By Jennifer Ludden | National Public Radio
Women today are nearly half the workforce, and two-income couples are the norm. But the U.S. tax code? It’s straight out of Ozzie and Harriet.
When it comes to paying taxes, economists say a lot of secondary wage-earners are getting a raw deal. It’s called the marriage penalty.
“The system was never designed to penalize working spouses,” says Melissa Kearney, director of the Hamilton Project at The Brookings Institution. “It was just designed in a different era.”
That era was 1948, when the U.S. began pooling the income of husbands and wives, Kearney says. It works great if one spouse stays home. A couple can drop to a lower tax bracket for a marriage bonus — or, as one legal analyst calls it, “aid for affluent husband care.”
Statement by Laura Bianchi:
“It’s an outdated area of the tax law that penalizes women for being equally as educated and successful as their husbands, and it needs to be revised. The battle to be treated the same as our male counterparts when it comes to wages, treatment, promotions, etc. continues, and this particular tax treatment does nothing more than hinder that battle and delay complete equality in the workforce.
