LARRY KUDLOW: Everyone should keep more of what they earn

There are reports that the administration is cooking up a plan to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect childcare subsidies, using funds from a Health and Human Services program, also intended to assist working parents. The HHS fund was created a while back to help low income and working-class parents afford child care, so they could go to work.

Under the new plan, parents who stay at home with their children could be eligible for about $9,000 per child each year, by redirecting money from the HHS working parents, to the new stay-at-home parents. Kind of sounds like taking from Peter in order to give to Paul. I don’t think it’s a really good idea.

According to reports, about 80 percent of the 870,000 families who currently get the childcare subsidies, have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to HHS data.

So let’s step back for a moment. I’m for parents having tots. And I’m certainly for work. Both are Godly. But this sounds like big government Republicanism. Too much government directing to this, and too much government directing to that. 

Why not just reform the tax code, and let everybody keep more of what they earn, and then let them decide how to spend their own money? In other words, that means not the government deciding how to spend their money, but letting individuals and families decide how to spend their own money — probably more astutely than the government.

We should be reforming the tax code. Take a police detective and his schoolteacher wife. I’ll bet their combined income is $150,000 to $200,000 a year. That’s good money. But they shouldn’t have to pay a 32 percent tax rate. I’d knock their rate down to 15 percent or 20 percent. In other words, a middle-class tax cut. And by the way, we don’t need seven tax brackets, which is overly complex.

Let’s knock it down to 3 brackets; 10, 20, and 30. Ronald Reagan, more than 40 years ago, left it at 28 percent and 15 percent. If you make $500,000 or $ 600,000 a year, you can pay 30 percent, not 37 percent. The middle bracket is if you make $200,000 or 250,000, you should pay only 15 percent or 20 percent.

The bottom bracket could be 10 percent but nobody really pays taxes there anyway. This would simplify the tax code, clean out a lot of unnecessary IRS flotsam and jetsam. And it’ll let people keep much more of what they earn. It’ll help families, it’ll help their children, and by the way it’ll be a big help to small businesses who pay the individual income tax. And it will keep big government’s nose out of peoples lives.