Are You Sure You Don’t Want Kids? What If We Bribed You?

There have been some recent news stories about conservative lawmakers’ borderline wacky schemes to get the birth rate up. I call the schemes wacky because they do not seem like they were cooked up with the input of anybody who is on the fence about wanting kids (or wanting more of them).

Scheme One originates (where else?) in Texas, where conservative lawmakers introduced a bill last week that would give massive property tax breaks to straight couples who owned property and had many, many children. H.B. 2889 would give heterosexual couples with four children a 40 percent break on their property taxes, and all the way up to a 100 percent property tax break for families with ten or more children, provided the parents were married.

I’m no tax expert, but it seems like that sort of law, in addition to being homophobic and creepy, would make it so that a theoretical school district containing only families with ten or more children within it would have a property tax base of zero dollars with which to operate its respective public school. Conservatives have made no effort to hide their hatred for public education, but until some pretty seismic shifts in the legal system occur, public schools still must exist. Again, I’m not an accountant, but it seems like a bad idea!

Read more at The Daily Beast.