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Pro/Anti Child Bearing Policies (split from "Canada don’t matter" thread)

Hey how about a tax on the rich? Like those that make over $150K per year....

Tax The Rich Joe Biden GIF by GIPHY News

Not news, but the wealthy already pay an outsized proportion of the taxes... but that doesn't go down well in political sound bites ;)


Do wealthy Canadians pay enough taxes? That depends how we define 'fair share'​

Top 20% of income earning families paid nearly two-thirds of personal income taxes, report suggests​


When the federal government announced an increase in capital gains taxes in its recent budget, the hike was defended, in part, as a way to ensure the wealthiest Canadians pay their fair share.

But how exactly do we determine what a "fair share" is? Especially, as some data suggests, the wealthiest are already paying a larger share of the overall income tax burden.

"That word fair is completely subjective," said Trevor Tombe, a professor of economics at the University of Calgary. "What's needed in any kind of statement around what is or isn't fair is clarity around what the person means when they say that word."

Jake Fuss, director of fiscal studies at the Fraser Institute, echoed that a lot of these discussions are not informed by definitions, which is why the institute releases an annual report about Canada's tax system that has found high-income Canadians are paying disproportionately more in taxes.

 
Not news, but the wealthy already pay an outsized proportion of the taxes... but that doesn't go down well in political sound bites ;)


Do wealthy Canadians pay enough taxes? That depends how we define 'fair share'​

Top 20% of income earning families paid nearly two-thirds of personal income taxes, report suggests​


When the federal government announced an increase in capital gains taxes in its recent budget, the hike was defended, in part, as a way to ensure the wealthiest Canadians pay their fair share.

But how exactly do we determine what a "fair share" is? Especially, as some data suggests, the wealthiest are already paying a larger share of the overall income tax burden.

"That word fair is completely subjective," said Trevor Tombe, a professor of economics at the University of Calgary. "What's needed in any kind of statement around what is or isn't fair is clarity around what the person means when they say that word."

Jake Fuss, director of fiscal studies at the Fraser Institute, echoed that a lot of these discussions are not informed by definitions, which is why the institute releases an annual report about Canada's tax system that has found high-income Canadians are paying disproportionately more in taxes.


It's very Canadian to punish succes and reward mediocrity and laziness.
 
It's very Canadian to punish succes and reward mediocrity and laziness.

It's OK, the government only wants people to have government jobs anyways ;)

Frank Stronach: If no one wants to invest in Canada, what does that say about our country?​

Steps must be taken to stop investment dollars from fleeing our over-taxed, over-regulated business environment

Dan Daviau, president and CEO of Canaccord Genuity, Canada’s largest independent investment bank, publicly criticized the government’s plan to raise the capital gains tax, saying it will “disincentivize private investment in growing businesses.” The result, Daviau said in an op-ed in the Globe and Mail, is that the “job creation and tax contributions by these businesses and their employees will be lost forever.”

The problem, however, is that cash-hungry governments are constantly searching for more revenue sources to pay interest on the national debt and cover the soaring overhead costs associated with our swollen bureaucracy.

We also need to claw back the regulations choking the life out of small businesses, cut government spending, and give our entrepreneurs the breathing room they need to grow their businesses.

All of these policies are part of the economic charter of rights I’ve been touting as a way to halt the further erosion of our economy and rejuvenate business growth in Canada.

If no one wants to invest in Canada — including even Canadians — what does that say about the true state of our country and our economy?

 
It's a bust....

Why paying women to have more babies won’t work​

Economies must adapt to baby busts instead​



As birth rates plunge, many politicians want to pour money into policies that might lead women to have more babies. Donald Trump has vowed to dish out bonuses if he returns to the White House. In France, where the state already spends 3.5-4% of gdp on family policies each year, Emmanuel Macron wants to “demographically rearm” his country. South Korea is contemplating handouts worth a staggering $70,000 for each baby. Yet all these attempts are likely to fail, because they are built on a misapprehension.

Governments’ concern is understandable. Fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere and the rich world faces a severe shortage of babies. At prevailing birth rates, the average woman in a high-income country today will have just 1.6 children over her lifetime. Every rich country except Israel has a fertility rate beneath the replacement level of 2.1, at which a population is stable without immigration. The decline over the past decade has been faster than demographers expected.

Doomsayers such as Elon Musk warn that these shifts threaten civilisation itself. That is ridiculous, but they will bring profound social and economic changes. A fertility rate of 1.6 means that, without immigration, each generation will be a quarter smaller than the one before it. In 2000 rich countries had 26 over-65-year-olds for every 100 people aged 25-64. By 2050 that is likely to have doubled. The worst-affected places will see even more dramatic change. In South Korea, where the fertility rate is 0.7, the population is projected to fall by 60% by the end of the century.

The decision to have children is a personal one and should stay that way. But governments need to pay heed to rapid demographic shifts. Ageing and shrinking societies will probably lose dynamism and military might. They will certainly face a budgetary nightmare, as taxpayers struggle to finance the pensions and health care of legions of oldies.

Many pro-natalist policies come with effects that are valuable in themselves. Handouts for poor parents reduce child poverty, for instance, and mothers who can afford child care are more likely to work. However, governments are wrong to think it is within their power to boost fertility rates. For one thing, such policies are founded on a false diagnosis of what has so far caused demographic decline. For another, they could cost more than the problems they are designed to solve.

One common assumption is that falling fertility rates stem from professional women putting off having children. The notion that they run out of time to have as many babies as they wish before their childbearing years draw to a close explains why policies tend to focus on offering tax breaks and subsidised child care. That way, it is argued, women do not have to choose between their family and their career.

That is not the main story. University-educated women are indeed having children later in life, but only a little. In America their average age at the birth of their first child has risen from 28 in 2000 to 30 now. These women are having roughly the same number of children as their peers did a generation ago. This is a little below what they say is their ideal family size, but the gap is no different from what it used to be.

Instead, the bulk of the decline in the fertility rate in rich countries is among younger, poorer women who are delaying when they start to have children, and who therefore have fewer overall. More than half the drop in America’s total fertility rate since 1990 is caused by a collapse in births among women under 19. That is partly because more of them are going to college. But even those who leave education after high school are having children later. In 1994 the average age of a first-time mother without a university degree was 20. Today, about two-thirds of women without degrees in their 20s are yet to have their first child.

Some politicians may seize on this to aim baby-boosting policies at very young women. They may be tempted, too, by evidence that poorer women respond more to financial incentives. But focusing on young and poor women as a group would be bad for them and for society. Teenage pregnancies are linked to poverty and ill health for both mother and child. Targeted incentives would roll back decades of efforts to curb unwanted teenage pregnancy and encourage women into study and work. Those efforts, along with programmes to enhance gender equality, rank among the greatest public-policy triumphs of the postwar era.

Some illiberal governments, such as those of Hungary and Russia, may choose to ignore this progress. Yet they face a practical problem, because government incentives do not seem to bring lots of extra babies even as spending mounts. Sweden offers an extraordinarily generous child-care programme, but its total fertility rate is still only 1.7. Vast amounts of money are needed to encourage each extra baby. And handouts tend to go to all babies, including those who would have been born anyway. As a result, schemes in Poland and France cost $1m-2m per extra birth. Only a tiny number of citizens are productive enough to generate fiscal benefits to offset that kind of money. Due to low social mobility only 8% of American children born to parents without bachelor’s degrees end up getting such a degree themselves.

Older, but wiser​

What, then, can governments do? High-skilled immigration can plug fiscal gaps, but not indefinitely, given that fertility is falling globally. Most economies will therefore have to adapt to social change, and it falls to governments to smooth the way. Welfare states will need rethinking: older people will have to work later in life, for instance, to cut the burden on the public purse. The invention and adoption of new technologies will need to be encouraged. These could make the demographic transition easier by unleashing economy-wide productivity growth or helping care for the old. New household technologies may help parents, rather as dishwashers and washing machines did in the mid-20th century. Baby-boosting policies, by comparison, are a costly and socially retrograde mistake.


 
It's very Canadian to punish succes and reward mediocrity and laziness.
Loves us some success - but not toooooooooooooooo much success.

Meanwhile, interesting takes from this ideologically intriguing pro-natal couple saying mo' babies makes sense based on their look at the data ....
From the longish piece ....
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Another take, with some different suggestions (also archived here) ....
From the piece
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She mentions an Angus Reid survey, commissioned by a Christian think tank, of 2700 women from January 2023 finding that almost 1/2 of those responding at the end of their child-bearing years that they would have liked more chlidren.
Don't know how much government can do, say, about people not finding life partners, but the piece says Russia's "cash for kids!" scheme ain't the answer.
 
I'll be honest, I did not read the 12 pages of comments above the infographic, but why is a low birth rate a problem?
To low a birthrate ie below replacement requires more immigration with its attendant assimilation risks.

I tend to think there's some ancillary social issues from no and small families

Difficult to have or model continued economic growth with declining population
 
I'll be honest, I did not read the 12 pages of comments above the infographic, but why is a low birth rate a problem?
The problem is that any population needs youth to fill in the blank file when the elderly start to retire and die off.

If we aren't generating that youth ourselves, we have to import them (immigration), and that is a cumbersome practice that may or may not yield results.

The reason our birth rate is plummeting, even in the face of childbearing policies that encourage parents to take time off, is cost of living being exorbitant.

When you have younger generations, who saw their parents raise kids in relative affluence, struggle to afford housing and groceries for themselves and their partner/pets; the thought of adding another mouth to feed is the last thing on their minds.

Add to the fact that societal and familial stigma on being childless has all but disappeared, those who wouldn't want to have kids, aren't.
 
The problem is that any population needs youth to fill in the blank file when the elderly start to retire and die off.
This is just nature's way of correcting our own policy mistakes. Depopulation - particularly if age groups are rebalanced - will alleviate cost pressures on things like medical care, income support, and housing. Stupid people will insist on policies that keep aggravating those problems. At some point, the costs which are disincentives to having children would fall enough that people would start having more children. I am confident this would happen because surveys on the matter usually report that people would like to have more children than they do.

We don't need economic growth to be prosperous unless the population is growing.

Meanwhile, we're awesomely clever, so we'll keep the immigration pipes wide open so that housing - the single largest cost for most families - remains difficult to attain.
 
Most people I know are limiting themselves to 1 child, due to fiscal reasons and the housing needs that come with having more than one kid. If you have a boy and girl, it's ok to have them room together till about 10, then you need a 3 bedroom place and they are less common and more expensive. Then you have the health and wellbeing costs of two kids, after school activities, cost of 4 people eating out, cost of 4 people travelling, etc. Then there is the cost of post secondary education for two kids.
 
Most people I know are limiting themselves to 1 child, due to fiscal reasons and the housing needs that come with having more than one kid. If you have a boy and girl, it's ok to have them room together till about 10, then you need a 3 bedroom place and they are less common and more expensive. Then you have the health and wellbeing costs of two kids, after school activities, cost of 4 people eating out, cost of 4 people travelling, etc. Then there is the cost of post secondary education for two kids.
I agree with your statements except the one about house size. Most new construction that I have seen features 3 bedrooms or more and many are the 2500 sq. ft. variety. I wonder if it is more that they wait so long because they had to or thought they had to get set up with the housing and neighbourhood thing first and by the time the kid came along they were in their 30's and looking at being 60 by the time any more than the first left the nest. Pure guessing on my part
 
Nothing new. The Roman empire struggled with low birth rates as well.

As countries get more developed mortality rates drop and prosperous birth rates tend to fall.
 
I agree with your statements except the one about house size. Most new construction that I have seen features 3 bedrooms or more and many are the 2500 sq. ft. variety. I wonder if it is more that they wait so long because they had to or thought they had to get set up with the housing and neighbourhood thing first and by the time the kid came along they were in their 30's and looking at being 60 by the time any more than the first left the nest. Pure guessing on my part
I am in North Vancouver, few of the families I know can afford those houses, which are mostly bought by Persians, Mainland Chinese and now Indians. My friend who works in the RCMP, his wife a ER nurse could not even afford a decent 2 bedroom apartment in North Van.
 
Most people I know are limiting themselves to 1 child, due to fiscal reasons and the housing needs that come with having more than one kid. If you have a boy and girl, it's ok to have them room together till about 10, then you need a 3 bedroom place and they are less common and more expensive. Then you have the health and wellbeing costs of two kids, after school activities, cost of 4 people eating out, cost of 4 people travelling, etc. Then there is the cost of post secondary education for two kids.
A lot of the last bit is changes in societal expectations. We were a family of four, dad had a solid government job. We ate out maybe once every two or three months, vacation was by car, a cooler and a Coleman stove, at night using those Vacation Cabins that used to exist. We day-tripped to Niagara Falls. Going somewhere exotic or overseas was simply unheard of. Now people want to go the Las Vegas for a weekend.

Post secondary, ya. What my college tuition cost in 1968 adjusted for inflation would be half of what the college is charging now.

I agree with your statements except the one about house size. Most new construction that I have seen features 3 bedrooms or more and many are the 2500 sq. ft. variety

Not in condo-land, at least not in Toronto anyway. Two bedrooms are rare enough; a three bedroom is a unicorn. The median price for a detached home in Toronto (# bedrooms u/k) is $1.3Mn.
 
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