The US isn’t experiencing a demographic winter.
But Santorum’s tripling of the exemption for children guts the income tax of the usual income incentives for people to work harder: it increases the tax burden on those without dependents, and for those with dependents, it too cuts the association with actual income earned.
Just an all around bad policy. (But great if, like Santorum, you have seven kids.)
The child tax-credit is to society’s benefit. Santorem’s seven will be paying more in taxes (specifically Social Security) than Zero’s two, and that’s just how it is. It’s exactly the same argument DINCs use when they don’t want increased public-school taxation: “We don’t have kids, so why should we have to pay school taxes?” True, but they do have houses which, so the argument goes, gain in value with the purportedly better schools. (And NO, I’m not saying that taxes improve public schools, nor that ANYone should be paying taxes for public schools; but that’s the way things exist today.)