal income tax deduction went a helluva lot farther in 1950 than it does today. And government tax policy rewarded middle class families for having children.
Back then, most working families of four paid next to no federal income tax, state income tax did not exist, and FICA had a $15 or $30 annual cap.

One right wing think tank crunched the numbers and said in 1948 or 1950, the median family of four paid only 2% of their income in taxes, a figure that rose to nearly 40% in the 1990's. I didn't believe them, and called out the author of the study. He had used some cheap tricks to come up with the 40% figure (doubling the worker's FICA contribution to include the employer's half), but the 2% number was correct. Working families paid next to nothing in taxes back then.

What we have seen with greater clarity over the past three or four decades is the result of a tax policy that rewarded the unmarried poor for having children, while making it more difficult for the middle class to have additional children. We paid the poor to have more babies, and they did so. We decreased the actual value of deductions for the middle class and raised taxes on them, and they have fewer babies.

The social programs may have had great benefits, but one cannot tout the positives without acknowledging the negatives.

The surest way to break the cycle of poverty is to reward those who can afford children for having them, while not providing incentives for those women who cannot afford to have them.

by Mike on Aug 26, 2010 11:33 am • link • report