Obama's Tax on Stay-at-Home Moms

Obama's Tax on Stay-at-Home Moms



President Obama’s disrespect for motherhood has manifested itself in policies ranging from support for same-sex marriage to defense of a form of abortion that involves forcing a baby into a drug-induced premature delivery and then leaving that little one to die.

When it comes to the most vulnerable and innocent human beings – those for whom great mothers have great hearts – Obama has a heart of stone.

It is demonstrably true that he does not believe a child has a right to a mother or a need for a mother. If he did, he could not support same-sex marriages in which two men can adopt a child or even hire a surrogate to incubate a baby for them.

God’s commandment says: Honor your father and mother. Obama supports policies that deny a child the ability to even know a mother.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that as he closes out his presidency Obama is proposing a new policy that discriminates against married stay-at-home mothers and provides an incentive for mothers not to take care of their own children.

The president’s tax proposal would “streamline child care tax benefits and triple the maximum child care credit for middle class families with young children, increasing it to $3,000 per child,” says a White House statement on Obama’s new proposal to adjust the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. “The president’s child care tax proposals would benefit 5.1 million families, helping them cover child care costs for 6.7 million children (including 3.5 million children under 5).”

“The president’s proposal would make the maximum credit – for young children, older children, and elderly or disabled dependents – available to families with incomes up to $120,000, meaning that most middle-class families could easily determine how much help they can get,” says the White House statement.

Most of Obama’s tax proposal are structured to be sold with class-war rhetoric. I.e. He is increasing taxes on the “rich” to help the poor. But that cannot be said of this proposal, which is designed to provide its maximum credit to families making $120,000 a year.

Who would this tax scheme help and who would it hurt?

For starters, an IRS webpage on the Child and Dependent Care Credit stresses: “The care provider cannot be your spouse.” So, one beneficiary is daycare centers.

Compare two families, each with two children under three. In the first family, both the mother and father work full-time and each earns $55,000 per year. Their combined income of $110,000 is under the $120,000 threshold, so Obama gives them his full child-care tax credit. They are happy to take it, dropping off their 1-year-old and 2-and-a-half-year-old at a for-profit daycare center where a relative stranger deals with them during the majority of their waking hours.

In the second family, the mother – who has a college degree and a solid work history prior to the arrival of her children – has decided she should nurture her own children rather than pay a daycare center to hold them. She has given up a $60,000 per year job, and she and her husband now sacrifice and get by on his $58,000 per year salary.

What this mother gives her children for free is far more valuable than what the daycare center gives the children of the first family for a hefty fee.

The first family has an income $52,000 greater than the second. But Obama gives the first family, not the second, his tax credit.

The mother in the second family gave up income and material comfort to raise her own children. For this, Obama punishes her with the tax code.

The perversely logical corollary to Obama’s desire to structure the tax code to the disadvantage of stay-at-him mothers is his desire to use tax dollars to replace working fathers with the government itself.

As this column has noted before, in each of the last six years on record – 2008 through 2013 – at least 40 percent of the babies born in the United States were born to unmarried mothers. By contrast, in 1940, only 3.8 percent of the babies were born to unmarried mothers.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services' annual report on “Welfare Indicators and Risk Factors” it is a fact that “historically a high proportion of welfare recipients first became parents outside of marriage.”

In 2013, according to the Census Bureau, there were 105,862,000 full-time year-round workers in the United States – including 16,685,000 full-time government workers. These full-time workers were outnumbered by the 109,631,000 whom the Census Bureau says were getting benefits from means-tested federal programs – e.g. welfare – as the of the fourth quarter of 2012.

Every American family that pays its own way – and takes care of its own children whether with one or two incomes – must subsidize the 109,631,000 on welfare.

Perhaps if we started rolling back the welfare state – and reduced the burden of government on all families that rely on themselves and not the government – more mothers would choose to stay home even if that meant Obama and his ideological heirs would discriminate against them in the tax code.

By Terence Jeffrey