> We are lucky that we can afford to do this.
This is the second piece. What about people who are on the margin who aren't wealthy enough to do this and the subsidy would hep them achieve this? The subsidy could help the mom stay home and maybe do part-time work from home even. The thing that's easiest to miss when you're well on one side of a boundary is only looking at the other side of the boundary instead of also looking at where that boundary is drawn.
The first point is just unfortunate humanity crab bucket mentality. "Others shouldn't benefit if I don't." I don't think there's anything we can do about that :(
Since it's subsidizing specific behavior and not merely being poor or whatever, people will naturally look at whether they think that behavior ought to be incentivized, or whether the government should stay neutral.
My wife is also a stay at home mom, and I've argued before that an increase in the child tax credit with a phase out for high income (so we might not qualify) makes more sense than a childcare credit/deduction for this reason. Then you're just subsidizing having kids, which seems fine to me (assuming we're subsidizing anything) since that's sort of necessary to sustain society.
It is funny to say this in this specific conversation. The exact logic you are using to support rebates for stay at home parents applies to childless people. So why are you drawing the line exactly where you are drawing it and why is that a better place than where this policy is currently drawing it?
What the government should encourage is charitable donations, and when I say that, I mean the mere act of it. There should be no tax incentive for doing so.
Where children are concerned, if anything, perhaps make the sales tax on child-related services zero, and increase sales tax on luxury goods associated with sink or dink households. At least that methodology provides the opportunity to forgo the penalties.
- Bidding up the price of housing
- Fewer parents active in overseeing the schools, volunteering to fix up the community, etc.
- Less general slack for parents to help each other out
- Fewer mom friends around during the day, less social life for existing stay-at-home moms
- Peer pressure and implicit societal pressure to work a career
- Parents sending their kids to camps and aftercare, rather than having kids free-range around the neighborhood and play with friends, so fewer playmates for the non-camp/non-daycare kids.
Of course the tricky thing is that not all children produce positive externalities, some have massively negative externalities and a naive subsidy might encourage the wrong kind of reproduction ...
Anyways, if you don't want any subsidies, one policy change is to eliminate general social security and simply have each retiree get the social security money paid only from their own children. Social security is not a savings plan or insurance, what it actually is is a socialized version of the current generation of children paying for their parents retirement. The non-socialized version is just the parents getting money of the kids that they raised themselves, and if you did not put in the work of raising kids, you don't get social security.
So we've come to a crossroads where something profoundly un-libertarian is viewed by the anti-libertarians as libertarian because it incidentally achieves some of its aims.
The argument you’re making in general is a valid one about subsidies, it’s a weird argument to make regarding children since having children is the only way society survives. Unless your claim is that we’re overpopulated but generally people in developed countries are not reproducing, and a meaningful part of that does appear to be the cost.
So the answer is that this specific subsidy is net beneficial as we want to make it easier for people to have and raise kids, not least of which because it produces better adults when those kids grow up and makes society healthier.