The tax breaks go both ways. A married couple in which one spouse earns a lot more than the other do pay less tax than the two would together as individuals. But in a marriage in which both earn similar amounts, the tax burden is higher.
True, although the penalty is typically not very large and only applies to those in the four highest tax brackets (essentially an extension of the progressive tax rate that applies to single filers)
In the vast majority of cases I’d imagine there is a disparity between spousal incomes that would make filing jointly beneficial. My question is why two people filing jointly get a tax break over two people filing individually.
Please give an example of an “enormous tax break” a married couple would get, and how you think it should be applied to a single person.
The ability to file your income tax form as “married filing jointly” is a very minor concern.
What you’re up against here is the fact that people tend to pair-bond. What happens to a person’s assets when one of them dies? With marriage, the other person owns those assets without having to go through a probate process. What happens when one is incapacitated and can’t make his own medical decisions?
Those are the kinds of things that gay couples need to have just like opposite-sex couples.
And they just don’t apply at all to a single person.
The majority of married couples pay $1,300 less in taxes than they would if they were single. Source
Anecdotally, all of my married friends have a high earning male and a low earning or no earning wife. All of them report a decreased tax burden, sometimes as high as $4k-$5k saved.
I’m not trying to determine how these benefits should be applied to single people, I’m asking why the concept of marriage is considered from a tax perspective at all.
It’s critical from the perspective of estate tax. That’s what the whole Supreme Court case was about, after all. The plaintiff didn’t get more than $300K in tax refunded to her because the IRS didn’t consider her married.
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I wed a man who wasn’t there…
In every case, they will still pay less than than a single person whose salary is equal their combined salary. Since we do tax by the household, this is one case where single households do pay more than married households do.
Still, that doesn’t make the argument in the OP better.
From your source:
[quote]
[ul][li]51% of married couples paid less tax jointly than if they had not been married, according to a 1996 Congressional Budget Office analysis. The average amount these couples saved: $1,300.[/li] [li]42% of married taxpayers paid more by filing jointly than they would have if they’d remained single, the office said. The average penalty: $1,380.[/ul][/li][/quote]
You seemed to ignore the second bullet. Assuming the remaining 7% of married couples paid the same either way, there’s barely an average benefit to being married. About $83 per year per couple, according to my (probably shitty) math.
Married couples tend to behave differently than single individuals - shared expenses, shared income, shared property. It’s a different situation which warrants a bit of consideration as to how the rules ought to apply to them. It’s not a flawless system, but that would probably be impossible to achieve.
Many of those 1100 benefits you are talking about are things like death benefits, primary rights dealing with medical decisions, issues dealing with privacy, the tax code provides tax free transfers between spouses in several cases, There are really no benefits I can think of that married couples get that would apply if you married yourself.
How so?
I’m not seeing how it demonstrates that at all.
Yeah, this. Every benefit I can think of that the laws currently grant are nonsensical when applied to a single person. When the ‘married’ single dies, the ‘spouse’ dies at exactly the same instant, and so has no need of surviving spouse benefits or insurance payouts. If the ‘married’ single is incapacitated, so is the ‘spouse’, and so is also unable to make medical, legal, or financial decisions. When the ‘married’ single shops at the military base PX, the ‘spouse’ is already there, getting the same cheaper price on everything s/he buys. When the ‘married’ single is ill or injured, so is the ‘spouse’, and is getting treated for it at the same time, for no additional cost. Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum…
The OP (the poster) may have a valid point, but the actual argument made in the OP (the post) is a really ridiculous way to try to illustrate it.
Oh, yeah. On reviewing the thread after my last post, I noticed this that I thought to respond to, but not enough to actually post. But, since I posted anyway, in for a penny, in for a pound…:
I’m game. I went to school in Steubenville, and I was all over Ohio on ‘Road Trips’ at the time. Wherever you’re going might make a nice base (if it’s within 3 hour’s drive) for ‘Day Trip’ visiting all the places I’d like to see again (including Salt Fork State Park, where I broke my first bone). It will certainly be within ‘Day Trip’ distance of some of the places I’d like to revisit. I might even be able to come up with sufficient cash to do it, if I can get away when you are going there. PM me. We might be able to share the expenses!
Hey, you two, get a room. . . . Oh, wait. . . .
Exactly. It’s like legally recognizing the bond of parent and child; it’s the legal recognition of an instinctive human relationship, not just some arbitrary association.
But it is arbitrary, unless you want to define ‘pair bonding’ as to involve more than two, and little bonding.
Marriage through human history has been equivalent to men owning women, often more than one.
Right. The argument about the 1000+ “benefits” or legal entitlements exists as a function of the inequality where certain entitlements vest upon the legal spouse of a person, but *not *anyone else who is just as much their life partner but happens to have a different form of relationship.
The OP also as pointed out conflated a number of things that are not legal entitlements from marriage. Developments are families-only/singles-only based on *private *covenants. Singles get charged higher insurance premiums than marrieds of the same age and sex because *actuarially *they’re shown to be lower risks, that’s just the market. And so on.
In the end, there has to be some sort of legal order under which the formation and operation of family units, which among most human populations are based on pair-bonding at some pointy, are regulated and disputes about it adjudicated, which does not require reinventing the wheel with each contract and each case. Call it sacramental matrimony, civil marriage, domestic society, mancommunal association, jelly doughnut, gazbofloom; you’ll have to call it *something *before the law. And guess what, very shortly after that’s established, the common laypeople’s vernacular for this joining will become: “married”.
OK, it’s hilarious seeing someone say this to Der Trihs.
But even in societies where the wife was considered effectively the property of the husband, the norm was still one wife per man, and there was usually some sort of emotional bond between them.
Are the specific benefits themselves all that matter? How about the social acceptance that comes with the term “marriage”?
Whether or not there was an emotional bond, there was always an economic bond. The laws regarding marriage are about economics, not love, and about how the law should treat property held by a household.