ARE childless Australians community-spirited enough to pay more taxes to enable people with kids to be taxed less, to help support them as they raise the next generation of taxpayers to keep the country going?

It is a controversial proposal, floated today in the US by one childless columnist who was raised by two extremely hardworking middle class parents who battled—as many Australian families do—to cover family costs.

To foster a fairer society and give those who are producing kids a little less excruciating financial pressure, he suggests that child-free people earning more than the median household income (in Australia $57,400 in 2011) should be taxed more heavily, and families should pay around $5000 a year less.

“As a childless professional in my mid-30s, I often reflect on the sacrifices working parents make to better the lives of their children. And I have come to the reluctant conclusion that I ought to pay much higher taxes so that working parents can pay much lower taxes,” writes conservative columnist and political commentator Reihan Salam in the journal Slate.

“By shifting the tax burden from parents to nonparent, we will help give America’s children a better start in life, and we will help correct a simple injustice. We all benefit from the work of parents. Each new generation reinvigorates our society with its youthful vim and vigour. . .

While nonparent can focus on their jobs in laserlike fashion, parents are rarely in a position to do the same. Every time a sick child keeps a parent home from work, her earnings suffer, either directly, because she’s taking an unpaid leave of absence, or indirectly, because she’s missing out on opportunities to climb the corporate ladder.

Even when we compare a nonparent and a parent who are working exactly the same hours and earning exactly the same income, the nonparent has a clear leg up. Most obviously, the nonparent has far more disposable income to play with. . .Raising taxes on nonparent could even the score a bit, tilting the balance ever so slightly in favour of those who toil on behalf of America’s future workforce by wiping their butts and painstakingly removing their head lice.”

His tone is playful but his point is very serious. In the US it is estimated the cost of raising a child born in 2012 to the age of 18 is $US301,970 (which as Salam points out doesn’t include the cost of post-secondary education), and the latest AMP and the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) study found last year that the cost of raising two Australian children to age 21 here was a crushing $800,000.

It found middle-income families had the biggest increase in costs, and are now spending up to 50 per cent more than in 2007.

“The cost of (raising) two children to the age of 21 is about $800,000, Ben Phillips, a NATSEM researcher said. “So it’s incredibly expensive, and the main drivers of this are the big ticket items such as food and transport and recreation.”

And coupled with the financial outlay required to cover the rapidly increasing cost of kids is the cost of foregone earnings and the opportunity cost for people who choose to have kids. The massive cost of quality child care in Australia, plus the lack of available places, are stacked against Australian working parents, and the cost of child care alone is said to be a big factor in families’ decision to keep one person out of the workplace altogether when the kids are preschool aged.

Lowering taxes for families by increasing taxes on childless people would free up more of families’ disposable income for child care, for one thing, and potentially allow the workplace participation of women to increase in Australia—as consecutive governments have strongly suggested it should.

And, though clearly not a vote-winner among the childless by choice (or those for whom infertility or other issues have made parenthood impossible), it would recognise the vital job families are doing by rearing new Australians who will care for, and pay for, many of us into our old age.

Australian birthrates still lag behind replacement rates, and the decline in family sizes, as well as the trend towards delaying starting families, has been attributed in large measure to the intimidating cost of having kids.

So, what do you reckon, are we family-friendly enough to ask those who go without the burden of having children to pay more to help the ones who do? Or do we still consider that in Australia it’s every, man, woman and their children—and every double-income no kids unit—for themself?