I like to keep up with some blogs about homemaking, partly because I find them interesting, partly because I want to raise my daughters to know how to make a house a home, and partly because I get some great recipe and craft ideas. I don’t usually find information about tax proposals on them, but Anna at Domestic Felicity talked about this article that proposes that Australians pay a tax for having children. The initial cost would be about $5000 with an annual $800 per year after that. Theoretically, that offsets the impact of each child on the environment (nevermind that they may have a very positive impact).

Anna had this wise comment:

Limiting our drive for consumption and teaching our children to be wiser stewards of the earth’s resources, to have just what they need and use just what they can’t do without, is another option. This isn’t something that can be done by legislations and campaigns; it’s quiet, steady work that doesn’t involve glamour, bonuses and promotions. And in the long run, I believe it’s the only way to really help our planet, because greed is limitless and being fewer doesn’t mean we will be any less consumption-driven.

Since we have 9, yep that’s NINE, great kids, we’d really go in the hole around tax time if such a proposal ever made into law around here. But I have to agree with Anna on this one. In our family we teach our children to reuse and cook from scratch and to try, try, try to satisfy our true needs without giving into rampant consumerism.

As for the likelihood of that tax increase in Australia, there is this great quote from Angela Conway of the Australian Family Association:

“I think self-important professors with silly ideas should have to pay carbon tax for all the hot air they create,” she said. “There’s masses of evidence to say that child-rich families have much lower resource consumption per head than other styles of households.

Interesting idea. If we could just implement a hot air tax for politicians, we could get rid of the budget deficit in a matter of days.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Christmas, Large Families, Parenting, children, homeschool. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.