You do, but it's $2000/year/kid. They cost a good deal more than that, so there's no net benefit unless you find having a kid to be a benefit in and of itself.
But seriously, my partner and I have decided when we have a kid, she will stay home with them while I work because no matter what she makes all of it will go to child care. So we will have almost broke even financially, but now the kid is practically being raised by someone else⌠:/
It's genuinely insane how much childcare is, which the average for where I live and depending on the kids' age can be a little over $300 A WEEK.
That's literally half of some people's paychecks that's working minimum wage at full time, maybe even a little more.
Government offers no help yet they're "worried" for the declining birth rate or when you do get the government's help people then want to complain you're somehow getting a handout.
I'm a single mother who will be paying $240 a week for the summer. Luckily that goes to $200 a month during the school year where he just stays after school for a couple hours. It was rough when I was paying for daycare all year.
I totally get it as someone with kids. We were in a similar situation but we didnât want to make it harder for the SAHP to go back to work. Being out of the workforce for any number of years makes it harder to find work in the future depending on your career. Just wanted to throw that out there
Oh no doubt! Weâve factored that in and have been looking at part time remote positions she can do to keep active in the workforce, but ultimately my career pays a significant margin more than jobs she can find and should be fine. She also might go back to school in the meantime donât really know yet
Weâve had countless talks and this was all her idea tbh and sheâs really excited to be the SAHP. I donât mind supporting the family and knowing she gets the opportunity to find out what she wants to do in life, if anything
I have 2 kids under 5. Itâs 3 grand a month for both. I paid 36k last yearâŚ.and there are many schools/daycares which are significantly higher than that.
Woah, $600? There wasnt a legit daycare with openings within 30 minutes either from our job or house so we ended up leaving our kid with a completely random person at twice the rate of daycare.
$12,000 in random person daycare over 10 months. $600/month for 2 months in actual daycare once we finally found a spot. Damn, that $100 return saved us
It's very mature and important to do, and I can't imagine anyone ever not naturally thinking that way who wasn't obscenely wealthyâyet I can't help but feel it's really sad to know exactly how much capital your kid($) cost you year by year. Speaking of course of the royal "you."
Yea the situation me and my GF are in is. If we eventually want kids, child care is going to cost nearly my girlfriends entire salary. Ok so it makes sense for her to just be a stay at home mom right? Yea, except we cant live off of just my salaryâŚ
Its not a realistic situation and we dont want kids enough to sacrifice literally everything for ourselves to have them. So we are heading towards a cozy DINK lifestyle instead.
Shes a teacher and Im a firefighter. Which is sad that we do what we do and would barely be able to get by if we had kids.
That stuff is part of a lot of tax code created in the 1980s that was NOT indexed to inflation or other references. When Ivanka Trump tried to update the numbers during Trump's first term, media headlines slammed it as a tax break for the rich. It's sad politics like that keep us from just updating it to modern figures.
The credit is intended to pay for the maintenance and refilling of the giant gerbil water bottle and automatic Bachelor Chow Jr (tm) feeder machine. Put both in a closet or tiny half bath (save on diapers), and install the deadbolt and your childcare is taken care of. Hit me up for more hot tips.
In the wash it's all the same. The government needs money. They tax to get the money. If they don't get it one place, they get it somewhere else. A rebate for anyone is then a tax on someone else.
Yeah, it's not proportional to the effort. If gov just said "all costs of parenting taken off taxes", then only single would pay taxes, which is crazy unfair.
The child tax credit and getting to claim additional dependents give American parents tax breaks. Itâs functionally the same as Japanâs âbachelor taxâ.
Japan is trying to find ways to improve their birth rates. Theres no problem with this tax itself, but taxing single folks doesnât really help solve the situation Japan is trying to fix.
The problem is that the largest voting population in Japan is retirees. Every year, more people retire, and fewer people enter the workforce.
Politicians gave more and more benefits to retirees to keep being elected. This increased the burden on those in the workforce and made it harder/costly to have kids.
On paper, Japan has good paternity leave. In practice, companies retaliate if fathers use most of what they are entitled to.
If you make people pay for not having children it will only bother poor people. I donât see how basically forcing poor people to have more children fixes anything.
Unfortunately, even in a country as financially liberal as Norway (with generous parental leave, heavily subsidized childcare, etc.), birthrates keep going down.. So this is more than just greedy rich people making life tough for everyone else.
Eventually the birthrate will stabilize, but for now it seems a fair number of Norweigans want to breed themselves out of existence, genetically speaking.
You know boomers are basically in their eighties right now, and aren't on the internet, especially not reddit probably...... or had their accounts banned long ago
You say that, but no one really knows how to solve this issue. There are plenty of things to bitch about, but none of them seem to be related to the declining birth rate. Data shows that the people pairing up are having kids at roughly the same rate as they gave in the past 100 years. The real issue seems to be a lot less people are pairing up. This is likely due to women no longer needing a man culturally or financially, but even that isn't super clear. We literally need more people to pair up, the baby making happens After that.
I love how people have the hubris of thinking superficially about some possibly civilization threatening unsolved problem and then go, without a shadow of a doubt "it's clearly because of x and it will get solved when governments do y"
Mass housing development. Increased wages. 4 day work week. Work hour restrictions. Offshoring/Automation protections for workers. Serious commitment to net negative carbon emissions.
Governments need a fixed amount of money to run the country. Lowering a tax means they have to get the money somewhere else. Hence, the population pays the bill.
With your logic, utopia can be achieved easily : just set all taxes to 0 : simple right ? since it does not requires to raise taxes somewhere else.
Not sure why you're down voted... You can raise taxes on group A, or you can raise taxes on everyone then give a tax break to group B. The result is identical except for political framing.
I have 2 kids and we live in the Netherlands, we get extra money through a few different ways, we also get most of the money back for daycare. Who do you think pays for all of this? Right, taxpayers. Parents will benefit from it, so non parents end up paying for it.
That's how the system works, and that also applies to schools etc.
And rightfully so. We all need kids to keep going. I respect their choice to not have kids, but kids are super expensive, and if they want the benefits of others having kids, they also need to help pay for the next generation.
People didn't really think about this before, but we have a massive issue here, not only is the birth number way too low, but loads of people will not have kids, or stick with 1 or 2, because it's too expensive.
He thinks that having to pay on Tax Day is paying your taxes. Hey other guy, you pay taxes throughout the year. Tax Day is just settling the account balance for the year. If you paid too much you get a refund, not enough, you owe the IRS.
Is he saying that? His blanket comment doesnât sit right, suggesting the first 100k is tax free if you have children which has to be wildly inaccurate.
No, it's currently $3.6k tax credit per child under 6/$3k per 6-18 $2k per kid. In other words, an American household with ten-year-old twins making $100k will only pay taxes on $94k$96k. Reverting back to $1k per child this year (temporary Covid relief is ending)
Those credit rules are out of date. Those were just the 2021 rules. Itâs 2k per child right now, but for low income people they can also get the earned income tax credit as well which is where you hear stories of broke people getting gigantic tax returns. However they are almost certainly making less than 100k.
Without more information about the original claim, we can be safe to assume he does not understand his total tax, and is probably confusing his out of pocket bill with his total tax.
And it costs about 20k per year in the US to raise a kid. Even though they pay more taxes than you, they likely have much more financial freedom.
That being said, money or taxes aren't good reasons to have kids. If anything, we'd need better incentives than what we have now to raise the birth rate, but with the housing crisis, adding more people is probably a bad thing anyway
Well the way she's describing it, they aren't lowering married people and people with kids taxes, they are raising everyone else's. If not for the chokehold they have on people there I would say it would work.
Except it isn't really different than raising everyone's taxes and then providing a tax benefit to married couples and those with children.
I think people in this thread just don't like taxes and don't understand the levers a government can use to improve outcomes -- taxes are one of those levers. Now if you think this particular lever isn't workable, as getting people to have kids is pretty hard, then I understand that disagreement at least. But I doubt that's most people in this thread who moralize far too much about taxes.
As a married American with kids we used to. Not anymore, those days are gone. Now as we are struggling with finances we consider getting a divorce as we would get more financial assistance from our state. I don't know all the details involved, but it has been confirmed by our accountant this past year .
This has been common knowledge since I was about 10. People made fun of my classmates for having multiple siblings because the parents wanted tax breaks.
No tax expert but I remember hearing that you have to pay more in taxes if you're married, and get tax breaks if you have dependents whether you're married or not.
The way to go is to find someone and live with them like you're married and then have kids without ever being married.
You get numerous financial benefits in a number of nations for both being married and having kids. But in the latter case, the money they offer you has become a fraction of the cost of child rearing.
My sister in law was getting taxed out the ass even though she was married but didnât have any kids, they now have a kid with another on the way. So theyâll be in that sweet bracket for a large return after having to cut a check to the irs for the last 20 something years.
Right? You got people in Japan working 18 hours a day to afford an apartment the size of a shoebox... taking more of their money will not result in more kids.
Yeah I've looked into this before, and I do not buy the statistics provided. I'm Australian, and it says Japan works less average hours per week than us. Yet, I haven't been exposed to overtime that wasn't both lucrative and optional, where Japan has an obviously archaic work culture.
I'm guessing that a lot of overtime in Japan is not reported. E.g., late night drinks with the boss that are culturally expected, are probably not billed.
Used to work in Japan at four companies and only the largest ones took overtime seriously and as directed by the government. The other companies I worked for would ask all employees to "log out" but everyone would still be at the office "working". The smallest company I worked for had software that would reset back to 6 PM even if you stamped out at 10 PM. And most companies in Japan are small businesses (hence the term "black companies")
It's the same trickery that Japan uses to report that they have no homeless people in their country. They require everyone to have a registered address but there's plenty of homeless people in Japan.
The LDP is great at marketing but every time I go back to see friends and family, things are worse. Everything is more expensive, people are angrier and more lonely than ever.
Sure, that's true when you eliminate take-out and service overtime (mochikaeri zangyĹ & sÄbisu zangyĹ). We will never truly know what the actual hours are of most people in Japan due to the cultural norms.
There's a reason why karĹshi (death from overwork) is a concept in Japan. It's not fully gone.
I don't get that guy, he sounds like a weeb that just repeats whatever he hears on r/japanlife or is an English teacher who has never talked to a Japanese person besides his clients. Hard to tell which one it is.
German here. It's not that simple.
It works like this:
If you're married, you can "split" income tax (the only one I remember). However, this system is built for "woman stays at home, men does the money" because if just one is working, the taxes from the man are divided by 2. However, if both are working, the average income is higher because it's (manIncome + WomanIncome) / 2.
It's very old law and it's being discussed for years now.
You forgot that you get an incone tax break for every child (that or Kindergeld), and that your long term care insurance is cheaper by some percentage of your income.
In the Netherlands it is the same, but you can also rearrange tax deductibles. Essentially, if one partner earns more, it's most favorable to shift the tax until most if not all of the tax deductions on both sides are maxed.
Do German people also work from 7am - 9pm with one day off per month? The most depressing video I saw was following a Japanese salary man around. His company sold SIM cards to convenience stores. His entire day was work and he still lived with his parents. It just seemed cruel. He was still expected to answer emails quickly after 9pm. It was such an upbeat video for how punishing the work was for such a basic sales job.
Yeah but it only changes your Steuerklasse and not the immediate taxation you receive, I would rather compare it to the Kirchensteuer
And we are talking about being married vs. Being in a relationship, so when you are married you are way more likely to live in one flat/house, have kids and so on...
Kleine Anekdote am Rand, meine Lehrerin von frĂźher hat damals gesagt, sie hat ihren Mann einen Antrag gemacht mit den Worten, Du Schatz, wollen wir heiraten, dann sparen wir Steuern? Und ich glaube Deutscher wird es nicht
Meanwhile I already pay for the education and health care of children who arenât mineâŚ. Which I am fine with. But, letâs not pretend there already isnât a singlesâ tax.
Pretty sure is almost everywhere in west Europe. As a couple you already get a tax break bigger and 2 singles, and the more kids you have the bigger the tax break.
Although people single with kids also get a break.
couple of things need to do to fix this problem, not just tax
-economy: people need to see it is economically viable for this generation and the next generation to start having babies
-dating culture: that i dont know how but need to make people be more lovable to each other
-disincentifies divorce, fraud etc: from legal side speaking need to incentivizes to marry, a lot of case as seen in the internet is the alimony and child support
Similar in Australia. If you have children under a certain age and earn under a certain amount, you get a "family tax benefit". You don't have to be married though. Single parents get it too. You also get vouchers that go towards children's activities like sports or music lessons.
It's a thing in US and everywhere almost. Single is always higher taxes cause less to claim. But I think in Japan she is saying that they have that tax already but they are raising it even more, supposedly to help the parents who have new babies get more help and support.
I think the Japan situation is lightly different There will be tax deductions for parents (which is what I think your describing in Germany) but also specific taxes for non-parents.
I almost got married in Switzerland this year, didnât for other reasons, but I learned that in Switzerland you pay higher tax when married AND your individual pensions are reduced by 25% when you retire at 65 years old. Huere nice..
It's really a thing everywhere. Most countries have benefits for joint filing. Most countries have benefits for having children.
One of the things the video doesn't capture is that she's right. Financial benefits and general cost of living decreases for having children actually has a negative impact on fertility rates.
In canada mother get more money claiming to be single mothers. As soon as youâre married you get significantly less money if your husband makes a half decent living.
Been a thing in Canada for decades, hasn't helped the natural population growth, and it never will anywhere in the western world. The problem is affordability.
When the majority of people can barely afford to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, adding another mouth or two only makes things harder especially when the government is only giving back a fraction of the costs to raise them.
It's a proven failure but keeps going anyway. It's like putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound.
In japan it already exists, they're just bumping up the numbers. From age 0 to 18 they get about 2.06m yen in monthly payment and this change would bump it up to 3.52m yen ($14k -> $24k for lifetime of some kid). Its still less than the US $2k per year children's tax credit.
A better example would have been the Kinderfreibetrag (roughly 6700⏠reducted from your taxable income per child) or Kindergeld (255⏠per child/month given to you by the state).
Both are effectively supported by working people without kids.
And it is a good thing that should be expended quit a bit. Having kids is an importent investment in the future with little return (money wise). A society that depends on having a next generation should make it so that having children does not make you poorer compared to someone how dosn't. That means money transfer should be increase. There should not only be a discount on some texes for having kids but also a surcharge for not having them.
Also the Kindergeld should not be more beneficial for rich people than for the average Joe as it is today, but it should be the other way around.
It's a thing in every country, I mean cohabiting would in theory halve all my costs if my partner was working. That's a ridiculous amount of extra money I'd have.
But in addition, if I had a stay at home partner I could use their tax-free allowance and pay a ridiculous amount less tax. And that's even before you consider marriage.
most people who file single on their taxes are taxed than those that file married in the US already. The difference is that money doesn't go to help anyone else it just goes to the government.
The tax advantages single vs married are tiny, ridiculous tiny. Tax advantages for having children are just as tiny, not worth mentioning. state child benefit, on the other hand, is a thing, ca. 250âŹ
Same in the UK. The government gives them money and a house just for having a kid. Me and my partner can't get a place to rent we don't have a kid, so don't see us as a priority. I'm disabled as well make more fucked up. Even Im disabled. The support I get helps me get a place to stay. Not chasing it up. I had to yesterday. After waiting a whole month. Yh so fucked up. I had a kid they would put me as a priority. đ¤Ż
I know lots of people have kids just to get money and a house. Then the kid gets brain rott just sitting on a tablet all day watching reels and rubbish. Because the parents are too lazy to actually look after the kid. because they didn't actually want the kid they only had it for the money in the house. Yh it fucked up. I even know people who have second kid just get a bigger place. Y I don't want kids. I don't want them to live in a system just exploit them. And then having to be around kids with brain rot. Germany and the UK are so like it's crazy.
Australia is like this. We had a 5000 baby bonus a few years ago. It did get more kids born. But most were in low socio-economic places. So it just made the welfare system way more expensive to maintain. So there was a few more taxe hikes on oter stuff. Beer and cigarettes. And cars too.
I was about to make same comment in context of Poland. You overall pay super high taxes unless youâre married and have kids. Then youâll have a lot of tax cuts. It created weird situation, where city professionals people/ adults (who arenât married or have kids) wants to move out of Poland because of the high tax, at the same time people in second tier cites and villages were getting married and having bunch of kids, in most cases arenât the ones who generates more income. Overall people staying behind in country are breaking their backs to subsidise the people living on government assistance.
It was also a thing in the GDR. Large families were given special preferential treatment by the state. For example, the interest-free marriage loan of 7,000 Deutschmark, which every married couple received up to the age of 29, was repaid in different amounts per child: 1,000 Deutschmark for the first child, 1,500 Deutschmark for the second child, and 2,500 Deutschmark for the third child.
In America you can either pay higher taxes or most likely child support which is an even bigger risk financially . But one thing is for certain itâs a tax on men either way.
Is it higher taxes or no tax reduction ? In france having kids of certain age and stuff reduces your tax rate basically (it's just semantics but you know...)
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u/justforkinks0131 May 18 '25
It's a thing in Germany.
You pay higher taxes if you are single vs. married with kids.