As someone married to a homemaker, the main benefit I get from our marriage license, AKA the piece of paper, is a lower tax rate. There’s no reason that couldn’t apply to a single person, if the government wanted to encourage people to live alone.
Now, if my wife outlives me, she’ll get a significant benefit in the right of survivorship. But we will pay for that by receiving lower benefits during my lifetime. Which brings me back to the main benefit, of the piece of paper, being the lower tax rate.
Those I care about would grant me equal social acceptance from our religious wedding ceremony even if the government hadn’t issued us a license.
The other thing you get is a wife willing to live with you and be a homemaker. She’d be insane to take the risk of becoming economically dependent on you without having any legal claim on the household you are building up together.
People like to build economic partnerships. This can involve one person putting the other through school, one person staying home full time so that the other has 70 hours a week to dedicate to a career, this can involve one person taking a risk and starting a business while someone else restricts themselves to a stable job to provide security for both. No one could make those sort of economic specializations without the protection of law, and the understanding that what a household builds together is owned by the household.
All the single people I know are already married to nobody, and I’m not aware of any rights they are denied because of that, including the right to be married to somebody.
If they exercise the right to marry somebody, then that sort of union has particular privileges and obligations which extend to both parties. Those are not necessarily “benefits” of course, which is one of the reason many singles prefer to stay married to nobody.
But in any case, whatever “benefits” there are to being married to somebody instead of nobody ultimately derive from societal consensus and not from some sort of government fiat fetched out of thin air. Is there a particular benefit you can cite which is an example of discrimination? For example, economically how is it an advantage for a married person to have to share wealth with a partner while a single person can hog it all for himself?
Surely the real discrimination here is against folks married to somebody instead of nobody. They now are suddenly supposed to have any number of obligations beyond nobody…
Legally, not necessarily emotionally. Pair bonding is an emotional phenomenon, not a legal one; two people in love are in love regardless of how or whether the law chooses to acknowledge their relationship. And even in the minority of men with polygynous marriages, they typically had a “Chief Wife” or “favorite concubine” or whatever; the pair bond was still there, there were just also a bunch of other women too.
I suspect telling people you’re married to an imaginary person will result in something other than social acceptance, even when you have a certificate to prove it.
Not in the case of the OP. The"marriage penalty" occurs because you have two incomes that are combining to bring you into a higher tax bracket. Assuming your non-existent spouse has no income, you will always be better off filing a joint married return rather than a single return.
Even for people with real spouses, there is generally no marriage penalty if both spouses have an individual taxable income less than $73,200, or if one of the spouses income is substantially lower than that of the other spouse.
