Really?

I read this article today about an editorial put out by the SL Trib.  The writer suggests that anyone with three or more children should be taxed at a higher rate to pay for education costs.  Something was also said about a study indicating families with more children have a higher carbon footprint.  Hmmm.  

I see so many things wrong with the logic of that that I don't even know where to start.  First of all let me start with one that may not affect most of us...how about adoption?  Some families adopt because they can't have children, but many adopt because they want to help.  So if you decide to adopt a sibling group of 5 kids (heaven bless you!) then you would be bumped into a higher tax bracket.  Some people want to provide a good home for children that otherwise may not have one.  So along with taking on the cost for their care (any help you might get would be minimal), increase in your bills, their higher education, etc.  you want to punish them for that?  

So you have to pay for the education of children.  Well, I think if you looked at the numbers you would probably find that Utah has one of the most educated populations in the nation (secondary education, people that speak foreign languages, etc).  Education is one of those things that a society gets paid back eventually.  So you invest in these young children and they are going to grow up, maybe go to school, get careers and serve society for the greater good.  I'm not sure what the situation is like now, but I know before the major recession hit Utah had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation.  Which meant that people were working, they were giving back. They were repaying society as it were for educating them.  Education is an investment in the future.  Yes, Utah has always struggled having enough money for it.  My dad has been a teacher for 20 years.  I know how it goes.  There just is not enough money to go around.  But we have dedicated people in Utah who want to make a difference.  We have fathers and mothers of large families that teach for pennies because they know the value of it.  Your going to end up taxing the teachers, the law enforcement officers, the social workers that are barely making a living as it is.

To the carbon footprint...I don't know, maybe that's true.  But from personal experience I will tell you that since I've started the daycare and had more kids in my home, I have been a lot more concerned about my carbon footprint.  It's not so easy to ignore when you are producing two or three times the amount of garbage each week.  So since I've started the daycare I've started recycling and composting.  I've switched to (mostly) reuseable shopping bags and reuse as many materials as I can with the kids.  We talk about recycling and things we can do to be nicer to the earth.  Maybe not all busy moms take the effort to worry about it, but I'll tell you what, people with or without kids don't worry about it.  When we lived in Logan they had an optional recycling program.  You could pay I think $6 extra a month to have a recycling bin, just like your trash can.  All you had to do was throw your recyclables in the bin (you didn't even have to sort them) and they picked them up twice a month.  You could recycle ALMOST anything with the exception of glass and it was SO easy.  We gladly signed up for the program.  Well they decided to make it mandatory, but increased the fees for everyone only $3 a month.  People pitched a fit!  I don't have any way to know what type of people pitched the fit (people with families or not...) but I think that's beside the point.  A lot of people in AMERICA (because we are such a consuming type of a nation) have a large carbon footprint and we could all do a little more.  

I skimmed through some of the comments on the article on KSL and was quite surprised.  Many people actually agree with him and there were actually a lot of really (what I felt) were ignorant comments on the subject.  What do you think?