[coccinelle]

It can be also a married person tax depending on your circumstances. If both spouses make similar amounts then they are getting taxed more as a married couple, because the bracket threshold for a married couple are less than 2x that for an individual. I don't understand why everyone is not taxed as an individual, regardless of marital status.

[knallfrosch]

> I don't understand why everyone is not taxed as an individual, regardless of marital status.

Because married couples form a household and it allows them to share child care and work as they see fit.

If you tax individuals, you're encouraging both to earn the same amount of money.

If you tax couples, it encourages the higher earner to keep working, thus you have a higher overall productivity.

Thus you have freedom and higher overall productivity in favor of shared tax burden.

[hellojesus]

I don't follow. If you encourage both to work, don't you get more total productivity? How does productivity increase by incentivizing one to leave the workforce?

And by encouraging both to work, you'll get more total tax revenue.

[zeroonetwothree]

Taxing as individuals is kind of unfair to single earner households, since the earner has to support more people it seems reasonable to tax them less. You could maybe accomplish a similar thing with deductions but there will still be some weird cases

[graemep]

We have exactly this problem in the UK.

A couple each home earns x, each gets taxed on x. Each gets the tax free allowance on the fist £12.5k of the annual income. Each gets the full basic rate slice before they hit higher bands etc.

If one of the couple earns 2x and the other zero, then only one can use their tax free allowance and they get one slice of the basic rate band etc.

They still have the same pre-tax income for the same household.

Personally I think people should be allowed to opt in to sharing taxable income.

[toast0]

As a mostly single earner in a community property state, my spouse earns half the income for tax purposes. If you were going to tax individuals, it's probably reasonable to apply income evenly across marriages for all states.

[stackskipton]

Tax policy is also used a method of encourage certain types of behavior and discourage others. EV Tax Credits and Solar Tax Credits are example of encouraging starting up industries which we need to assist with climate change in economic powered method.

At a broad level, offering benefits for marriage solves political problem, married people tend to vote so need to be catered to. It also solves societal one, marriage tends to be better at extremely broad strokes for society. Married Couples live longer, commit less crime, kids in married households generally have better outcomes and so forth. So politicians in United States decided to incentive it.

[hellojesus]

I would prefer that tax disincentives existed in the form of excise taxes on things the government doesn't want consumed. Instead of offering EV tax credits, why not offer 0% tax on EVs and 200% tax on ice? Let's get rid of this nonsense 16A and go back to the correct form of federal taxation: excise and/or apportioned if you need a non consumption based tax.

[antonymoose]

I just checked the Federal rates and they’re pretty much exactly double from single to married.

Are you in a funky state with bad tax policy?

[LanceH]

The threshold rates for a lot of credits, deductions and exemptions are not. Like the Roth IRA is $153k for single, $242k for married. Child care credits have a similar problem if I remember correctly (or they did before my kids grew out of it).

[soupfordummies]

I did a draft of our taxes this week and it was almost exactly the same amount filing married vs separately. Where is the big benefit for filing jointly? I guess if you claim dependents?

[wkaisertexas]

A married couple pays the same income tax as two single payers making half the income.

Due to progressive taxation, we tax two people who make $50,000 less than someone who makes $100,000 which is where the tax savings come from.

[pavon]

TIL. All the tax bracket thresholds for married filing jointly are exactly double that of married filing separately, which are the same as single taxpayer, except the threshold for top-most bracket where it switches between 35% and 37%, which is wildly different in favor of single taxpayers. Weird.

[anamax]

A marriage differential is a mathematical consequence of progressive marginal rates and community property (specifically the ability to shift income between spouses).

To put it another way, eliminating the marriage differential[1] in all cases requires giving up progressive marginal rates or community property.

Which one do you want to give up?

[1] The current US brackets and deductions taxes some married couples more than comparable pairs of individuals, taxes some less, and is basically a wash in other cases. It's easy to move couples between the first two groups and you can move some of each to the third, you can't move all of them.

[wkaisertexas]

What is very strange is that some states let you file jointly to save money on federal income taxes, but file separately for state income taxes and others do not.

Taxation is a strange, mixed-up world.

[scotty79]

The calulator doesn't support negative savings. The color is green all the time and even the minus sign is stripped from the large font number.

Try 500k both

[mahirsaid]

if its not more evident that taxes are to benefit whatever it is and not what's important. The complex rules that are based on 0 logic.