Advantages of gagging cock sucker….

Sorry Rajat, no offence meant, but the simplest, cheapest and most rational approach from a monetarist point of view is to let you die in your bed. Why on earth the Indians and Africans would want to come to Australia to clean bedpans when they could be manning the sex and drug fuelled call centres of our banking, finance and insurance industries is beyond me. I know which job I’d rather have.

Peter said “The point is that you and Tom N are looking solely at your current situation and ignoring the fact that you have already been a beneficiary of taxpayer support when you were a child.”

I did not ignore this “fact” at all (see my earlier response to DD). However, as I pointed out, absent the subsidies my parents received, I would still have enjoyed a similar standard of living when growing up to the one I received. In my view, the main impact of those subsidies was to require my parents to dissave less during my childhood, thereby providing them with a higher life-time standard of living - at the expense of their childless peers. On that basis, my parents - not me - were the prime beneficiaries of those subsidies. (Of course, the subsidies may also have induced a higher level of reproduction than would otherwise have occurred, although the effects of this on welfare are debatable.)

Peter also said: “The truth remains that other people

The point is that you and Tom N are looking solely at your current situation and ignoring the fact that you have already been a beneficiary of taxpayer support when you were a child. Public spending on families with children before the 1970s may have been much lower than now, but tax allowances for families were not, (nor was education spending as a percentage of GDP) so in terms of the relative disposable incomes of people with and without children, the situation was much more like it is now than you acknowledge, although as I pointed out in my first post, there have been fluctuations.

The idea that the goods and services needed when people retire is purely a private matter ignores the point that Derrida Derrider makes - money is not a resource - it is a call on resources. You need other people to produce the goods and services you will need when you retire. Robinson Crusoe could have had a treasure chest on his island fill to the brim with gold and gems, but he would not have been able to retire. The truth remains that other people’s decision to have children is still a benefit to childless people.

Family spending is mainly about wealth transfers and politics than the economics of children because the transfers involved only affect decisions to have children on the (very fine) margin. I agree with Tom N that the goods and services I need to pay for when I retire is a private matter - if no one has children and wages go up because labour is scarce, that’s something I just have to deal with. And I should be able to save more now to deal with this eventuality if taxes were reduced due to reduced transfers to families.

On the second, the fact is your father paid a lot less income tax than he would have if you hadn’t been around.

On the last point, migration and overseas investment just establish a claim on other country’s children rather than this country’s. Look ahead - most of the world is undergoing demographic transition. True, it will be a long time before we have to worry about underpopulation. But it will be a considerably shorter time before the rate of return on overseas invested capital, or the supply of young migrant families, falls. Especially as all those other old developed countries will be in the same boat as us and competing with us on both fronts (ie finding profitable investments and getting suitable migrants).

Not to mention that a claim on our own children may have less chance of being repudiated than a claim on other country’s children (they may see those repatriated profits and debt repayment as Leninist imperialism rather than your just desserts for past foregone consumption).

Re: 5, it can be argued that the main effects of the subsidies received by my parents in the past were that (a) they did not need to dissave as much to have their children (and, thus, are now more able to live it up in their retirement); and (b) they could ‘afford’ have more children. Absent government assistance and my parents would still have provided my siblings and me with a simlar standard of living to the one we had (though they might have had fewer of us)*. On the other hand, my parents’ lifetime standard of living did increase as a result of the subsidies. For this and other reasons, I reject the notion that today’s former children ‘owe’ a debt for the parental subsidies of the past.

Re: 6, yes, I have made provision for old age and will be happy to pay whatever the market demands for the services of today’s young Australians, should I use them, at that time. However, DD, it is pertinent to note that there are alternative sources of future supply - including though migration and trade. If there were (valid) concerns about a shortage of future supply in Australia, then the cost-effectiveness of inducing further domestic reproduction through higher parental subsidies would need to be compared the the cost-effectiveness of securing additional supply via these other sources. That said, I doubt that underpopulation is likely to be a concern for the foreseeable future; in fact, quite the contrary.

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* The welfare effects of less children is a complex area beyond the scope of this debate. Suffice it to say that I believe that I could mount a robust case that those effects could well have been strongly positive.