The recent debate and brouhaha over Planned Parenthood, and especially this diary, got me thinkin' (uh oh!). I commented that birth control should be offered free of charge and that it would certainly be less expensive for the government than the Child Tax Credit afforded parents.
Then I did some digging...
The Child Tax Credit gives families up to $1,000 per qualifying child in a nonrefundable tax credit. This reduces their tax liability, but won't result in a refund, even if the liability is less than zero. But the Additional Child Tax Credit is refundable. For some people, it's also possible to get a 35% credit on qualifying child care expenses.
Meanwhile, the only allowable deduction for birth control is the pill, under the Schedule A medical expense deduction. But the thing about that is this:
You can deduct on Schedule A (Form 1040) only the amount of your medical and dental expenses that is more than 7.5% of your AGI (Form 1040, line 38).
As in, if your medical expenses don't exceed 7.5% of your gross annual income, you cannot take the deduction. Or it ends up that the standard individual deduction would be more. Even for someone at full-time minimum wage, there would have to be over $5,000 in expenses to achieve any deduction there. The pill is pricey, but not that pricey, especially when you compare annual costs of various birth control methods.
Notice that the most expensive annual cost of birth control was $390. Let's assume some crazy insurance mumbo jumbo was skewing those numbers and go with a figure that reflects the worst-case scenario, most expensive price the market bears; even if we double that amount, we're only at $780. Let's triple it; we're still only at $1,170.
Why can we afford $1,000 per year tax credits for children, but we cannot subsidize birth control? It's particularly baffling in the case of, say, the IUD, since they last roughly 10 years. Even at its most expensive, an IUD wouldn't exceed $1,000 in costs. So, one $1,000-deduction in ten years for the IUD versus $1,000-deductions every single year for children. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
Birth control expenses should count as a dollar-for-dollar refundable deduction. It would only be an option for women taxpayers and it obviously wouldn't apply to all of them. The costs, comparatively, are minimal. And if we can afford tax breaks for children and the costs of their care, we can totally afford tax breaks to keep unplanned children from becoming tax breaks.
This isn't to say that I'm anti-child or anti-family, nor should this diary be construed as some misanthropic Malthusian diatribe. I'm just saying that in the big picture, the ROI on subsidizing birth control is phenomenal.