Is Our Fiscal System Discouraging Marriage?

Is Our Fiscal System Discouraging Marriage?
Author: Elias Ilin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

We provide a new measure of the marriage tax - the percentage change in remaining lifetime (future) spending from marrying. (Equivalently, the increase in future net taxes divided by initial future spending.) We calculate this tax for young respondents to the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finance, impute the tax facing single young respondents to the 2018 American Community Survey (ACS), and study whether the tax alters the ACS respondents' decisions to marry. We control for endogenous spousal selection by assuming clone marriage - marriage to oneself. Our clone-marriage tax is comprehensive, intertemporal, and actuarial. It includes all key federal and state tax and benefit programs, weighing the present value of extra net taxes along each marital survivor path by the path's probability. The weighted average marriage tax - 2.69 percent - is very large, corresponding to a year or two of lost earnings for most singles. The range of clone-marriage tax rates - -74.4 percent to 45.8 percent - is equally remarkable. The average marriage tax rate is twice as high for the poor than for the rich and twice as high in some states than in others. Marriage taxation has a small overall impact on marrying, but a substantial impact for subgroups. Absent the tax, 13.7 percent more low-income, single females with children would marry annually and 7.5 percent more would be married by age 35. Our results are robust to assuming ACS singles marry higher- or lower-earning variants of themself and to adjusting for partial benefit takeup. Clearly, making each fiscal policies marriage neutral or using the federal income tax to annually adjust a couple's total net tax burden to ensure it's twice that of singles represent two ways to eliminate marriage taxation. An alternative, partial reform lies in adopting universal health insurance whose receipt is not income based. As we show, Medicaid and the ACA embed substantial marriage taxes.

Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 38

Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 38
Author: Robert A. Moffitt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2024-06-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226835715

Timely and authoritative research on the latest issues in tax policy. Tax Policy and the Economy publishes current academic research on taxation and government spending with both immediate bearing on policy debates and longer-term interest. This volume presents new research on taxation and public expenditure programs, with particular focus on how they affect economic behavior. John Guyton, Kara Leibel, Dayanand Manoli, Ankur Patel, Mark Payne, and Brenda Schafer study the disallowance of Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) benefits as a result of IRS audits, and find that in post-audit years, audited taxpayers are less likely than similar non-audited taxpayers to claim EITC benefits. Janet Holtzblatt, Swati Joshi, Nora Cahill, and William Gale provide new empirical evidence on racial differences in the income tax penalty, or bonus, associated with a couple being married. Haichao Fan, Yu Liu, Nancy Qian, and Jaya Wen evaluate how computerizing value-added tax transactions in China affected the tax revenue collected from large manufacturing firms. Niels Johannesen, Daniel Reck, Max Risch, Joel Slemrod, John Guyton, and Patrick Langetieg study data on the ownership of foreign bank accounts and other financial accounts as reported on income tax returns. They find that many of these accounts are in tax havens, and they discuss the impact of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act on tax compliance and government revenue. Louis Kaplow integrates charitable giving into an optimal income tax framework, and shows that the externalities associated with such giving are key to determining its optimal tax treatment. Finally, Roger Gordon compares caps or quantity targets on emissions with carbon taxes and points out that which one dominates can be situation-specific and depend on a number of features of the economy.

Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 37

Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 37
Author: Robert A. Moffitt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2023-06-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226828263

Timely and authoritative research on the latest issues in tax policy. Tax Policy and the Economy publishes current academic research on taxation and government spending with both immediate bearing on policy debates and longer-term interest. This volume of Tax Policy and the Economy presents new research on important issues concerning US taxation and transfers. First, Edward L. Glaeser, Caitlin S. Gorback, and James M. Poterba examine the distribution of burdens associated with taxes on transportation. Replacing the gasoline tax with a vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) tax would increase the burden on higher-income households, who drive more fuel-efficient cars and are more likely to own electric vehicles. User charges for airports, subways, and commuter rail are progressive, while the burden of bus fees is larger for lower-income households than for their higher-income counterparts. Next, Katarzyna Bilicka, Michael Devereux, and Irem Güçeri investigate tax shifting by multinational companies (MNCs) and the implications of a potential Global Minimum Tax (GMT). They find that MNCs shift intellectual property to tax havens, and that a large share of patenting activity takes place in tax havens where little or no R&D occurs. Tax havens are particularly important for MNCs with large subsidiary networks; such firms would likely be subject to a GMT. Mark Duggan, Audrey Guo, and Andrew C. Johnston study the role of experience rating in the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system and find that the current structure stabilizes the labor market because it penalizes firms with high rates of UI-eligible layoffs. In the fourth paper, David Altig, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, and Victor Yifan Ye calculate how retiring at different ages will affect Social Security benefit amounts, taking into account taxation and other benefits. They find that virtually all individuals aged 45 to 62 should wait until age 65 or later to maximize their Social Security benefits. Indeed, 90 percent would benefit from waiting until age 70, but only 10 percent do so. Finally, Jonathan Meer and Joshua Witter examine the potential impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit on the labor force decisions of childless adults who are eligible for a small credit after they reach age 25. Comparing labor force attachment changes just before and after this age suggests that the EITC has little impact on the labor force participation of this group.

On The Economics Of Marriage

On The Economics Of Marriage
Author: Shoshana Grossbard-schectman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2019-07-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000306461

Marriage is an institution that plays a central role in most societies. As it affects decisions regarding labor supply, consumption, reproduction, and other important decisions, marriage receives considerable attention in academic circles. Much research has been done about marriage, principally by sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists.

Who Should Pay for Medicare?

Who Should Pay for Medicare?
Author: Daniel Shaviro
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2004-03-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0226750760

Good news first? The good news is that Americans today are living longer, in part because of continual advances in healthcare. But the bad news is that with our aging population larger than ever before, nothing is being done to ensure that we can continue to afford the increasing costs of care. How Medicare—with the Bush administration's reforms and a slumping economy—will meet the needs of its recipients without adequate financing is among the most pressing issues facing this country today. Daniel N. Shaviro sees the future of our national healthcare system as hinging on the issue of funding. The author of books on the economic issues surrounding Social Security and budget deficits, Shaviro is a skilled guide for anyone seeking to understand the financial aspects of government programs. Who Should Pay for Medicare? offers an accessible overview of how Medicare operates as a fiscal system. Discussions of Medicare reform often focus on the expansion of program treatment choices but not on the question of who should pay for Medicare's services. Shaviro's book addresses this critical issue, examining the underanalyzed dynamics of the significant funding gap facing Medicare. He gives a balanced, nonpartisan evaluation of various reform alternatives—considering everything from the creation of new benefits in this fiscal crunch to tax cuts to the demographic pressures we face and the issues this will raise when future generations have to pay for the care of today's seniors. Who Should Pay for Medicare? speaks to seniors who feel entitled to expanded coverage, younger people who wonder what to expect from the government when they retire, and Washington policy makers who need an indispensable guidebook to Medicare's future.

Conjugal America

Conjugal America
Author: Allan C. Carlson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2017-09-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351526626

The institution of marriage has become perilously weak in America. Changes in the law over the past three decades, such as the spread of no-fault divorce and broad acquiescence to cultures of divorce and intentional childlessness, have stripped traditional marriage of important legal supports. Half of all marriages end in divorce and just as many are childless. Conjugal America seeks to recapture the real purposes of marriage and the unchanging nature of this most vital and fundamental human institution.Confronting contemporary issues and drawing heavily on the natural and social sciences, each chapter also reaches into the past to find truths grounded in human experience. Carlson reexamines the basic bond of marriage to procreation, showing that this tie has been no less than the foundation of the unwritten sexual constitution of Western civilization. He also shows how the Gnostic heresy, which despises procreation, posed a stark danger to the early Christian movement and to ""the sexual constitution"" of our own time as well. He then dissects claims regarding the ""evolution of marriage,"" showing that true marriage always represents the vital connection of the sexual with the economic.Carlson explores the political nature of marriage showing, why every ambitious totalitarian government seeks above all to destroy marriage, and why the true marital bond actually stands for liberty. He concludes by arguing for the necessity of marriage policy. Because both the nature of the centralizing state and the pressures of modernity have altered family circumstances, new protections and encouragements to marriage are now imperative. Conjugal America will be central to the new debate on marriage and its purposes. This book sees the current moment as an opportunity to revitalize a necessary institution that has recently been abused and neglected and reinstate it as the primary source of commitment and care in the modern world.