Below, Peter links to his pro-pro-family tax policy Big Think piece. What’s fair, he says, about tax incentives for child-raising can be summarized thusly: some will contribute to the American future by having more children, others will do so by paying more taxes.
And over at Ricochet, here’s James Poulos , Mr. Postmodern Conservative, opposing such policies. (Although he makes an interesting suggestion that conservative victories would allow other ways, besides tax credits, to rectify the bias in the tax code against raising children.) His main point: it looks like interest-group politics, and thus gives license for bad liberal and statist-Republican tax policy incentives when the political winds shift. The Bush years “prove” this.
And moi? Until I’m convinced there is a hard-core commitment among conservatives to abide by a consistent set of inviolable principles for tax policy, i.e., reason to think we can cabin off tax policy from typical American political patterns, I’m with Santorum, Douthat, and Lawler, for increasing the pro-child-raising credits. I’m certainly open to changing my mind on the basis of practical revenue-flow projections, but not, I think, on a set of tax-policy principles that I suspect too few are really serious about.
