Texas Lawmaker Wants 100 Percent Tax Credit for Families With 10 Kids

The state flag of Texas on April 14, 2022. Patrick Butler/The Epoch Times

A Republican state lawmaker in Texas has introduced a bill that seeks to promote large families by offering property tax credits for married couples who have at least four children.

HB 2889 (pdf), filed by state Rep. Bryan Slaton on Feb. 27, seeks to promote marriage and families with varying levels of property tax relief, depending on the size of the family.

A “qualifying married couple” is defined in the bill as “a man and a woman who are legally married to each other, neither of whom have ever been divorced.”

Qualifying married couples with four children would get a 40 percent tax credit and an additional 10 percent credit for each added child. A family with five children would get a 50 percent tax credit and so on, all the way to a 100 percent tax credit for a couple that has 10 children.

The children can be biological or adopted.

If one of the spouses dies, then the remaining spouse will continue receiving benefits of the tax credit, provided the “surviving spouse remains unmarried.”

A qualifying married couple with no children is eligible for a 10 percent property tax credit.

The bill does not address extra tax credits for married couples who have only one, two, or three children.

Protecting Marriage and Boosting Birthrates

The bill comes as Texas is struggling with a declining birth rate.

Though Texas is maintaining a higher birth rate than the U.S. average, it still continues to fall along with the national trend.

Between 2007 and 2019, the birth rate in Texas fell from 79 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44 down to 62 births per 1,000 women in that age group. In comparison, the birth rate dropped from 69 to 58 births per 1,000 women nationally, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

“Supporting Texas means supporting Texas families. Strong families are the backbone and building blocks of society,” Slaton said in a Feb. 28 press release.

“We must support families by making it financially easier for them to have and raise children in a supportive and nurturing way. With this bill, Texas will start saying to couples: ‘Get married, stay married, and be fruitful and multiply.'”

In the press release, Slaton calls falling birth rates a “potentially significant problem for the future” as the state’s age dependency ratio rises.

The age dependency ratio measures the number of dependents aged 14 and younger and 65 and older against the total population aged 15 to 64. A high ratio means that the working-age population will face a bigger burden of supporting those who are either too young or too old to work.

Policies similar to HB 2889 have been implemented in countries like Poland and Hungary, Slaton says, while adding that these nations have begun reversing their declining birth rates, helping to foster “thriving families.”

Slaton also stated that children tend to have enhanced “well-being and development” and that they avoid developmental, behavioral, and academic issues when they are raised by two parents in a stable marriage.

Declining Population

Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the number of births in the country rose by 1 percent in 2021 compared to 2020.

However, this was only a blip compared to the average 2 percent annual decline between 2014 and 2020, including a 4 percent drop from 2019 to 2020.

Nick Wolfinger, professor of family and communication studies at the University of Utah, attributes the falling birth rate in the United States to younger Americans being in sexual relationships less often. Married couples are also having less sex.

Some of the reasons for this phenomenon include lower testosterone, changing dynamics due to social media, and time spent playing video games, Wolfinger says. He pointed out that people who are actively religious tend to be the most likely to have children.

Jackson Elliot contributed to this report.