In a move clearly aimed at encouraging more births in this country, a top government official has come up with a plan to re-introduce the long-abandoned childless tax in Russia.
Speaking to the press after a seminar that focused on low birth rates in Russia health and social development minister Mikhail Zurabov suggested that childless taxpayers should help the state support families with children and thus at least partially assume the cost of encouraging more births.
Deputy chief of the lower house health committee, Nikolai Gerasimenko, backed the idea saying that nearly 21 million Russians are single and said that the lower house was working on a bill to the effect. None of the officials would elaborate on the size of the tax.
In his state of the nation address earlier this year President Vladimir Putin said the most urgent problem facing Russia was its demographic crisis.
The country’s population is declining by at least 700,000 people each year, leading to slow depopulation of the northern and eastern extremes of Russia, the emergence of hundreds of uninhabited “ghost villages” and an increasingly aged workforce. Official Russian forecasts, along with those from international organizations like the UN, predict a decline from 146 million to between 80 and 100 million by 2050.
But in an exclusive interview to the BBC, Viktor Perevedentsev, who has been studying Russia’s population since the 1960s, said he believed even these figures may be overly optimistic. He said the decline was likely to accelerate and that the Russian leadership should accept the population had reached a “tipping point”, beyond which direct intervention would be ineffective.
Birth-rates in many developed, industrialized countries are declining. Seeking to remedy the situation, governments in many European countries talk increasingly of sanctions against the childless.
In Slovakia, for example, a leading adviser on the government’s Strategic Council on Economic Development proposed in March to replace an unpopular payroll tax with a levy on all childless Slovaks between the ages of 25 and 50, Newsweek wrote this month. In Germany, economists and politicians have demanded that public pensions for the childless be slashed by up to 50 percent.
And in Russia a powerful business lobby has called for an income-tax surcharge on childless couples.
But, experts see no reason to believe that sanctions against the childless will do much to raise the birthrate. Germany, for instance, already spends more than any other country on family subsidies, and has the world’s second-highest taxes on childless singles (after Belgium).
Russian observers also doubt that such measures as re-introduction of childless tax in Russia will prompt people to have children. While rights activists denounce sanctions against the childless defending their freedom of choice, even those who back the idea in principle are not sure it will work.
These days in Russia many married couples are reluctant about having babies, even if they are well-off and can afford to multiply. Many of the generation of those who are now in their 30s and 40s have already developed a set of personal values and there is hardly a place for a kid in their lives. Maybe, they would not mind a surcharge to exonerate themselves. If, of course, they ever experience any pangs of guilt
In his comments for BBC Perevedentsev pointed to how the Soviet government, at the beginning of the 1980s, undertook similar measures as proposed recently by Vladimir Putin in response to concerns over falling birth-rates. They produced a mini “baby boom”, lasting just two or three years, before the long-term decline reasserted itself.
The idea of bribing people into having babies will hardly work for middle class tax payers, who earn well enough not to ask for more from the government. As to fining people for not having babies, international experience shows that such schemes are not effective either. Besides, in a country where many employers are still reluctant to report their workers’ incomes in full to avoid taxation, the plan is even more likely to fail.
Then, it has to be remembered that many childless couples do want to have children, but cannot. They undergo expensive medical treatment to have a baby, and often fail. The bill on amendments to tax legislation is only being drafted, but hopefully that category will be exempt.
Another reason why bribing people into having babies or forcing them into it through sanctions would not work is that our reluctance is rooted in our consumer mentality. We are no givers, but a generation of egoists whose choice between a screaming infant and a Zermatt ski vacation is easy to guess
A childless tax? Well, perhaps, it is not such a bad idea, after all, as long as its size is reasonable. For, if it is not Russian taxpayers will not pay it. Instead, they will rather pay a doctor who will confirm their infertility.
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