It's actually that life is too good for childless people, especially when they're wealthier. Take a DINK couple with high paying jobs, say an engineer and an attorney. Without kids they can have a nice house or condo, regularly take great vacations, and still be saving enough to have the option of retiring in their 40s or 50s. But with kids, that mostly goes out the window. The societal expectation is that you should spend basically all your disposable time and income on your children, which means expensive daycare, travel sports (gotta start working on the college applications in grade school), and private schools (or "good" "public" schools gated by living in a super-expensive area). And even if you can avoid all that, colleges are very good at figuring out how much money you have and declaring that to be the tuition.
As a high-earning childless person myself, I'll freely acknowledge that I should have been paying significantly higher taxes in order to benefit my counterparts who did have kids. Although it would be a challenge to do that redistribution in a way that doesn't just get captured by daycare and college.
As a high-earning childless person myself, I'll freely acknowledge that I should have been paying significantly higher taxes in order to benefit my counterparts who did have kids. Although it would be a challenge to do that redistribution in a way that doesn't just get captured by daycare and college.