Thursday, September 21, 2006

Taxation Without Heriditization

Russia thinks about the incentives:

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.

.... 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.

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