Marco Rubio: Tax Reform Should Help American Families

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Having kids is one of life’s greatest experiences. It’s also expensive. Between school supplies and summer camps, sports and doctor’s visits, raising children increasingly takes more and more money. I should know — my wife, Jeanette, and I have four. We’ve been blessed in recent years, but I know what it’s like to start a family and struggle to make ends meet. My parents were immigrants who came to America with virtually nothing, and after I finished law school, I owed more than $100,000 in student loans.

There’s a reason many people feel it’s harder to afford children now than in previous generations. It’s true. According to federal data adjusted for inflation, from 1960 to 2015 the average annual cost of raising a child in a middle-income family rose by over $11,000. It’s now estimated that middle-class parents will spend more than $230,000 over the course of their son or daughter’s childhood — and that doesn’t even include college tuition.

Ask just about any couple and they’ll tell you this absolutely influences their decisions about when to have children and how many to have. As the economist Lyman Stone has shown, by 2012, the average number of children American women intended to have was 2.37, and the total fertility rate was 1.88 — a gap of about 0.5 children on average. Since the 1960s, there has been a consistent gap between intended and total fertility, even as the number of children American women desire to have and the total birthrate have declined over time.

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Tax reform is a key part of reinvigorating the American dream so that couples have the flexibility to choose how to best start and raise a family. The status quo means the cost of having children makes those choices for them, resulting in smaller families, riskier pregnancies, longer commutes from more affordable exurbs and more missed recitals.

Families are how our values are passed down from generation to generation. We simply cannot have a strong nation without strong families, and working Americans face a challenge in the cost of raising children that threatens the health and vitality of our country.

Washington should help by modernizing the tax code for the 21st century. Think about it: For high-cost, major life decisions, we have financial products that help families pursue the American dream. For buying a home, we have the 30-year mortgage. For going to college, we have student loans. But for having a child, we have very little, even though raising a child is more expensive than buying a house or getting a college degree.

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Providing significant tax relief to working families shouldn’t be a final box to check after all of the lobbyists have had their fill. As Congress works on a tax reform package, families must be our priority. We cannot lose sight of what should be the primary goal of tax reform for our time. As the 2016 election revealed, the crisis of the working-class family has steadily grown in recent years, with fewer marriages and children, less work and lower pay, and high rates of disability, all against the backdrop of increasingly out-of-touch, ruling-class elites in the wealthiest country in the world.

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As Congress bows to the pressure of the modern lobbyists there is one person who is fighting for the common man on a daily basis, Marco Rubio. We must take care of working American families first and foremost. Marco is the 100% correct in stating the dream of raising a family is sometimes not possible for families hyper-conscious of their finances. This should never be the case. We need to promote the pro-life, pro-family thought and tax reform is a wonderful way to accomplish a little financial break on the working American family.