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As I said last time this idea came up. Punishing people for not having children is a bad idea. If you are single woman, a harsh tax + good benefits is going to result in you having children out of wedlock. Which is dysgenic for society anyway. If you are a single man, you are just fucked. There is nothing you can do to have children on your own, and if you can't get a partner by normal means, you'd have to commit horrendous crimes to do so. The vast majority of people are not Chad + Stacy, sucking and fucking around and never settling down. Punitively targeting everyone as if they are is just revenge porn dressed up as a policy.
There is no material difference, single people will be always punished. It does not matter if you let's say have $10k tax for both and give tax credit of $5k to family with children or if you have tax $5k and gather extra $5k tax from childless family. Single person pays $10k and family pays $5k in taxes in either case.
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"Punishing" for the purposes of tax policy is always a bit vague: are EV and solar credits "punishing" dinosaur car owners? Kinda, but the distinction seems a bit unclear. It's not an uncommon structure in tax code, either.
Tweaking some combination of the child tax credit, tax rates, and the standard deduction could feasibly
punishraise taxes on households with less than two children.Not endorsing, just observing how it could be implemented.
I think about it as rewarding for taking an action vs imposing a penalty for not. There's a third axis for how easy/capacity to take that action is. I think its probably more permissible to impose penalties for taking an action if it requires a conscious single decision to take that action, for example littering. Or if the action you want people to take is very easy to do. The ACA "tax" is somewhere there, though it was mildly contentious. EV and solar credits are rewarding a particular behavior. The problem stems from imposing a penalty for not taking an affirmative action, made worse by that affirmative action being downstream of other affirmative actions that additionally require another party to also take those same actions. Since person A can't control what person B is doing and requires person B to also do it so that person A can, punishing person A for not doing it is fairly tyrannical.
I'd say something like raising the overall tax rate and then giving a cut is not really a punishment. We understand the side eye thats really happening but theoretically its just raising the tax rate to pay for the deficit, and then lowering for people that are making "future taxpayers" as a reward for the socially approved behavior. But you'd have to do a blanket increase, doing targeted increases is just punishment. Last time this came up there were even more draconian punishments for the childless.
Tax credit for having kids or tax penalty for not having kids are functionally identical policies economically
One just makes people mad and one doesn't
If they are the same then it should be easy for people to stop suggesting the penalty. For some reason they can't, suggesting there is an emotive component that they prefer to punish people they disagree with, rather than benefit people they agree with.
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