alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
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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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.