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Boessenkool’s piece is entitled Kids Are Not Boats, and that is pretty much the crux of the thing. (Indeed, one wonders why this excellent slogan is only appearing now, after the election, in a technical publication.) Before the Tories started smuggling old-fashioned family allowances back into the system, he notes, higher-income families “received the same tax treatment for having children that they received for purchasing a boat.”

Should the state, Boessenkool asks, stand aloof from these alternatives? Should spending on a boat be taxed exactly like spending on baby booties, so that the individual consumer can make an uninfluenced pure choice between the utilitarian value of the purchases?

The argument goes like this: every government, in practice, does favour kids over boats. Assuming that we do want to do this, or other things like it, giving money back to individual consumers is the most efficient, decentralized way to do it. Giving people dollars they can use in the market is better than building or subsidizing daycares or gyms, because it doesn’t screw up the operation of price signals.

We then get a grocery list of things Boessenkool thinks are worth encouraging through tax credits: marriage, reproduction, human capital formation, home ownership, saving, “improving civil society.” Some of these, I am afraid, rather give the game away. Wasn’t it just a few years ago that the Americans incubated an enormous international financial crisis because of a political mania for encouraging home ownership? You might already have personally lost a few years of income growth because someone wanted to “improve” civil society by rewarding property-flipping and mortgage fraud.