Jürgen Borchert, judge at the Hessian Social Court in Darmstadt, was the invited speaker at the IZA Tower Talk on October 24, 2006. In the corporate headquarters of IZA’s sponsor Deutsche Post World Net in Bonn, the family policy expert spoke on the topic “Poverty for Everyone? How Family Policy Undermines Freedom and Prosperity."
According to Borchert, parents are systematically disadvantaged by the German tax and social security systems. He called it “socially unfair” that working parents carry a double burden: While they contribute to pension funds to the same extent as the childless, they additionally bear the substantial costs of raising children, upon which the childless depend to finance their old-age pensions. Borchert showed that 80 percent of all public revenues place an undue burden on families, thus causing their “economic suffocation.” This imbalance would be aggravated by an increasing focus on indirect taxation since families are more strongly affected by excise taxes than singles and childless couples. Borchert made the case that the current fiscal redistribution to assist families was insufficient and could be avoided altogether if taxes and social security contributions were levied according to the individual ability to pay, which means taking the number of children into account. Instead, Borchert claimed, the government “encourages” childlessness – with detrimental consequences for Germany as a country that relies most of all on its human capital.
In order to increase the political influence of families, Borchert advocated the principle of family suffrage, which would give parents an additional vote for their under-age children. |
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