All My Tax Dollars Are Sacred

Rand Paul is wondering whether we should punish people on public assistance if they have more kids.  

His comments came at a Commerce Lexington luncheon; he got to talking about the benefits of not having children out of wedlock, including the increased likelihood that the mom and family would end up living in poverty, when compared to married couples with children.

I'm OK with that; and besides, particularly when he was talking about high school kids having children, it's good advice. But here's what he said that is causing an uproar.

...there are all kinds of ways to stop having kids.

You know, but we have to teach our kids that. But some of that's sort of some tough love too. Maybe we have to say 'enough's enough, you shouldn't be having kids after a certain amount.' I don't know how you do all that because then it's tough to tell a woman with four kids that she's got a fifth kid that we're not going to give her any more money. But we have to figure out how to get that message through because it's part of the answer. 

He went on to note

Some of that's not coming from government. It needs to come from ministers and people in the community and parents and grandparents to convince our kids to do something different.

Now, I'm not going to argue whether a cap on benefits for people who have more kids is a good thing or a bad thing, or whether it 'works' or doesn't work. In this link to Think Progress, you can read up on that for yourself.

But I have to ask, if we are to stop rewarding people for having children, why isn't Rand Paul suggesting that we stop granting people additional tax benefits for each added dependent?  I mean, with the incentive, what's to stop some married couple from just popping out more kids so they can get the savings on their income taxes?  And what does having kids have to do with income? If you want to dis-incent people from having children, then take away all of the birth incentives for all of the moms.

This is just like drug testing for welfare folks; if you want to test people who receive money from government programs for drugs, test ALL of them, including anyone collecting a pension through the state or federal system, anyone who works directly in a government job, anyone who works for a company that has a government contract, and so on.

Of course, by the time we make all of those connections, we'll have government-mandated urine tests every week for just about everyone in the country.  Sure is a good thing we all have insurance now!

The only way we are going to spend less money is to treat all of our tax dollars as sacred and worthy of protection, not just the ones we spend on the less fortunate.