The Public Policy
Gallagher, Maggie
THE PUBLIC POLICY by Maggie Gallagher GOP Spouse Abuse Ending the "marriage penalty" still penalizes marriage. Why is George W. Bush bor-rowing family policy from dead Swedish...
...What Republicans seem to think they are doing is no more than eliminating a blip in the tax code that can cause two-earner married couples to pay more in income taxes than they would if they were just living together...
...Pro-posed reforms instead alternated between individual taxation (two-earner couples and two-earner cohabitants pay the same lower rates, breadwinning husbands get strung up in higher brackets) and more day-care tax relief...
...It simply recognizes that a married fam-ily, like a corporation, is not a personal indulgence but a coherent economic unit purposely enabled by the law to advance our most fundamental social and eco-nomic purposes...
...tax code favored marriage but was neutral on the subject of working wives...
...Carl-son notes that Swedish feminists hailed individual taxation as the critical turning point in breaking down the notion of male breadwinning, and thus the idea of marriage as an economic union rather than a personal indulgence...
...It's got those married wastrels pegged...
...An outrage...
...Income splitting allowed married partners to divide total income between them for tax purposes regardless of whose name was on the paychecks...
...Individual taxation of spouses is not neutrality, it is an attack on marriage as an economic unit...
...Married women are particularly sensitive to lower rates, responding with higher labor-force participation rates and greater average hours of work per week...
...Not 56 February 2001 . The American Spectator Encouraging marriage is one of the fundaments of successful economic policy...
...The net result of George W. Bush's marriage tax relief will likely be more divorces and a higher proportion of children born outside of marriage...
...Cluttering up the tax code, like K Street lawyers "in Gucci Gulch -carving out one piece of the tax code for some loud interest's benefit...
...Yet most economic conservatives today cling to a bizarre notion of tax-code neutrality, one that Swedish social engineer Alva Myrdal would have loved...
...The notion of eliminating everyone's marriage penalty by restoring income splitting never made it to the agenda...
...The American Spectator . February 2001 57...
...Why are marriage partners the only kind of economic partners denied this right...
...Alas, it is not nearly so simple...
...The law does not, for instance, insist on taxing profitable divisions separately from cost centers, the corporate equivalent of Alva Myrdal's "individual taxation" for hus-band and wife...
...The choice for supply-siders is precise-ly between using the tax code to rein-force a few basic institutions (work, mar-riage, property) crucial to human creativity and a decadent code cluttered with thousands of elitist attempts to manipulate demand...
...It was a discreet company...
...THE PUBLIC POLICY by Maggie Gallagher GOP Spouse Abuse Ending the "marriage penalty" still penalizes marriage...
...They know that would amount to effectively abolishing the corporation...
...One of Jimmy Carter's last proposals, the "second earner" deduc-tion, essentially an individual taxation plan eliminating most of the marriage penalty for working women, was added to the 1981 Reagan tax cut, only to be removed in the 1986 tax bill...
...Within a few years, Nixon's marriage penalty was being denounced by Amer-ican feminists, who framed the issue as discrimination against working wives...
...David Mclntosh's more balanced proposal for marriage tax relief as "a new sort of discrimina-tion-singles discrimination...
...All the teleconferencers looked away when the big guy went after the ducky...
...Yet economic conserva-tives are not crying out for tax neutrality as between corporations and sole pro-prietors...
...Until 1969 the U.S...
...A fellow earning $50,000 will find himself in a higher bracket than the guy earning the same who works one cubicle over, just because the second fellow is married...
...Individual tax-ation is what we now call "eliminating the marriage penalty": Two-earner cou-ples end up in lower tax brackets than single-earner couples earning the same total income...
...Broad marriage tax relief including one-earner families is not tax favoritism...
...They're...they're Special Interests, that's what they are...
...Business partners are allowed to split incomes precisely because no outsider can objectively decide whose contributions were responsible for the partnership's total exactly a pro-marriage proposal...
...Richard Nixon, who never met a tax increase he didn't like, elimi-nated income splitting, replacing it with income piling-on, boosting millions of Americans into higher tax brackets, and MAGGIE GALLAGHER, affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values, is co-author of The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially...
...A "neutral" tax code, in this view, is one that treats married two-earner cou-ples, singles, and POSSLQs all alike, but penalizes homeinaker couples...
...A s the 1981-86 Reagan data began to come in, however, supply-siders like Lawrence Lindsay, the future Federal Reserve governor and now an adviser to George W. Bush, noticed that the second-earner deduc-tion seemed to have a massive positive effect on married women's participation in the labor force...
...To restore or abolish income-splitting is not so much a deci-sion about how we tax marriage as it is a decision about how we define it...
...Pro-family pols who sign on to Bush's mar-riage penalty plan are like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving...
...Last spring, Martin Feldstein, writing in support of George W's plan -essentially a revival of the two-earner deduction -echoed the by now doctrinal point: "Mr...
...Is that OK...
...Conservative devotion to this new-found version of neutrality can verge on dementia, as when the Wall Street Jour-nal denounced Rep...
...Rather than being favorable toward marriage and neutral as between working and homeinaker wives, the code is to be neu-tral toward marriage and punish home-makers (and breadwinners...
...Marriage is an economic partnership, in which both partners contribute in myr-iad ways to the productivity of the unit...
...Bush's plan will...induce people to work and earn more...
...Jerry Weller told the New York Times in 1998, "It all traces back to one simple ques-tion....Do Americans feel that it's right to tax a working couple more just because they live in holy matrimony...
...As Rep...
...A tax code that properly rec-ognizes the marriage partnership is no more akin to a laundry list of special-interest tax breaks than a tax code that prefers work to idleness, or one that encourages the creation of capital rather than its consumption or destruction...
...Encour-aging marriage is one of the fundaments of successful economic policy...
...Why is George W. Bush bor-rowing family policy from dead Swedish socialists who wanted to eliminate marriage...
...In other ways, marriage is like the cor-poration: In order to advance crucial eco-nomic goals, the law defines corpora-tions as legal persons, indissoluble for most purposes into their constituent parts...
...After all, working wives incur extra costs for clothes, trans-portation, and child care, while hus-bands of homemakers get the benefit of untaxed goods and services like home-cooked meals...
...Please...
...The guy supporting a fam-ily pays less than the guy in the bachelor pad...
...Well, the Journal isn't fooled...
...output...
...Since there is no more powerful factor pushing families into poverty than the failure (or inability) of parents to get and stay mar-ried, in the medium-term, the plan leads to higher taxes and more government intervention, and less wealth...
...The tax treatment of those legal persons more or less logically arises from that one definitional decision...
...Just about the same time, Sweden was adopting "individual taxation," the brainchild of feminist socialist Alva Myrdal, who wanted "to eliminate mar-riage as a social category," as historian Allan Carlson points out...
...The answer, one hopes, is that like the hordes of clueless Republican congressmen who support his plan to eliminate the "marriage penalty," he has no idea he's doing any such thing...
...In 1971 the Swedish gov-ernment officially instructed a Com-mission on a New Marriage Law to use "legislation on marriage and the family as one of the instruments in the struggle to shape a society in which every adult takes responsibility for himself...
...creating a tax penalty for two-career mar-riages, not as compared to one-earner marriages, which suffered equally, but as compared to unmarried cohabitants...
...The crime in their view was not that husbands were being taxed more harsh-ly than POSSLQs (persons of opposite sex sharing living quarters), but that two-career couples were being taxed at the same rate as homemaking families with the same income...
...But two-career married couples have higher rates of divorce (and fewer chil-dren) than married couples in which wives specialize at least partly in home production...
Vol. 34 • February 2001 • No. 1
