Marriage-Penalty Tax

By Jonathan Chait

Nearly every politician in Washington agrees that the marriage penalty is unfair. Who could think otherwise? The penalty--a quirk in the tax code that forces some married couples to pay higher taxes than they would if they were single--seems to make as much sense as a tax on baseball or apple pie. Here's how the penalty works: If a man and woman, each making $60,000, fall in love and marry, they will be pushed into a higher tax bracket. The $120,000 couple will pay a higher rate than the two singles would have. It seems unfair. But that doesn't mean anything is going to be done about it anytime soon.

Why not? For one thing, there's no easy way to remedy it. A progressive income tax with multiple rates is a complicated proposition, and somebody is always going to get the short end of the stick. Arbitrariness is in the nature of a code with brackets. In the '50s and '60s, single people paid higher tax rates than they would have if they had been married. So an organized singles lobby--there really was one at the time--pressed Washington for a remedy, and thus the marriage penalty was born. Now married people are complaining. But if they get their fix, it won't be long before the singles pipe up again.

The second reason is class politics. Both parties agree on cutting taxes for married couples. But Democrats want a smaller cut aimed at lower- and middle-class families, while Republicans want to help upper-middle-class couples too.

Finally, Republicans don't want to lose their best issue. The marriage penalty is one of the few sure-fire winners for the G.O.P., uniting family-values conservatives with married suburban swing voters. Clinton, reading the same polls, wants to take the issue off the table by swapping the marriage-tax cut for a Medicare prescription-drug benefit. But the Republicans realize that if they take the deal, they will have nothing popular to promise the voters in November. Thus, so far, they have said no. But if the summer drags on and the public buys Al Gore's attacks on a do-nothing Congress, Clinton's offer might start looking like a bargain to the G.O.P.

--By Jonathan Chait