The fact that Howard (as the current end point in a long line of miscreants) has produced a cash payment (rather than a tax measure) in FTB A that has lost sight of that purpose (instead making it a form of How-To-Vote card) is an issue of design.

I am not, in the comments I am making, opposing assistance to people who are genuinely poor. But I am trying to keep everyone else out of the welfare system.

If Andrew doesn’t have a problem with tax concesssions, then I’m back to square one in trying to understand his position.

I don’t think it is so easy to get away from concerns about relative needs. Do you accept that welfare payments, for example, should vary according to the size of the household that they are supporting (ie that a couple should receive more than, if not twice as much as, a single person and that a household with children should receive more than an otherwise similar household without)? Or are you in favour of a flat amount which the unemployed or disabled person can then choose (or not) to share with others who may be dependent upon them?

If you accept that at no or very low private income it is appropriate for larger families to have a higher disposable income than smaller families in order to achieve roughly the same standard of living, why does this logic no longer apply once a person’s income is higher? I presume you would have no problem with allowing some tax concession to a person with dependents to support, but in the end this provides a not dissimilar outcome to family payments (depending of course on exactly how it is designed).

Don’t get me wrong - I would agree with you that the Howard government has gone a lot further in expanding family assistance than can really be justified in public policy terms. One of the problems as I see it is that it has never really spelt out what it is attempting to achieve through all of this largesse, preferring to cloak its policy rationale in vague rhetoric about ‘enabling choice’. You would have to say that, if the baby bonus is meant to increase fertility it hasn’t been an astounding success and if increased family assistance is meant to encourage mothers to work less, that hasn’t happened either.

If you like, we are debating a subsidy for the “running costs”. As before, whether you think we should subsidise the running costs depends on whether you think children and other dependents are different to BMWs.

What do we get for the money? For horizontal equity measures, we are taking a tilt at equity. Not better child rearing or fertility. We are accepting that dependents are different and that their running costs should mean that a person with said dependents shouldn’t pay as much tax as someone without.

We won’t agree on this - the dependents as commodities debate is longstanding. But at least I think I understand where your objections to FTB A/B are based - in the commodity issue, rather than the design issue.

I’d totally reject any ‘equity’ argument. As with any proposal to spend taxpayers’ money - especially one with such a massive price tag - I want to see what we are going to get for it. Do we get significantly higher fertility or significantly better child rearing as a result? Perhaps - but I am yet to see a convincing argument.