Women? With credit cards?

Factual Questions
62

One of my friends taught a technical high school subject, and he says once he made the mistake of saying “you have to learn this stuff unless you want to end up working as a garbageman.” Some smart-Alec kid sticks up his hand and says “My dad is a garbageman for the city and makes $28 an hour.” then the whole class starts pounding their desks, chanting “garbageman! Garbageman!” and laughing.

He said “you have to be really careful what you say nowadays.”

And several years later in the city I live now, they laid off all the garbagemen, contracted it out, and replaced manual labour loading trucks with automated garbage bins distributed to each household. So only one driver, no loaders, and the arm on the truck does the heavy lifting. And that driver gets closer to minimum wage.

= = = = =
When I got married, both my wife and I worked and had decent incomes. I suggested separate incomes since I was concerned that we might not realize each other were writing checks and go into overdraft. But by the time the money thing got settled out after the honeymoon (we settled on joint account) I realized we were almost entirely using credit cards and paying bills online with the bank app; our cheque use dwindled from maybe once or twice a month in 1999 very quickly to about once every year or two nowadays since eTransfers came along - most cheques had been for personal things not big payments. And we consult and agree before any significant purchases.

I remember spending a summer with my much older step-sister’s family back before 1970; she handled much of the financial stuff mainly because he was commuting to work from 7AM to 6PM while she looked after kids, groceries, etc. I believe she paid cash, and i was astounded to se a cart full of groceries came to the amazing sum of $100. Money was obviously a concern, because she tasked us with keeping a running total in our heads. I believe she paid cash.

When I visited for the daughter’s wedding 15 years later, they were running all over the college town writing cheques to every business. (My niece worked at a large grocery store part time, and complained because she said a co-worker had told the manager about her wedding flower order there “Why is she allowed to order that? She can’t afford it!” No, but mommy and daddy can.)

Another fun anecdote - I worked for a large manufacturer, and they had started direct deposit back in the late 1960’s when the banks went full computer. Someone mentioned that when this happened, a lot of the men from the plant had to explain to their wives why they were suddenly being paid so much; apparently they used to get paid (cash? cheque?) and drink or gamble half the money before they got home on Friday.

63

On a similar note, I’ve personally known several families where they lived on the wife’s income because the husband spent all of his on himself, usually to satisfy some kind of addiction. Obviously, after they split up, their standard of living increased by leaps and bounds even if they were “poverty stricken.”

(I’m very aware that to this day, there are also a lot of women who believe that his money is our money, and her money is her money.)

64

Within the past 10 years, I’ve seen ads for men-only or women-only jobs, but that’s understandable because they would be working in an environment where the other gender’s presence was not appropriate: for example, male RNs only to work at the intake clinic of a men’s prison.

65

Of course. That makes sense. But there are no longer whole sections of Help Wanted ads segregated by gender. That was a battle fought and won. :slight_smile:

66

In the UK it was as recently as 1990 that a wife’s income was treated as separate from her husband’s.

"Before 1990, the income of a married couple was added together for tax purposes and treated as if it were the income of the husband. A married man had a personal allowance, which was just over one and half times the single person’s allowance. A married woman who was at work had her own allowance – Wife’s Earned Income Allowance (WEIA) – which was the same as the single person’s allowance, but all the allowances including the WEIA were in law given against the husband’s income which included his wife’s income. The system had its roots in the social legal concepts of the early nineteenth century."

67

When my dad’s car was in the shop I dropped him off at work – a car battery factory – and picked him up at the end of the day. When I did there were about a half-dozen autos waiting, each with a woman in them. When I asked dad what that was all about he said, “Today’s payday and they’re here to make sure half of it doesn’t get drunk up on the way home.”

68

I don’t know how long ago Canadian income tax stopped lumping married income together; essentially anyone earning income files a separate tax return, marital status has nothing to do with it. A person can claim one dependent as “married” if the spouse does not have sufficient income, but if both work, it is possible to claim one other dependent as “equivalent to married” (I think a higher deduction that a child or other dependent). The logical calculation is to see who should claim common dependents to maximize the refund. Similarly, only one can claim the family home tax credits, etc.

The thing I read about in the USA about having to file jointly for married just seems confusing - is it not a perverse incentive for working couples to divorce and live together instead?

69

Married couples in the U.S.do not have to file jointly; they have the option to file separately if they wish. There are several tax credits and advantages to filing jointly, and my understanding is that most couples do file joint returns.

But, there are some circumstances in which separate returns can make sense, such as if both spouses have high income, or if you have a lot of medical expenses, as there’s a cap on how much of those can be deducted.

70

I still have a bank account with ‘both the husband and the wife name on it’.
And I also live in a house with both names on the dead and both names on the mortgage.

And we also have both names on the credit account, and on the “cheque account” (although we don’t use cheques).

So I guess my wife still has “her husbands name” on her credit account. The actual cards have only one name on each, but that’s not the account name – that’s just the card.

My Dad managed the bank accounts when I was a kid, but in all honesty – he did the clerical stuff because my Mother had more important stuff to do.

71

As kenobi_65 said, married couples don’t have to file jointly in the US - but for a lot of couples, MFJ saves money. It depends upon specifics, but for example, let’s say I earn any income and my live-in boyfriend does. I pay no taxes, as I have no income. Live-in boyfriend gets a standard deduction of $12,400, pays 10% on his taxable income up to $9875, and 12% on the taxable income between $9876 and $40,125. Now we get married, but everything else is the same - we get a standard deduction of $24,800 and pay $10% tax on taxable income up to $19,750 and 12% on the income between $19,751 and $80,250. It’s the same effect as splitting the total income in half, and mainly benefits households where the spouses have very different incomes.

Married filing separately is not the same as two unmarried people each filing their own return. There are a very few situations where taxwise, it’s better not to get married - the incentive to not marry usually come up regarding either means-tested benefits or benefits based on a prior marriage, not taxes.

72

Same in Germany. Married couples can choose between filing jointly and filing individually. But the progressive tax rates means you can save a lot in taxes by filing jointly (unless the incomes of the two spouses are almost the same), so that’s what the vast majority of married couples do. Arithmetically, filing jointly means that the aggregate income of the two is distributed evenly among them, and each of them pays taxes on half the aggregate income. That pushes them into a lower tax bracket than they would be in if filing individually.

In addition, the filing jointly scenario offers additional advantages in special circumstances. I work for an EU institution in Germany, which means my salary is exempt from German income tax. That means that if I were married (which I’m not), my spouse would effectively half the entire tax-free allowance for two all for herself, and the salary above that would end up in a considerably lower bracket. So for my married coworkers, filing jointly is a complete no-brainer.

73

As to the why behind the USA married filing jointly or separately thing …

The original idea was to subside being married and penalize cohabiting. The original tax rates were designed around the assumption of a couple consisting of one breadwinner and one low- or zero-earner. Obviously nowadays a lot of married couples have much more equal individual incomes than was common in e.g. the 1950s & 1960s.

At various times the relationship between the tax rates, deductions, phase-out amounts, etc., have been altered to be more advantageous to more-equal-earning couples vs. less-equal-earning couples.

I’ll stop here as the rest of this story drives directly into partisan politics and this is GQ.

74

Whereas, as I understand, the logic behind no joint filing in Canada is equity. If the spouse does not work (or works little) then they are a fixed deduction, minus what income the spouse earned if below the deduction amount. (plus lesser deductions for kids/other dependants) The logic is simple and egalitarian - why should someone with a very high income be allowed to escape quite a bit of taxes by being married and splitting their income? Indeed, the Revenue Agency will look into excessively high wages paid to spouses or children from a private business when it appears to be for income splitting, for example. I knew a few people with private businesses who hired the wife to “clean the office” to reduce their taxes. As long as the rate was not unreasonably generous and the work was actually done, not a problem.

(However, you can income-split retirement income like pensions, where having a bit more take-home is more important)

75

I’m not going to say one way is better or worse- only that it can also be seen as egalitarian that a married couple with X income should pay the same amount in taxes whether one spouse earns X or each earns 1/2X or one earns 3/4X and the other 1/4X. The issue results from the fact that there are three ways a household with two adults can earn X income -

  1. they can be unmarried , in which case who earns how much doesn’t make a difference as they will always pay taxes based on their own income
  2. they can be married with one partner earning all or most of the money
  3. they can be married with a less-lopsided income split

and there is no way to have all three couples pay the same amount in taxes. If you allow joint filing , then couples 2 and 3 will pay the same and couple 1 may pay more , and if you don’t allow joint filing couples 2 and 3 will pay the same amount as unmarried couples with the same income split, but not the same as each other.

76

Like everywhere else, tax in the UK is complicated. History has a lot to answer for, and we have more history than most. Income tax was introduced by W Pitt to pay for the Napoleonic wars at 0.8% for the wealthy.

Abolishing things like the married man’s tax relief, and raising the age at which women can draw their state pensions are all part of the movement towards gender equality.

Until the middle of the last century, the whole system was based on the idea that men worked and women stayed at home. It has taken a long time to get away from that presumption.

77

Independent Lens – the PBS series – had an interesting doc on the 9to5 organization (the organization came before the movie). Although focused on clerical workers, it was fascinating to see how things started to change.

78

I worked at a grocery store in high school that didn’t start taking credit cards until the mid to late 90s. And then it was only Visa and Mastercard.

79

A friend worked on a market stall selling greeting cards back in the 90s. The owner steadfastly resisted the move to plastic, but eventually, when he saw people walk away when he refused the proffered card, he was forced to capitulate.

80

That’s a large exaggeration. Many working-class women “took in” work; laundry, ironing, sewing, etc. Their customers would often drop off and pick up the items in question.

And even when women worked outside the home, that was often only until they got married.

81

But that still remained much more true for middle-class women (secretaries, teachers, etc.) than for working-class ones. Female cleaners, child-minders, agricultural workers, etc., were very often married (and very often mothers, who relied on family and community networks to manage their own childcare needs).

Nurses and nannies and maids etc. who had to live in their employers’ houses rather than in their own family dwellings did overwhelmingly tend to be either unmarried or widowed (either grass or sod, as the expression is).