Are parents getting short-changed?
THE CHILD-FREE movement -- those vocal non-breeders who have never seen "Barney" and hope they never will -- has received lots of attention lately with the complaint that American society caters to parents at the expense of others. Outspoken child-free types feel put upon when they work late, for no extra pay, as parents rush off at 5 p.m. to get to day care on time.
And don't get them started on child tax credits. "Handing out goodies to parents just because they are parents is affirmative action . . . based on reproductive choice," complained journalist Elinor Burkett in her book "The Baby Boon" (2000).
Yet in economic terms it's parents, not the childless, who get the short end of the stick. So says Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, in his new book "The Empty Cradle: Freedom and Fertility in an Aging World" (Basic). Once upon a time, having children who would contribute labor to the household and then support you in your old age was a good investment. But today, children are a money pit.
One study finds that it costs $200,000 to raise a middle-class child these days, and some estimates place the "opportunity cost" of having a child -- lost wages, lower pensions, etc. -- at $1 million. Meanwhile, Social Security spreads the wealth generated by younger generations to all of the elderly, including the childless. One group raises children, but everyone gains from their labor. "To put it bluntly," Longman writes, "child-rearing is fast becoming a sucker's game."
No wonder some are opting out. Low fertility rates have reached crisis proportions in Western Europe, but even in the United States the current child-bearing generation is not producing enough progeny -- an average of roughly 2.1 per couple -- to replace itself. As a result, while today there are 3.3 workers for every retiree, in 2030 there may be 2. Worse, Longman argues, there's a correlation between youth and entrepreneurial verve. The older an economy skews, the less productive it is.
All of which suggests we need to change our family-unfriendly ways. "Elected officials love to talk about `family values' and `investing in our kids,"' writes Longman, "but shy away from proposing anything big or new that would actually help them."
Some economists have proposed federally subsidized day care and universal preschool as partial solutions to the parental financial pinch. Others prefer cash. In the current issue of The Boston Review, Yale law professor Anne Alstott proposes a $5,000-per-child grant to be used for child care, education, or parents' retirement savings.
Longman similarly opts for cash, but pegs awards to retirement programs. For the first child, parents would get a one-third break on their Social Security payroll taxes until that child reaches 18. A second child would bring an additional one-third cut. Have three or more children, and pay no Social Security taxes.
Longman would pay for this by reducing benefits for non-parents -- probably ensuring that his plan will remain a thought experiment. Meanwhile, at retirement age, parents who had spent some time out of the workforce would receive as much Social Security as those who worked straight through their key earning years.
Nancy Folbre, a UMass-Amherst economist who has studied these issues, believes there's a certain elegance to Longman's argument. "It is a good idea to make people aware of what Social Security is doing," she says. "It is, to my mind, a major source of redistribution from parents to non-parents." Yet she prefers some of the traditional solutions -- day care, better public schools, universal preschool, the ability to take time off from work to take care of family responsibilities.
"We need to have a public debate and come to some kind of agreement about what proportion of the cost of child-raising should be born by parents, what proportion by the public, and whether [the answer] should be the same for poor families and rich families," Folbre says.
Enola Aird, director of the New York-based Motherhood Project, an offshoot of the Institute for American Values whose goal is to "put motherhood on the national agenda," echoes Folbre's call. But she takes issue with the vocabulary used to conduct it. Children are "ends in themselves," she says, not just widgets that help fuel the American economy. Longman's, she adds, "is an economist's view of people." And she doesn't mean it as a compliment.
Christopher Shea's column appears in Ideas biweekly. E-mail: critical.faculties@verizon.net. 