Penalty for childlessness

The UN prognosis that in 2050 the population of Ukraine may shrink to 35 million people has apparently worried the members of Ternopil Oblast Council to such an extent that they decided to resort to drastic measures. Officials appealed to the president, the Verkhovna Rada, and the prime minister with a proposal to introduce a childlessness tax. It will only be applied to men above the age of 25 who have no children of their own. They propose that the state take no less than six percent from those men’s salaries. However, nobody seems interested in finding out why young people are not having children. The MPs justify their decision by saying that this kind of law will encourage Ukrainians to procreate, and therefore the population of Ukraine will increase, and the UN prognosis will not be fulfilled.

The government already wanted to introduce such a tax back in time when Yulia Tymoshenko was prime minister.

In early 2010 the former prime minister issued orders to the Ministry of Family, Youth and Sports and the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy to prepare a draft law that would introduce a childlessness tax of 10 percent of people’s official salary.

But later the authorities changed their minds and the issue never went any further. At least this was the case until the Ternopil MPs came forward with their initiative.

However, regardless of who initiates such a penalty tax, the idea of taking money from a person only for that he or she does not have children is not just wrong, it is absurd. For some reason nobody considered that nearly every fifth family in Ukraine cannot have children and such a tax is an immoral mockery of them. They also did not take into account current trends regarding marriage. Earlier, Ukrainians married at the ages of 17-20, today young people postpone taking this crucial step until the age of 25 or even later. The appeals of NGOs to promote responsible parenthood when a young family is getting ready to have a baby, in both moral and financial respects, rather than leaving the baby in an orphanage or simply on the street because they are not capable of taking care of it, were also left unheard. It never occurred to anyone that we should fight orphanhood instead of creating new risks and increasing the number of abandoned children. There is a great difference between giving birth to a child and bringing them up.

“Every person has the right to choose when to marry and every family has the right to choose when to have a child,” says Liudmyla Cherenko, head of the living standard research department at the Ptukha Institute of Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences. “We already saw this in Soviet times, when the childlessness tax was paid by all working people, starting from 18 and up. However, we cannot say that this stimulated the birth rate. If you ask an adequate person ‘Will you pay a certain percentage of your salary or have a child?’ this person will opt for the former. So I don’t think this will boost the birth rate. The causes behind the demographic crisis go back to Soviet times, while the crisis of the 1990s simply exacerbated this process. However, there was a goal for a family to have two children back in the 1960s, and the number of children that a family wanted to have decreased, despite the tax. In what regards balancing the budget, such ways of replenishing it contradict Ukrainian and international legislation. Forms of budget receipts and their distribution also involve very complicated calculations. If the Ternopil oblast council expected these funds to stay in the local budget, it is a utopia, because receipts of this kind go to the state budget from which they are distributed in the form of transfers. If they wanted to finance some new program on the national level from these funds, it is better to finance the existing programs, for example one that is aimed at supporting families with many children. It seems to me that this is a way to nowhere rather than to Europe.”

A childlessness tax is also being intensively discussed in Russia (somehow we don’t borrow wise ideas from our neighbors, such as increasing social payments after a child is born). The goal of this tax is the same as in Ukraine, i.e., an improvement of the demographic situation and driving up the birth rate. Anatoly Vishnevsky, director of the Center for Demography and Human Ecology of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, said in an interview with a Russian periodical that Russia has been among the countries with the lowest birth rates for over 40 years now. In his words, this is an old problem which is hard to solve. In Ukraine the situation is somewhat better, and demographers have registered a birth rate increase, albeit a modest one, in the past several years. But the dynamics are not so bad as to force us into adopting our neighbor’s experience and introducing a childlessness tax, which would also be a violation of human rights.

“Introducing this kind of tax is not simply wrong. It is a violation of human rights, in particular the right to privacy, and it comes from the state at that,” says Yevhen Zakharov, co-head of the Kharkiv Human Right Group. “When a person is essentially punished by a duty without any violation on his/her part, this is not normal. This system did not pay off in Soviet times. However, some have retained the impression that it is right. If bureaucrats think that they will stimulate the birth rate in this way, they are wide off the mark. If we are talking about solving demographic problems, it is better to encourage families financially before they have children.”

Meanwhile, the government has not responded to the Ternopil proposal. However, sociologists and human right advocates believe that society would respond to this idea very negatively. Cherenko believes that it is better to initiate the development of individual charity, because every person gets to a stage in life when they want to help someone. In Ukraine there are many people that need help: there is a multitude of families with many children and family-type children’s homes or simply gifted children in poor families! It would be still better if the government learned to prevent problems rather than simply attacking the existing ones.