Maybe those couples who want more than two babies should pay for it. After all, each extra baby consumes more carbon emissions – and thus resources – during lifetime, right?
Associate Professor Barry Walters thinks so. He believes that families should pay a $5000-plus “baby levy” at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 per child. His proposal appears in a current edition of the Medical Journal of Australia. He also suggests that population controls like those used in China and India aren’t such a bad thing.
In the US, we would shudder at such a thought. In fact, we actually subsidize birth in the form of extra deductions and exemptions (though, as a mother of three kids, I can attest that it hardly offsets the extra costs to us). But maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe, as Earth gets a little bit more crowded each year, we should consider incentives to keep the population low. After all, money talks, does it not?
I know that this is not a novel idea. In fact, there are social programs in place that have suggested paying young moms not to have more children. Hmm. Maybe that’s the wrong way to go about it? Maybe instead of paying folks not to have children, we should have those who do have lots of children pay us?
I know, it’s not necessarily polite conversation. This idea of what is essentially government regulation of our private lives isn’t something we like to talk about in public. But doctors like Garry Egger wonder why that is. In response to Professor Walters’ idea, he queries, “One must wonder why population control is spoken of today only in whispers.”
What do you think?
Technorati Tags:
tax policy, population control, baby tax
digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/environment/A_Baby_Tax_in_Australia’;
{ 13 comments }
