Some commenters (Sarton Bander, Chef Dave, Onus Probandy spring to mind, UPDATE add Jorge to the list) have often voiced their opposition to the idea of paying out Child Benefit. I'm in favour because I'm strongly pro-family and mildly feminist, plus that's just the way that most countries do things.
But it's no big deal really and it doesn't actually make much difference, it merely affects the timing of payments. In very round figures, let us imagine that we have £200 billion surplus LVT receipts that we have to dish out somehow to 40 million adults and 20 million children as a Citizen's Dividend, and let's assume that a tenth of adults don't (or can't) have children. To simplify things further, let's assume that all adults live in two-adult households.
1. Following SB, CD and OP's approach, 40 million adults would get £5,000 a year each, or £10,000 per household (whether they have children or not), and children get £zilch.
2. If we pay children half the adult rate, then 40 million adults get £4,000 per year each and 20 million children get £2,000 per year each.
3. If a tenth of adults never have children and the other nine-tenths have 2 2/9 children each and those children stay with their parents for half their parents' lives (let's ignore retirement age and upwards), then there will be three types of household:
- Two adults, who never have children = £8,000 a year each.
- Two parents, who have on average 2 2/9 children living with them = £12,444 a year each
- Two adults, who will have children in the future or whose children have left home = £8,000 a year each.
4. Over the lifetime of the household of 40 years (like I said, ignore post-retirement age):
- Childless households will receive £8,000 x 40 years = £320,000.
- Parent households will receive [£8,000 x 20 years] + [£12,444 x 20 years] = £409,000.
5. So let's compare this with option 1. where there is no Child Benefit (or where the Citizen's Dividend doesn't kick in until you are adult):
- Childless households receive £10,000 x 40 = £400,000.
- Parent households receive £10,000 x 40 = £400,000.
6. So yes, childless households might feel a bit miffed, they receive £80,000 less over a lifetime. But parent households end up a princely £9,000 better off.
7. I (personally) don't think that if a parent couple receives £9,000 more over 40 years, that's an average of an extra £2 per parent per week, that this is in any way some sort of big financial incentive to have children, or that it even makes a small dent in the cost of having children (the bulk of which is the loss of mothers' wages), which has been stated to be hundreds of thousands of pounds.
8. It is, as I said, largely a question of timing of payments. Unless I've missed something, we were all children once anyway, and in a sane world, people tend to have children towards the start of their adult lives, so you get a bit more earlier on in life when money is tighter and a bit less later on when it isn't.
