For Richer, For Poorer

...At tax time, the couple would add up their income and divide by two, so that effectively each spouse would be taxed on half...

...Another way is to permit married couples to file their returns singly, as if they were unrelated individuals, or jointly, whichever would result in the lower tax burden...

...An interesting debate about marriage just took place, and apart from his sneering reference to "Ozzie and Harriet" families, he can hardly say what it was about...

...There are two basic approaches to reducing the marriage penalty...

...When two people marry, they cease to be simply two separate individuals...

...It was endorsed by supply-side economists, who recognized that moving toward individual taxation would encourage more mothers to enter the paid labor force and thereby boost economic growth, and by feminists, who recognized the same thing...

...In particular, which spouse has earned which sum in the paid labor force is not the main issue...

...about $1,400 per year more in taxes than they would have paid if they had been taxed as separate individuals...

...Both plans would get rid of what Plan A calls the marriage penalty, but only Plan B would do so in a way that corresponds to the reality of the marital bond...

...Plan A assumes that the underlying standard for tax fairness is individual filing, and that the basic question is whether a married couple pays less (gets a "bonus") or more (pays a "penalty") than they would have paid if they had remained single and filed separately...

...Call them Plan A and Plan B. Plan A, by far the more widely cre-dentialed, was brought to prominence in 1994 by Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans in their Contract With America, and is now viewed as conventional wisdom by the New York Times, supply-side Republicans, feminists, European-influenced social democrats, most economists, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office...

...Here's their argument...

...Both plans would reduce the tax burden on marriage, but Plan B in principle leads to a broader, across-the-board reduction...

...For this reason, the tax code should treat the married couple as a true partnership, in which the two spouses share equally and to which they are viewed as making equal contributions...

...The big winners," he complains, "are the Ozzie and Harriets...

...This solution was proposed by Congressional Republicans throughout the 1990s and came very close to becoming law...

...But about 40 percent of couples incur a marriage penalty, paying an average of David Blankenhorn is president of the Institute for American Values in New York City...

...For him, the meaning of marriage is not even a topic, and so there is no philosophy to discuss, only political intrigues to uncover...

...couples, including most one-earner couples, receive a marriage "bonus," paying less in taxes as a married couple than they would have paid as two unrelated individuals...

...That's why Edmund Andrews of the New York Times smells a rat...

...From a policy perspective, the objective is not to treat them as if they were single, but to treat them as married...

...Here's our argument...

...Until fairly recently, George W. Bush and most Republicans solidly backed Plan A. But by the time of the tax cut of 2001, most House Republicans had switched to Plan B. The Senate eventually went along, and President Bush signed into law that year a long-term plan to reduce the marriage penalty that contradicted his own campaign proposal from the previous year and that, while not pure income-splitting and far from perfect, clearly pleased the marriage buffs and the defenders of at-home mothers...

...This solution was proposed by candidate George W. Bush when he ran for president in 2000, and just about everyone thought it was a good idea...

...It seems that President Bush won't stick with the plan favored by Andrews and most experts for reducing the marriage penalty in the federal tax code...

...About half of U.S...

...Poor guy...

...If this is the goal, one (but not the only) way to get there is to permit income-splitting for married couples...

...Every day, spouses cooperate, trade off, give freely to each other, and specialize according to talent and inclination...

...Yet another version of Plan A is to give a special tax credit to two-earner married couples...

...But for married couples, the real question is whether the tax code recognizes what marriage is...

...Except for a few malcontents insisting on Plan B. This approach has been favored by a small number of marriage buffs (including your author) whose big idea is to support marriage, and several grass-roots organizations, most notably the Family Research Council, one of whose big ideas is to support at-home mothers...

...If this is the problem, there are several ways to fix it, or at least reduce it...

...In so many areas of life, including the economic, the two become one...

...He points to the "surprisingly intense political battle waged by influential conservative groups" to distort the original proposal, and, amazingly, ends up blaming almost everything on Phyllis Schlafly, that "indefatigable foe of feminism...

...In his January 19 column, he patiently explains bonuses and penalties, as if there were no other way of thinking about the issue...

...Two-earner couples are particularly likely to incur this penalty, since their joint income-tax returns typically push them into a higher tax bracket...

...Now, as part of his 2003 tax package, President Bush wants to speed up the implementation of that Plan-B style reform...

...Whereas Plan A would reward individual financial autonomy and greater participation in the paid labor force, Plan B would recognize the fact of spousal interdependence and offer a measure of protection for non-market work, such as raising children...

...One way is to permit the married couple to claim a tax credit equal to the amount of the marriage penalty incurred...

...Andrews is bothered for bad reasons, but it's true that President Bush has changed his proposal, and therein hangs a small but revealing tale...

...All the talk about bonuses and penalties is largely misguided, a sign of having asked the wrong question...

...This is unfair...