New York Times columnist Charles Blow doesn’t like marriage. “I have been married. I no longer am. I do not see remarriage in my future,” Blow writes. “I am also keenly aware of the nudging of those around me, who are married or aspire to be and who falsely assume that an eventual marriage is the only way to be truly happy and whole, to have completed the checklist of life. I rebuke all of that.”
Blow’s column goes on to celebrate the recent decline of marriage, noting, “we are nearing a time when there will be more unmarried adults in the United States than married ones.” With this transition coming, Blow says, it is time “to start asking ourselves whether it is fair and right to continue to reward and encourage marriage through taxation and policy.”
Blow then points to a 2013 calculation by two Atlantic writers showing that “over a lifetime, unmarried people can pay upward of $1 million more than their married counterparts for health care, taxes and more.”
The calculation is comically bad, with over $750,000 of the supposed single penalty coming from the fact that married people live together and share a mortgage while single people don’t have a partner to help pay the rent. If Blow thinks single people are so oppressed because they have to pay rent by themselves, he should get a roommate.
Some high-earning married couples do pay less in taxes, as the Atlantic writers correctly note, but this is not true in all cases. Generally, those couples who earn about the same amount don’t get a bonus and sometimes even pay a penalty, while couples where one partner earns more than the other receive a bonus. For the Atlantic writers, they used a woman making $80,000 and a husband making $103,000. They found the married woman paid $3,875 less in taxes than her single counterpart in a single year, netting out to a lifetime $155,000 single “penalty.”
It is true, some high-earning couples, particularly those where one spouse earns more than the other, enjoy a small marriage bonus from federal tax policy. But most American households aren’t making $183,000 a year. The median household income is around $70,000. And millions of Americans live in households that earn less than that.
How does federal policy treat these families?
Well, it turns out federal policy does the exact opposite of what Blow thinks it does. Our tax and safety net programs actively punish low-income people who get married.
Take, for example, a couple earning $24,000 and $20,000 respectively, as Institute for Family Studies fellow Lyman Stone did recently. This couple has two children and benefits from the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Section 8 housing assistance, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.
Each of these programs are highly means-tested, which means if a couple gets married, their household income automatically increases, causing them to lose many of the benefits they qualified for as singles. All told, Stone calculates that this couple, earning just $44,000 a year, would face a yearly $10,500 penalty if they got married.
$10,500 a year!!!
Blow notes in his column that marriage is not declining equally among demographic groups. He notes that blacks, particularly black women, are most likely not to be married.
But race isn’t the only way to break marriage demographics down. We can also do it by income. Just 26% of low-income adults (those with incomes in the 20th percentile and below) are married. Almost 40% of working-class adults (those with incomes between the 20th and 50th percentile) are married. And 56% of those with incomes in the top half are married.
In other words, those families most likely to depend on government programs that severely punish marriage are also the families least likely to be married.
Considering all the benefits that the institution of marriage provides for adults, children, and communities, it is far past time the government stopped punishing marriage, especially for those families that need its stability the most.
