Not undeniable, because many married couples live in separate homes (because they are separated or, not infrequently, because they are temporarily living in different places for work). But you’re right that it is a good proxy for living together.
But the thing is, we predicate almost our entire tax system on the fact that people will answer forms honestly if they are subject to possible audit. I don’t see why asking if you live with another adult is fundamentally different from asking whether received some gifts, took some rides in the company car, lost a bunch of money on gambling, or made some cash tips.
The tax code recognition of marriage is about more than just living together. Married couples usually pool their time, money, and property resources in a way that casual roommates don’t. When one spouse does well, the other does well. When one roommate does well, the other doesn’t care.
I’m not out to defend the fairness of the present system–as a single person, I damn sure have my own grievances–so much as to point out that, when you combine progressive taxation with the tendency of humans to form couples and families, any system is unfair.
I’m not talking about casual roommates. I’m talking about unmarried couples. There are something like 7 million unmarried long-term couples living together in the US.
The standard deduction is $5450, independent of anything else. It used to be a fixed percentage of income (10%, I think). It is used only if you don’t itemize deductions. There is nothing like that in the Canadian return. And when I was filing in the US, it was used, basically, only by people not having mortgages.
Please check your figures. My calculations, documented in the spreadsheet referenced in the OP, show that *both *couples pay the same $25,200 in taxes. This is a direct consequence of the tax rate structure. The spreadsheet shows the marginal brackets plus assumptions about personal exemptions and standard deduction. (I did not develop other scenarios using mortgage interest deductions, etc., etc.)
Please reread your own OP. You’re advocating a tax code which ignores marriage. My post described the inequities which would arise under such a system. Quoting results from the current tax code is irrelevant.
Or take an executive making $500,000 and his teacher wife making $32,000. You really think we should treat this couple like each one is in an individual tax column? Seriously? I’m half a dink and you won’t hear me complaining. My household is also 60/40.
I reread my OP and your post. Your post doesn’t have anything do with being married vs. not being married. It has to do with distribution of income within a married couple. You are not comparing married people to single people.
How can analysis of the current tax code be irrelevant when that’s the point?
Hang on a sec. Is your earliest post describing a hypothetical situation under an imaginary tax system? That was not clear. I am still not sure how you are making your point but I’m open to trying to understand it.
OIC. So the $10K or whatever it is I deduct - I don’t remember what the number was this year, we did our taxes weeks ago - is different in that I take it even while taking other deductions, whereas a US taxpayer takes that OR takes other deductions, whichever better suits them?
Well put. This does bring it into focus. I guess a lot of it boils down to “the government extracts as much taxes as it can from everybody regardless of any doctrine of ‘fairness.’” It takes over a third of the income from the wealthiest Americans because it can, and because nobody feels very sorry for the wealthiest 0.1% of the population.
Someone who is supporting a spouse pays less taxes that a single person at the same salary. You can state this two ways, depending on your bias:
The government should not penalize people who choose to get married. Marriage is a valued institution in our culture, and the government though its tax policy should not discourage it.
But taxes are a bump under the rug–if you reduce them somewhere, you must increase them somewhere else. Thus:
The government should not require single people to subsidize the chosen lifestyle of people in single-earner families.
The way I would do it would be to have a single category for all income earners (no “single” vs "married), but allow married couples (and any other formal financial partnerships) to distribute the total household income and deductions between the individuals in any way they choose.
Yes. Preferential treatment of marriage by the government would be a whole 'nother debate. My solution retains both progressive taxation and favorable treatment of marriage while maximizing overall fairness. As has been stated upthread, you cannot have a perfectly fair system that includes both progressive taxation and recognition of marriage.