Veronique de Rugy writes at National Review Online about the argument for making childless adults pay higher tax bills. Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance supports the idea.
Vance seems ignorant about our current tax code and its implications: The tax code already taxes people without kids more heavily than it taxes those with kids. It does so not just with the child tax credit but also with the earned-income tax credit, the larger head of household deduction, dependent-care credit, and numerous other items in the tax code. …
… [People on the political left] seem quite ignorant. They are also hypocritical, since the Left is always trying to expand the child tax credit into a universal basic income for children (with all the work disincentives that we know UBI programs have), as well as to further subsidize child care at the expense of childless adults. …
… My disagreement with Vance, and many others, is with the content. One of my main issues with our tax code is precisely that it punishes some taxpayers and favors others with tax credits, deductions, exemptions, and preferential tax rates. For example, renters pay more for the same amount of housing than do homeowners with mortgages; households where no one attends college pay higher taxes; and people who don’t own electric vehicles pay more than do EV owners. And, of course, the child tax credit causes adults without children to pay more in taxes than parents do. It should bother us, especially as advocates suggest expanding the child tax credit dramatically.
Call me weird, but I believe that ideally, people earning the same income should pay the same amount in taxes. I don’t believe that people making the same amount should pay more taxes simply because, in the case of the child tax credit, some of them made different family decisions than did others or faced different life circumstances. … I say this as someone who believes that Julian Simon was correct that people are our ultimate resource.
